The Aliens From The Meteor Storm Stole The Trees!

I may have conflated a couple of trains of thought in that headline. Maybe.

But let’s look at the evidence! Very few meteors, so they must have been in stealth mode! If they were in stealth mode, there must have been aliens flying them! What would the aliens want to sneak in for? Well, big chunks of the neighbors’ trees are gone, so it MUST have been the stealthy aliens! I mean, what else could it have been? The evidence is all right there for those who would see it!

The meteor “storm” was a bust here in the west San Fernando Valley. It seemed clear enough, at least for this area. I could see stars down to at least Magnitude 3 or better once my eyes got dark adapted. I was outside from 21:30 to 22:20, fifty minutes total, and I saw:

• 2 meteors from this event
• 1 other meteor, not from this event – it was in the wrong part of the sky and going the wrong direction, just a random meteor crashing the show
• 4 jets going into Burbank
• 4 very high altitude jets headed southbound
• 2 small planes toodling along just outside of VNY’s Class C airspace
• An owl
• An LAPD helicopter
• 2 satellites headed eastbound

I also got a contact high from the clouds of cannibis wafting from several neighbors.

I was snapping five-second exposures the whole time, so there are something like 600 photos to flip through to see if I caught anything at all. In my copious free time…

Then I was up to almost 2AM finishing up some deadline stuff. So I was sort of hoping for a few extra minutes of sleep this morning.

Nope. CHAIN SAWS!!! At 07:00:00.000001 exactly!

The neighbors’ gardener’s tree trimming team was in, giving quite the little buzz job to the hedges between our yards and all of the big trees.

As these things go, I guess they did a decent job. But aside from the slightly better view of the sky over that way, all I could see was where the birds were losing their nests and habitat.

This tree out in the front is where all of the bluebirds have been for the last two years. At first it was one or two last year, but this year there are a couple dozen. Beautiful birds, bold blue and orange accents. Now? We’ll see if and when I ever see one again.

The trees in the back and the fence hedges were home to mourning doves, juncos, towhees, crows, hummingbirds, mockingbirds, and more. There are plenty more trees around and I doubt any birds were killed today, but there were undoubtedly many nests, eggs, and fledglings that got destroyed.

Stupid aliens. Stupid meteors.

Stupid sleep.