June 24, 2026 · 23:12

Shoot Quick – You Might Hit Something

Yesterday I was walking through the kitchen as I usually do and I thought it was odd that there were no small birds visible near the feeders, no squirrels or pigeons on the ground – but there was a large bird on the back wall, over in the corner. Not a raven, but maybe…

I knew it would be gone if I opened the door, so I walked over to the breakfast nook windows while pulling out my phone and thumbing it on. Those windows have plantation shutters on them, but they were mostly tilted open, so I didn’t try to swing the shutters open or otherwise open them. I got the camera  app open on the phone and saw the bird launch just as I got to the window.

QUICK! Through the shutters, one shot, hoping I got lucky. I got a good look at the bird, definately a red-tailed hawk – and it was back this afternoon circling low over the dirt lots behind our house. (No pictures today.)

But yesterday…

Confirmed!

Be ready. Shoot quick. You might get lucky and hit something.

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Filed under Birds, Forever Home, Photography

June 23, 2026 · 22:43

A Magnificent Sunset Out Of Nowhere

After weeks and weeks of “clear and a gazillion” conditions, I was surprised to get a “Red Flag Warning” from the National Weather Service. A chance of thunderstorms, rain, high winds, and dry lightning that could spark brush fires.

Okay! The weather app went from 0.00% chance of rain to 15%. I was not holding my breath waiting for the gully washer, despite the fact that we started to pick up some clouds over the mountains. Then the clouds got thicker and started moving west.

Right about sundown…

It was unusual in that it wasn’t colored from north to south, pole to pole, but just in one narrow little spot. There might have been more clouds down over LA or Antelope Valley that were blocking all of the sunset rays except for through one little hole in the clouds. But the display it left on this end! WOW!

No enhancements, no editing, no filters, no effects. This is straight out of the phone, exactly the way it looked.

There were spots, like here on the right, where rain was falling, but it’s “virga,” rain that never hits the ground, evaporating before it can get there since it’s falling into such dry air.

The longer I looked, the more vibrant it looked.

I was out moving back and forth between the front yard and the back, taking pictures and trying to get the bird seed feeders refilled before it got dark. But every time I hung a feeder I had to stop with that task and start taking pictures again.

The birds were impatient (they have brains that are theeeeeeees small…) but I finally got it done.

From there it was time to grab The Long-Suffering Wife so she could see, and sit out in front to watch it finally peak and fade.

So with all of the clouds, grey or crimson, I wasn’t going to be seeing the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, or Mercury tonight. But this was a pretty great trade off. It’s acceptable. I’ll take it!

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Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather

June 22, 2026 · 23:58

Proof Of Life – June 22nd

Watching the LOTR movies after watching World Cup soccer all day, every time we wander into some castle or fortress where there’s a bunch of statues, I wonder why the statues doen’t all have orange traffic cones on top of them.

My brain is weird.

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Filed under Paul, Photography, Silly Shit

June 21, 2026 · 23:42

Proof Of Life – June 21st

I’m enjoying the World Cup matches, but I feel my brain melting and brain cells dying from the collection of truly STUPID ads. Gambling apps, which are simply evil incarnate. Royal Match & Candy Crush & all of their endless copycats, which are lower than whale shit in terms of redeeming value. Lotions and potions to cure non-existant conditions and make us miraculously all more beautiful, less wrinkled, in better shape, and with better hair. Lawyer ads that make all of the other ads look like film classics from Scorsese or Spielberg. And the worst of all, Scientology ads.

Normally I won’t watch shows that attract those kinds of ads – I figure if the advertisers are targeting that demographic, and I desperately want to avoid being part of that demographic, I’ll just move along and watch something else. I’m a little bit baffled to see the soccer games being targeted by these ads, but figuring the whys and wherefores of that one is above my pay grade.

It does help a lot to watch the Spanish networks. I know enough Spanish to pick up about one word in twenty, and they talk REALLY fast, but I can follow the game from the level of screaming and in the end that’s all that really counts. They may be having some ads for really stupid stuff (telanovas?) but I can just ignore them and let ignorance be bliss.

Which, in the bigger picture, is not a bad strategy. With everything going on in politics and the psychotic lunatics running our country into the ground, ignorance has a lot of appeal.

Hell is not being able to turn away and accept that ignorance, while also not being able to change anything or fix any of the problems.

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Filed under Paul, Photography, Politics, Sports

June 20, 2026 · 23:37

Happy Solstice 2026

In about two hours as I write this, at 01:21 AM PDT on Sunday, June 21st (08:24 UTC), we’ll be at the summer solstice, where the Sun appears at it’s most northern point and the hours of daylight are at their maximum in the Northern Hemisphere and at their shortest in the Southern Hemisphere.

I spent much of the day making plans and reservations for July. Since we’ve been up here in Hesperia, we haven’t been to an Angels game in Anaheim, and we haven’t seen fireworks. With the upcoming July 4th weekend, we’re going to go down the hill for the entire three-day, three-game series against the Red Sox, with fireworks every night.

July 21st will be our 25th wedding anniversary for the Long-Suffering Wife and me, we’re looking at a couple of days in Las Vegas (where we went on our honeymoon) to celebrate.

And July 22nd is the one-year anniversary of us closing escrow and moving into our Forever Home, that we’re still in love with. Not sure how to “celebrate” that – maybe by finishing up some of the still pending unpacking tasks…

What else can the next six weeks hold in terms of celebrations and joyous occasions? I can think of a couple of my wish list, for which we have multiple bottles of champagne chilling 24/7/365. C’mon Fates, let’s make it happen!!!

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Filed under Paul, Photography

June 19, 2026 · 22:50

Today’s Backyard Mystery

Out on the pergola I have a lounge chair to plotz in. It’s fairly heavy, and it’s normally a foot or so from the edge with the back against the cinder blocks and one of the support posts for the pergola to block it from sliding. Plus, the floor isn’t smooth, it’s ribbed with the planks that make up the floor. The short version is that it’s not that easy to move, even when I want to move it.

This morning everything was normal at 9:00-ish when I went out for breakfast. But about 10:45, it was cattywampus.

No harm, but my brain immediately went to, “What moved it?” Up here the wind is always a suspect, but the winds were calm. I hadn’t heard any of the wind chimes going off, and none of the other lawn chairs or anything else in the back yard had been disturbed.

No way that the squirrels could have pushed it or moved it, even if all dozen of them had pushed at once. And they were out there looking at it like they were wondering what was going on also.

Birds? The biggest we normally see are the pigeons, but they’re always on the turf, not on the chairs. What’s on the chairs are the sparrows and wrens, but they’re all way too small.

I guess it might have been one of the ravens, if it was on the back or the arm and pushed off hard to get airborne. Or a big hawk. An eagle? I haven’t seen them, but I know they’re in the area.

An earthquake will eventually toss everything around, and probably topple the pergola and break all of our windows and worse, but that obviously didn’t happen.

One of these days we’ll probably have a Great Dane and they’re quite capable, but we don’t have one yet. There’s a stray cat that is seen now and then, but again, they’re not that big.

Remember the potential triffid growing about ten feet away on the left? So far it’s my most likely candidate, if it IS a triffid and not an onion of some sort. It’s exercising its mobility and muscles and tossing furniture about willy nilly.

Or maybe we have a back yard poltergeist.

It’s a mystery.

 

 

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography

June 18, 2026 · 23:30

It Might Actually Be A Triffid

This odd plant (and another that’s fallen over behind it, or been knocked down by squirrels) has popped up in the back yard.

Maybe a leaf or two at the base, but nothing on this big, curvy, thick stalk, topped by this fuzzy ball.

The ball turns out to be made up of a bunch of small flowers.

I don’t really think it’s a triffid but you can’t be too careful when you’re dealing with an alien invasion…

I’m guessing some sort of rugged, drought resistant, desert plant that found a friendly spot in our gravel.

(My plant ID app on my iPhone has a best guess of a “wild leek” or “wild onion” – another says it’s a “chapparel yucca.” Intereting! I know that the yucca trees are protected, we had to sign a document when we bought the house acknowledging that we are aware of that and we agreed not to cut down any yucca trees. So for now, this little guy is safe from us, but the squirrels are independent agents!)

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Filed under Critters, Flowers, Forever Home, Photography

June 17, 2026 · 23:39

Sunset Conjunction 2026 – Big Finale

Mind you, the key players (Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury) will all be up there for at least another week or more, but tomorrow the Moon will have moved up beyond Venus, Jupiter will have dimmed a bit more and moved down toward Mercury. I don’t know if there’s a “technical” definition of what constitutes an astronomical conjunction (X number of bodies withing Y degrees?) but gut feeling is that it’s almost over.

But tonight, still…

It was looking pretty nice up there in a clear, desert sky. Three-day old Moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury (just above the tree at the lower right).

And even with the (carefully) hand-held iPhone, I can zoom in on the crescent Moon and Venus and see some details on the portion of the Moon illuminated by Earthshine.

I was also shooting photos with the good DSLR and lenses. I still haven’t downloaded and reviewed them. We’ll see later if there’s anything there that’s special and worth sharing.

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography

June 16, 2026 · 23:24

Four-Body Conjunction

From top left to bottom right, Venus, Jupiter, the Moon, Mercury.

It was beautiful! And clear, fortunately. My daughter who lives down in LA had nothing but that coastal low cloud layer to look at.

Mercury got left out of the close-up, but the two-day old crescent Moon was a diamond!

Mercury is always elusive, and it’s nearing the furthest away from the Sun that it ever gets, but it’s been surprisingly easy to see this trip around into the evening sky.

Keep watching, they’ll be playing this dance for a few more days. If you don’t have clouds!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Sunsets

June 15, 2026 · 23:33

Less Than 25 Hours

The Moon was New at 19:54 PDT on Sunday. I wasn’t going to go out looking for the barely one-day old Moon tonight, because I ***NEVER*** see the crescent Moon before at least a day and a half to two days after New.

Surprise! At 20:47 tonight, less than 25 hours after New Moon, there it was, a fingernail of light, just barely above the horizon and the neighbor’s roof.

I don’t know that I’ve ever gone back inside, grabbed the camera and tripod, and got back outside and ready to shoot so fast.

Of course, Venus and Jupiter are still up there, separating now that they’re past last week’s conjunction, as Jupiter dives toward it’s passage behind the Sun. (If Jupiter ever goes between us and the Sun, we’re in deep shit.)

And if you click on this picture and blow it up nice and big on your screen and look just a bit above the peak of the roof and just a smidgen to the right, about halfway between Jupiter and the Moon, there’s Mercury.

Three planets, the Moon, and a great sunset! What more could you ask for?

Go look tomorrow night just after sunset – the Moon will be a little more illuminated and up there about halfway between Mercury and Jupiter. IT SHOULD LOOK SPECTACULAR!!!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Sunsets