The only good thing about getting up early enough to meet the movers at 7AM is getting to see brilliant Venus in the morning sky.
Well, that and finally getting that last loose end paritally tied up. (“Partially” because everything’s at the house now and out of storage, but I still have to put stuff away at the house. Progress is progress, I’ll take it!)
Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography
Not a single trick-or-treater, but we sort of expected that. Our subdivision only has a dozen houses and is a bit isolated and we have almost no children that I know of and only a small handful of teenagers.
I’ve been a bit busy (candidate for understatement of the year) so I didn’t decorate at all until today, not that we normally decorate much for Halloween to begin with. But it did give me a chance to start seeing where on the house there were places to hang lights and mount decorations.
Spoiler: Christmas decorations are going to be FANTASTIC!
Filed under Forever Home, Photography
…and then you’re gonna crash.
More dental work today. Appointment two of three on the current round, which started with the cracked and missing tooth & extraction back in June, just before the move to Hesperia. Relatively little pain today, but plenty of stress, plus the drive 2 hours down and almost 4 hours back up.
One last huge loose end in the move to finish up, getting everything out of storage and up to the new house. Since we were down anyway, it was a good opportunity to meet with the pro movers we used to get out of the house in July and have them finish up what I started last weekend. Starting out exhausted from that, plus still plenty sore from my accident yesterday trying to start unloading at the new house.
‘Tis done. And there’s a big chunk of the expense budget eliminated. Excellent progress.
Tomorrow for the spooky holiday we’ll try to get the telescopes out as we hand out candy in the new neighborhood. If it weren’t for needing to do that, I swear I would sleep for the next 72 hours straight.
Filed under Forever Home, Health, Photography
Oh, let’s get real! I was unloading crap from the Uhaul truck and lost in a fight with gravity.
It was heavier than I expected, I was on the ramp, I went down, hit my head, and it came down on top of my head to add insult to injury.
Good thing I have a really thick, hard skull. Only minor damage to the gravel next to the driveway.
Tomorrow the young, strong, professionals come in to finish the job. I might be stupid enough to do this at age 69 – I’m not stupid enough to try to finish the job after getting my ass kicked.
Filed under Forever Home, Health, Paul, Photography
What did Bilbo say just before he gave up The Ring and went away to live with the elves? Something like, he felt “thin,” like too little butter scraped over too much toast? Yeah, I get that.
Facebook gave me a prompt today, a “before” picture from nine years ago…
A memorable day, this picture was taken just before I got murdered. (We were in Raleigh, NC for our neice’s wedding and we were doing a family cosplay murder mystery. I was the lying, cheating, evil bastard who soon was to be covered in blood on the kitchen floor. It was fun!)
Of course, for the “after” picture from today I needed something equally silly…
Maybe not QUITE as silly, but I was on a tight schedule. One of those things where you do the best you can and move on.
Stay silly, folks!
Filed under Paul, Photography, Silly Shit
I’m home, but I know who’s the most upset about me being gone for a couple of days. The birds! The sparrows and finches and scrub jays who are chowing down on the seed in the feeders, and who are emptying them in a day, a day and a half at most. When I’m gone for three days, those feeders are seriously empty when I get home. They even eat the parts that they don’t like!
While refilling the feeders about 18:30, there were these amazing, bright, high-level clouds visible to the west:
They look like noctilucent clouds, but those would be incredibly rare this far south. Normally you would only see them way north, in the polar regions.
However, that’s toward where Vandenberg is, and launches out of there are getting close to being a daily occurrence. A quick check showed that a launch had happened at 17:43, just about 45 minutes earlier.
So, there you go! Launch leftovers in the sunset sky. And happy birds now that their feeders are full again!
Filed under Birds, Photography, Sunsets
When you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, CHEW FASTER AND DON’T STOP.
At the end of Day Two of my 3-4 hour packing & loading task, the truck’s finally at capacity.
Before:
After:
The pros will be here on Thursday to finish it off and tie off that final loose end.
Wisdom is knowing that it’s stupid and unnecessary to try the three hour drive home when I’m this exhausted and sore and have bruises and pain in places I didn’t know I had places. So they were as surprised to see me back at the hotel as I was!
Filed under Forever Home, Photography
The good news is that I made a lot of excellent progress on the first day of this final stage of the great move to the Forever Home! The bad news is that I was (of course!) ridiculously overly optimistic about how much was involved and how long it would take to get done. I’ll be working on finishing it up and getting back home tomorrow.
The saving grace is that we’re slowly learning from past mistakes. I won’t be sleeping on the floor or in my car tonight. I brought a bag, just in case, and I’m now comfortable in a local hotel.
And there was a gorgeous sunset with a crescent moon over the Camarillo Airport, to boot!
I just wish that I didn’t feel like I’ve been beaten within an inch of my life by a legion of orcs. I’m truly getting too old for this shit.
Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets
Sort of winging it after one idea cascaded into another and suddenly starting late last night my plans for the weekend starting radically changing.
I was really hoping to sit on my ass and catch up with my naps. Instead…
After scrambling all through July to get ready to move and get packed and close escrow and get two PODS containers packed and then doing the last-minute sprint at the end of July to get out of the old house, then spending seven weeks getting the two PODS containers emptied and everything put away in the house, all while trying to keep current at work and getting settled in the new house and trying daily to not explode, AFTER ALL OF THAT…
There’s one major loose end. (Probably dozens of minor loose ends and “honey do’s,” but those can be tackled one at a time.)
Seven years ago when we moved from the 5-bedroom, 3300 square foot house where we had lived for over 30 years into the 3-bedroom, 1600 square foot rental home which was intended to be an interim home for “a year or two” we went through a HUGE freakin’ process of culling, tossing, pruning, throwing out, donating and we still ended up with WAY TOO FREAKING MUCH STUFF to fit into that half-sized house. So everything else went into three large storage units.
The Forever Home has enough room for all of that and we need to stop paying extra for those units. So everything in there needs to get here, and since we kinda wanted it here by the end of July and the end of August at the absolute latest, the coming of the end of October is applying some mental stress to “get ‘er done!” Some plans to get a big chunk of that done later this week fell into place, so the balance of that task was either this weekend or “sometime in November.” For reasons that I can’t quite explain, especially given my desire for naps and ass-sitting, there’s now a HUGE U-Haul van in the driveway. The two-hour-plus drive each way factors in and somehow this made the most sense.
Once more into the breach, friends! There will be plenty of time for naps when I’m dead. Or in November. Whichever comes first.
Filed under Forever Home, Paul, Photography
If you’re expecting one of those great, professional pictures that shows the bright comet trail stretching across half the sky, taken from a superior dark-sky location – Google it, move on, I’ll see you tomorrow.
But if you want to see how it really works for the amateur astronomer with decades-old, marginal equipment in the suburbs after four days of hunting – here you go!
See it? Click on the image to blow it way up, bigger than full screen sized! It’s right there!
Need some help? No worries. Let’s start over on the far right, where just over those trees you can see five of the seven brightest stars in the Big Dipper. The two left-hand stars in the bowl of the dipper are right next to the right edge of the image, with the three bright stars of the handle arcing up toward the lower center. Got them?
Now, just barely visible over the house, to the left of that tree in its back yard, is a bright star. That’s Arcturus, in the constellation Bootes.
Next, look straight up from Arcturus to right about the middle of the image. Do you see a “C”-shaped circle of six brighter stars, the open part of the “C” pointing to the upper right at bit? That’s the Corona Borealis constellation.
Finally, look between Arcturus and Corona Borealis for an elongated diamond of four bright-ish objects. Here’s a cropped image of that region, with Corona Borealis at the top and the “elongated diamond” in the lower left:
Using binoculars, I could see the comet pretty clearly, at least the fuzzy head (coma) and the tiniest bit of bulge of the tail. Not spectacular, not overwhelming, not mind-blowing, but also definitely not my imagination. I saw it to the left and slightly below two bright stars in a tilted, vertical orientation, with a much dimmer third star just above and to the right of the upper one. Here’s an even further crop of that “elongated diamond.”
Blow it up as large as you can on your screen. It will be grainy, that’s okay. See those two brighter stars in a tilted, vertical orientation with the much dimmer third star just above and to the right of the upper one? See the object to their lower left that’s a bit fuzzy, with sort of a dim, baseball diamond shaped bit of light off the top side?
That’s Comet Lemmon.
It’s not going to be the Astronomy Photo Of The Day any time soon, but it’s my capture. These days, you have to take the Teeny TEENY Tiny Bits Of Joy wherever you can get them.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography
 | berich56 on Wispy With A Chance Of Straigh… |
 | Jemima Pett on War Board Review |
 | momdude on Above Average Sunset & Cre… |
 | Frederic Paulussen on Above Average Sunset & Cre… |
| Jemima Pett on Proof Of Life – Febrary… |
 | karen bear on iPhone 17 Moonrise |
 | Praveen Yadav on Evolution Of Some Weird C… |
| Jemima Pett on Why Is There Brain Freeze… |
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 