Last year was “thin” for roses – not getting any water will do that. They’re on a drip system, but even that was cut back to two days a week with the water rationing measures in place in SoCal.
This year, after near record rainfall over the winter, rain STILL coming very late in the year and well past the end of the rainy season, and use of the sprinklers again authorized when it’s not raining:
There are still a couple of little holdouts there in the middle, but I have faith that they’ll get their act together and start contributing soon. Or maybe they’re holding out for all of the others to bloom and fade so that they can then have the stage to themselves.
A pair of rose buds made me think about “potential” a few days ago. Now that potential is coming to fruition.
The roses go from buds filled with potential to gloriously beautiful flowers just by existing, although I’m sure there’s more to it that behind the scenes in the operation of the Universe. For you and I, the potential’s a little harder to conver to glory and beauty.
We got a fair amount of rain last night, which is almost unheard of for Los Angeles in May. Yet I missed the really good stuff, the heavy rain. It moved through while I was spending “quality time” with a new dentist.
Everything was soaked, but off to the east was a humongous thunderstorm cell.
It also appears that I need to clean the lens on the wide angle lens on my iPhone. Or there’s a huge circular alien mother ship that snuck in out of the sun…
Then it was off to the office for a bit.
I found out later that not only was there lightning out there, but down in Compton there were two F0 tornadoes.
All day there were showers all around, but we didn’t get anything other than great clouds.
No rainbows – I guess that would be getting greedy. But it’s good to be greedy sometimes.
All week it’s been in the high 60’s and low 70’s, but by the weekend the warm weather will be back. I’m ready for summer.
Hazy, hot, humid. The Mississippi River at flood stage with St. Louis in the distance.
The structure is one of two water intakes for some local municipality’s water supply. Possibly St. Louis, possibly not.
The viewpoint is from somewhere out on the Chain of Rocks Bridge, an old car bridge from the late 1920’s which was where Route 66 crossed the Mississippi River. It’s now part of a trail system along the Mississippi for hiking and biking, strictly pedestrian traffic only.
If I lived in the St. Louis area, I suspect I would be hiking and biking a lot of those trails.
I find it interesting to observe the difference between what we see with the eye and what the camera records. They’re different mechanisms, different algorithms. For example…
To the eye at sunset the other night, looking south toward the Santa Monica Mountains I saw the bright lights of the setting sun reflecting off of a handful of windows that happened to be tilted in just the right direction. They were like golden jewels, pinpoints. The mountains were still lit at their tops while below the world slipped into shadow. On the valley floor below I could see red & white pinpoints, the traffic along Valley Circle Boulevard going and coming as folks got home from the day.
It was quite the scene. I grabbed my camera.
The camera still sees the golden glints and the traffic, but what stands out is what my brain had completely ignored and filtered out, the maze of power lines and the giant pole right in the middle. Sure, they were there when I was looking. But I wasn’t focused on them, opitically or mentally, but on what was in the distance. Unconsicously my brain filtered out all of those objects. Yet when the camera locks them into place in a two-dimensional image, they’re impossible to ignore.
What else is right there in front of us, but ignored, filtered out because we’re focused on something shiny behind us?
Rather than beat you over the head with the analogy, the philisophical implications are left as an exercise for the student…
Yesterday I looked back on the last ten years of “We Love The Stars Too Fondly” and the last year in particular. Today, let’s look to the future.
I saw these when I went out to go to the grocery store today and my immediate first thought was that they symbolized “potential” to me. You know it’s there, it’s a rose bush, it’s produced spectacular flowers in the past. But now, with these two buds just starting to swell and burst with color, you can get that first glimpse of the true potential there.
Let’s hope the upcoming year(s) are also like that.
It snuck up on me. It wasn’t until this afternoon that I realized that today is the 10th anniversary of my starting this website.
I guess this is sort of a big one.
10 years.
3,653 days.
3,745 posts.
8,921 images. (90%+ are taken by me. The rest are images from the news, from cell phone screen captures, and so on.) To be perfectly honest, some of my favorite images of those 8,921 were posted yesterday. Still just a bit gobsmacked by that.
72 videos.
10 audio clips.
2,978 total comments.
75,498 total views.
49,522 total visitors to the site.
11,438 total likes.
1,827 followers (730 from WordPress, 703 from Twitter, 280 from FaceBook, 10 from Tumblr, 58 from post.news, and 46 from Spoutible)
God alone knows how many words.
The last time I either was too busy or, more likely, simply forgot to post anything was April 10, 2020. Since they I’ve posted 1,115 days in a row.
In total there have only been fourteen days of those 3,653 days when I didn’t post anything at all.
I’m not only here (which is probably the most reliable source since I have the most control over the site’s existance) but also on:
BlueSky (waiting for an invite, but I’ll give you three guesses what it will be…)
Email (pwillett@ix.netcom.com)
I hope that at least a few of the 1,827 folks who get notified every day that I’ve posted something take a minute to look and/or read and get a moment of zen or pleasure from it. I enjoy creating it.
As always, I hope that in the next year there are many more occasions to share a pretty picture, a goofy story, or something clever.
As always, I hope that in the next year there will be many fewer occasions to descend into a venting rant about something stupid, annoying, or depressing.
As do we all, I’m sure.
As a lovely parting gift, couple of favorite pictures from the last year:
(This was an amazing, astonishing, fantastic, {insert thesaurus here} event. I’m giving you the full-resolution photos – click on any of them to blow them up to download or look at the complete image.)
You can usually find hawks floating around the neighborhood. Red-tail hawks are the common ones, but you also find red-shouldered hawks, Cooper’s hawks, and some kind of “night hawk” that I hear often but haven’t yet been able to ID. We’re adjacent to some large natural, open areas, but even over the more densely populated areas of the city, there are often hawks.
Glorious, spectacular creatures. Usually observed from a considerable distance.
This morning I went out to pick up the first of the trash cans after I got payroll done. (Working from home for more than three years is still a mixed bag.) I saw a big red-tailed hawk just landing on top of this big Italian Cypress tree across the street. (It might also be an Emerald Green Arborvitae, but I digress.) I grabbed the camera and took a few pictures.
Unlike most of the times I see these hawks, this guy wasn’t going anywhere, so I had time to cross the street, walk down the cul-de-sac, and get a bit closer.
Of course, what I really, really wanted to get some photos of him flying, but Murphy’s Law ruled and said that he would take off and fly away when I was walking and had the camera down. *sigh*
A couple hours later, when I went out to get the other trash cans, I saw him circling fairly low overhead and I ran in to get the camera again. That opportunity had passed, but he was just landing in that same tree again.
Again he sat for a minute, then to my amazement he leapt into the air. I started shooting one picture after another.
I think it was about this point that I realized that he wasn’t going to soar around and circle overhead, but was diving. FAST!
Straight. At. Me.
Ten feet away from me? Maybe? Less? I could hear the air whistling through his feathers. I had no idea what was going on, but he went by me, then landed in the bush that surrounds the pole on our front porch, right next to the front door.
I wonder if there wasn’t something in that bush that he was after. One of the bigger lizards? A rat or mouse? A bird’s nest of some sort? I know there are some house finch nests up under the eaves, just like in the back yard (search this site for “finch,” plenty of photos) but I don’t know of anything in that bush.
He gave me the hairy eyeball. I wasn’t doing anything other than shooting photos. Okay, there was that whole drooling thing since my jaw was on the ground…
Look at those claws!
Look at that glorious plumage and the patterns in all of those feathers!
Look at that glorious red tail! And he’s gone, soaring in ground effect about knee height, passing right past me on the other side, again no more than ten feet away.
GOBSMACKED!!!
But wait. After a couple minutes to regain my wits, I remembered that there’s a security camera that looks at the front porch.
Good. It really happened.
My thought at the time was that the hawk might be building a nest in the area, possibly at the top of that tree, and that it had seen me looking at it repeatedly and saw me as a threat. Maybe. But having now seen the pictures and how it was looking into that bush, I’m leaning more toward the idea that it was looking for something in that bush for lunch and I happened to be in the way.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 