SkyWatch Friday: "Light up the Darkness"

I've been away from blogging for over a month and absent from SkyWatch Friday much longer than that. I mostly blame a lack of inspiration in both cases. Our usually flamboyant skies have just been "meh" for much of the winter, with no pretty sunsets, dramatic storms, or interesting clouds. And while I can almost always count on our sunrises, this one from Jan 22 was the only one that motivated me to grab my mothballed camera...

Pretty, but compared to our typical sunrises not deemed worthy of a SkyWatch post!

But when I got up this morning and looked outside, I finally saw potential. Lots of great clouds and some golden light on the horizon. If more colors appeared, we'd be in business!

But for a long time, the sky and clouds just kept turning yellow. Till finally… 

Not bad, but still short of its potential (I expect a lot from our skies, don't I?) :-) But at last, it lived up to its promise...

I took this one a little over a minute later, just before the colors began to fade...

It was a sunrise that took Bob Marley's advice on what would have been his 70th birthday:

And it was a sky finally worthy of SkyWatch Friday!

SkyWatch Friday: The Difference Between the Lightning Bug & the Lightning

For the past month or more, our neighbor has been trying (unsuccessfully) to convince us that there's been a nightly cloud of lightning bugs blinking and flashing their luminous bellies above a street lamp north of our houses. Though we've looked for them (also unsuccessfully), we've remained skeptical for several reasons:

1) Lightning bugs (aka fireflies) prefer warm, humid climates and are native to areas east of the natural barrier of the Rockies. They're rarely seen in the more arid states west of Kansas - and those few species that can be found in the Rockies are not the flashing variety.
2) We haven't seen any in the 25 years we've lived in Wyoming (to our sorrow)
3) When we've lived in places with lightning bugs, we never saw them cluster around lights. In fact, along with development, researchers cite light pollution as a probable major factor in the worldwide decline in lightning bug populations, since it interrupts the flash patterns lightning bugs use to communicate and attract mates.
4) Every time our neighbor has tried to convince us, he's had a beer in his hand. ;-)

What we have seen are small moths flying around the streetlights, whose light reflects off their wings and makes them appear to be glowing. So we think those are probably what our neighbor is seeing and mistaking for lightning bugs.

But last Friday and Saturday evenings, we also saw this amazing cloud of lightning blinking and flashing above the street lamp north of our houses...

So maybe our neighbor meant to say lightning and not lightning bugs. :-)

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word 

is really a large matter -- 

it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

~ Mark Twain 

SkyWatch Friday: Peaceful Skies...

When not being assaulted by bottle rockets or bedazzled by brocades and chrysanthemums, our skies were putting on a beautiful (and much quieter) July 4th holiday weekend display of their own...

It seems a cloud-bird lost a tail feather ~

now drifting, lonesome and lazy, across the tranquil sky…

"… So let us welcome peaceful evening in."

~William Cowper

May the skies above you be peaceful as well. Enjoy your weekend!

P.S. For those of you who enjoy such things, my next post will be Part 1 of 2 of the 2014 Karz Club "Rod Run" annual hot rod/classic cars show, which took place in Sheridan last Saturday. Hope you'll cruise on by! 

The Murder of Grabwell Grommet (a repost)

Some longtime followers may recognize this, a favorite of mine I've posted before. But it's been a few years, and especially as the holidays roll around again it bears repeating! Enjoy, and live healthy, my friends! :-)

The Murder of Grabwell Grommet

On the morning of his 42nd birthday, Grabwell Grommet awoke to a peal of particularly ominous thunder. Glancing out the window with his bleary eyes, he saw written in fiery letters:

"SOMEONE IS TRYING TO KILL YOU, GRABWELL GROMMET!"

With shaking hands, Grommet lit his first cigarette of the day. He didn't question the message. You don't question messages like that. His only question was, "Who?"

At breakfast as he salted his fried eggs and buttered his toast, he told his wife, Gratia, "Someone is trying to kill me."

"Who?" she asked with horror.

Grommet slowly stirred the cream and sugar into his coffee and shook his head, "I don't know," he said.

Convinced though he was, Grommet wasn't going to the police with his story. He decided his only course was to go about his daily routine and hope somehow to outwit his would-be murderer. He tried to think on the drive to the office. But the frustration of making time by beating lights and switching lanes occupied him wholly.
 

Nor, once behind his desk, could he think a moment what with jangling phones, urgent memos and the problems and decisions piling in as they did each day.

Tom Grill/Getty Images

It wasn't until his second martini at lunch that the full terror of his position struck him. It was all he could do to finish his Lasagna Milanese. "I can't panic," he said to himself, lighting his cigar. "I simply must live my life as usual."

"The Big Smoker" by Craig Smith

(thanks, Craig!) 

So he worked until seven as usual. Drove home fast as usual. Studied business reports as usual. And he took his usual two Seconal capsules in order to get his usual six hours sleep. As days passed, the man fully stuck to his routine. And as the months went by, he began to take a perverse pleasure in his ability to survive. "Whoever's trying to get me," he'd say proudly to his wife, "hasn't got me yet. I'm too smart for him."

"Oh, please be careful," she'd reply, ladling him a second helping of beef stroganoff.

"The Glutton" by ciosuconstantin

The pride grew as he managed to go on living for years. But as it must to all men, death came at last to Grabwell. It came at his desk on a particularly busy day. He was 53.

His grief-stricken widow demanded a full autopsy. But it showed only emphysema, arteriosclerosis, duodenal ulcers, cirrhosis of the liver, cardiac necrosis, cerebrovascular aneurysm, pulmonary edema, obesity, circulatory insufficiency and a touch of lung cancer.

"How glad Grabwell would have been to know," said the widow smiling proudly through her tears, "that he died of natural causes."

~Art Hoppe 

Art Hoppe, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, died of complications from lung cancer in February, 2000.

If we do not change our direction,
we are likely to end up where we are headed.

~Chinese Proverb

SkyWatch Friday: grateful to be an early riser

Don't have much time today, but here's a colorful sunrise I photographed from our back patio last week… 

We've had several beautiful skies lately and I've photographed each of them, so I hope to share those next week on...

In memory of President John F. Kennedy

May 29, 1917 - Nov 22, 1963

Let's Talk About the (Wicked) Weather...

Most of the time it was probably real bad being stuck down in a dungeon.  

But some days, when there was a bad storm outside, 

you'd look out your little window and think, "Boy, I'm glad I'm not out in that."

~ Jack Handy's "Deep Thoughts" (from Saturday Night Live) :-)

The weather has sure made for a rather savage spring in a lot of places around the country and the world, including our little corner of it! As I mentioned in my last SkyWatch post, our weather last week was turbulent and often violent. We had a series of storms, each one noteworthy for an extreme version of a weather phenom: lightning, rain, hail, and wind. Here's a recap of what dominated local news and conversations this week (along with the awful fire in Colorado Springs)...

The series of wild storms began last Friday night, with the thunderstorm I mentioned in my Post-Yard Sale Fiesta post. I didn't get any photos, but for those of us unable to sleep through the meteorological equivalent of a night of nuclear detonations in our back yard, the intensity and frequency of the lightning and the eardrum-bursting volume of the thunder was the hot topic Saturday morning! 

After a chilly, gusty Saturday, a warm and lovely Sunday, and another very gusty day Monday, an uncomfortably muggy (for this usually dry climate) Tuesday brought more notable weather. We were under such dire severe thunderstorm warnings that afternoon that I grabbed my camera and photographed some flowers I'd admired on my walk with the dogs that morning, figuring they wouldn't survive the predicted weather...

Pretty Poppies

(I saw these again on Sunday - the spunky red ones took a lethal beating, 

while the dainty-hued pink ones were totally unscathed! Just goes to show...)

Not sure what this is called - snowball bush? - but they're quite popular here

 and this is the most impressive one I've seen. I also saw it again on Sunday,

 and though it had a carpet of white petals beneath it, it was still loaded with blossoms.

And then the scary monster arrived...

...turning the sky darker than I've ever seen daytime skies turn when not experiencing a total solar eclipse, and bringing more 60mph wind gusts, an impressive amount of pea and dime-sized hail, and torrential rain that caused flash floods. Here's a quick bit of the local coverage with a couple of photos, and here are a couple of videos I shot through two upstairs windows, mostly for the sound of the hail, which I thought was pretty impressive (having no idea what Thursday would have in store!)...

But after every storm comes the calm. So here is Mr. Peabody, one of our resident pheasants (we call all male pheasants "Mr. Peabody") in our next door neighbor's back yard after the rain and hail stopped, apparently come calling to discuss the storm with his pelican friends. ;-) Despite their stony expressions (*snork*), I think the pelicans probably enjoyed it a lot more than Mr. Peabody did...

Someone told me our rain amount of more than an inch in 15 minutes made the national news. I can't verify that, but at our house the rain came down in blinding sheets for about 20 minutes and, as you can see, filled our rain gauge with 1.6" of water, while the Weather Channel reported a total of just under 2½ inches of precipitation for that day (which would have included some more rain that fell that night)...

Too bad some of this couldn't have fallen on Colorado Springs!

Wednesday brought more thunderstorms, more gusty winds, and another ¾" of rain in our rain gauge, ho-hum. And then came Thursday.

BW stopped by the house as he usually does around 3pm, and when I greeted him at the door I noticed with alarm that the sky was absolutely black. So I got online to check for weather bulletins, and sure enough there was another severe thunderstorm bearing down on us and spotters in the direction it was coming from said it had ping-pong sized hail. I battened down the few hatches I hadn't already battened (and had left battened) on Tuesday, and hoped for the best. But though it did toss a few icy ping-pong balls at us (the half-dozen or fewer that hit our roof sounded like 2x4's dropped from an airplane!) along with more pea-sized stuff, and blew like stink (as usual) and rained hard (as usual), it only lasted a few minutes and then the sun came out and all was calm (I thought).

Not even the loud hail sounds could distract me from the unusual sight out our front window, though... the mist that rose from the hot pavement when the rain started to hit it and was then blown down the street by the gusty winds, looking like fine, blowing snow. I shot one video of it during the storm, and another after the sun came back out...

After it passed, I walked down the street and took some photos of the storm as it moved away from us (one of which was in my SkyWatch post). It was so huge, I could only fit less than half the expanse of storm cloud in my frame...

The rest of the evening was unremarkable until Robyn called me at around 6pm and asked me how bad it was at our house. "How bad what is?" I said, baffled by the question. "The damage from the ping-pong sized hail!" she answered. I told her we only got a little bit for a minute or two, and it didn't do much more than knock some little branches off our little trees, why? Turns out that hail storm cut a destructive swath through Robyn's neighborhood (where several other of our friends live) and the north end of town, while only grazing us and not affecting most of the town at all. Poor Robyn - the hail did enough damage to the shingles (and hopefully only the shingles) on their two-year old roof that it needs to be replaced, punched holes in her vinyl siding, pummeled (and probably totaled) their Honda Ridgeline, broke her fountain, cracked the main pipe from the house to their sprinkler system, dented her greenhouse panels, oblitered her flowers and veggie garden, and even knocked some of the metal leaves off her new faerie cart! :-( She said the hail was piled several inches thick against her fence.

Meanwhile, BW's boss (and many others, no doubt) also has to have his roof, including the sheathing, replaced. In addition, many trees, gardens, vehicles, and skylights in the affected part of town were damaged or destroyed, and even birds were knocked right out of the trees and nests and killed. :'-( Our friend and eye doctor Tim, whose beautifully landscaped house is right near Robyn's and so also suffered damage, normally would have had his car parked at his office in an unaffected area. But Thursday wasn't his day at all, as it was the day he goes to see patients at the VA Hospital - and the VA was right in the path of the hailstorm. He said his little car was "toast." 

But no words can describe it as well as photos can... so here's more local media coverage (check out at least the first several seconds of that second video - whoa!) and here are some of the impressive photos of the hail stones and of the some of the equally impressive hail accumulation and local devastation, most of it at the north end of town.

And even after all that, the weather wasn't through with us. At about midnight, some invisible, fiendish force flipped on the wind switch and the fiercest wind I've ever heard started screaming and roaring around our house. I have no idea how hard it blew, since the airport on the other side of town, which measures the official wind speeds in Sheridan, doesn't get nearly the wind that we do up here. But they still recorded 58 mph gusts that night - I'd guess the wind gusts here were close to 70mph! 

We've been enjoying beautiful weather since that final, epic fit of fury Thursday. But don't think we're not keeping a close and wary eye on the skies these days, and not just for photo ops!

❂❂❂❂❂❂❂❂❂❂❂❂❂❂❂

And finally in non-weather news, tomorrow is our Silver (25th) Wedding Anniversary! Our 2-week vacation in the PNW at the end of the month is our anniversary gift to ourselves, but the only silver involved (besides what's in our hair) is the color of our Highlander Hybrid we're driving out there. :-)

to us! :-)

SkyWatch Friday: Skies for Jiroemon Kimura

On Wednesday, the world's oldest man in recorded history, Jiroemon Kimura, died of natural causes in Japan at age 116 years and two months. What does this have to do with SkyWatch? According to the article linked to above, "on his 115th birthday, Kimura told reporters he attributed his longevity to getting out in the sunlight." 

"I am always looking up towards the sky. That is how I am," Kimura said then.

So I dedicate this post and its variety of skies from this week to the long life and SkyWatching spirit of Jiroemon Kimura, and to all of us who make it a habit to look up towards the sky. :-)

But first, some perfect musical accompaniment as you view this week's photos: Kyu Sakamoto's hit song "Sukiyaki," whose first line (and Japanese title),"Ue o muite arukou" means "I look up when I walk"  and which hit #1 on Billboard's pop charts in the United States on June 15, 1963 ~ yup, 50 years ago tomorrow! (Told you it was perfect!) :-)


Given that Japan is known as "Land of the Rising Sun" (its name's Japanese characters translate to "sun origin"), I thought we'd start out with Tuesday's sunrise...

Lupine on a hillside blends with Sunday's cloudless Wyoming sky...

Can you see the wee bee in the upper right? :-)
(Click on the photo to see a larger version)

Some not-so-cloudless skies during this week of turbulent (and sometimes violent) weather...



Sunrise-lit storm clouds clear out after a night of wild weather...

Only to start gathering again each afternoon...

This cloud reminds me a bit of Underdog! LOL

Though beautiful, this is definitely not a cloud you want to see looming over your house, as this was over ours last evening...

This storm hurled ping-pong sized hail and did great damage to nearby parts of town ~ 

we were very lucky to only be grazed by the edge of it!

A striped sunset sky with an eerie red glow on the horizon...

And finally, a "cresting wave" cloud...

Seriously, this cloud looked just like a cresting wave when I first saw it, but by the time I grabbed my camera and shot this picture, its shape had shifted and blurred and a lot of its wave resemblance was lost. Still, I wanted to include it because its original shape reminded me of this famous painting by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (aka, "The Breaking Wave"), and I thought it was especially appropriate to include in a post dedicated to Jiroemon Kimura-san...

Look towards the world's skies at SkyWatch Friday, and live long and prosper!

Our saddened hearts and concerned thoughts are with the people of Colorado Springs, where I know at least two regular SkyWatchers live (as does my sister-in-law and her family). As they continue to grapple with dangerous, devastating wildfires there (for the second year in a row!), we fervently wish for everyone's safety and the end of further loss of life and property!

Pre-Yard Sale Rainbow, Post-Yard Sale Fiesta!

"A garage sale is basically when strangers come to your house 

and examine your personal belongings with undisguised contempt."

~ Dave Berry, Homes and Other Black Holes

Yep. But they came in droves on day #2 like they had on day#1 in spite of the deterioration in the weather, and bought most of our contemptible crap. :-)  We had thunderstorms all during Friday night, with thunder so loud and lightning so plentiful and bright that it woke me around 11pm in spite of my exhaustion (BW slept through it all!), and I wasn't able to get to back to sleep till about 4am. So I went through day #2 with even more sleep deprivation than I had the day before. The weather that morning was still so ominous we briefly debated whether to set up our sale at all. I guess this full rainbow that greeted us that morning from our front yard, like the one the evening before in our back yard, was an auspicious sign! The clouds finally moved out and the we had stiff breezes rather than the strong gusts they'd predicted, thankfully...

The rainbow's left side to our south,

and its right side across the street to our west

We sold everything except for a box of books we donated to the library, three boxes of miscellany we donated to a local church thrift shop, a box of equine supplies that we gave to the folks who board Mocha, and one small box of items we'll keep for now. All our new clutter-free space feels wonderful! Our yard sale partners did very well too - together our four families made almost $1500, so I guess we can put up with a few derogatory comments about our possessions for that. ;-)

It was too hectic to take photos - the sale was supposed to start at 8am, but people were arriving not long after 6:30 when we'd barely begun setting up! (Why do some people always show up that early? It's obnoxious, for one thing, and they end up only seeing about 1/4 of the merchandise!) Our sale ended at noon Saturday, but folks were still stopping by as late as 2:30 when BW and I were packing up the last of the stuff to haul away. But even that wasn't the latest of the "late birds" - our doorbell rang at 6pm, and there stood a woman wanting to know if we still had the computer desk! Nope, Robyn's desk is now available for purchase at the church thrift store! I mean, really.

Anyway, as I was saying - it was too hectic to take photos during the yard sale, but I did notice as we were closing down that our rose bush had put out its first bloom! So, proud plant mama that I am, I had to snap a photo...

Meanwhile, the amazing and indefatigable Robyn invited us over for dinner and margaritas later that evening, to show us her garden and enjoy a slightly belated celebration of BW's birthday. I don't know how she managed it, and I figured I'd fall asleep in my margarita after the first sip, but buoyed by our successful yard sale (and knowing how delicious Robyn's food is), no way were we tired enough - or foolish enough - to decline. So that evening found us touring Robyn's lovely yard and garden, and admiring her newest addition - this sweet faerie cart she bought at the local greenhouse, in part with a gift certificate we'd given her for her birthday... 

We thought it was adorable and especially love the disco ball for boogying faeries! 

And then we got to enjoy a Christmas present I'd given her this year, this festive string of margarita lights she'd put on her deck...

But what fun are margarita lights without any actual margaritas? Robyn had found a recipe for pomegranate margaritas she wanted to try, so she made it for the first time that night and it was a huge hit! We all loved it - it was a perfect, flavorful combination of sweet-tart. Pretty, too! (I've shared the recipe at the bottom of this post)...

And check out this colorful spread of nosh! Robyn had made a pasta salad and also put out fixin's for a delicious "Spicy Chick'n Taco Salad" with her homemade "fiery sauce" (in the bowl to the far left), and for BW's birthday she'd made the indescribably delicious Coconut Lime Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World...

Robyn had made these and several other flavors of vegan cupcakes for her daughter's Hawaiian themed wedding reception last spring and asked us to be taste testers for her. Though they're made with some unhealthful ingredients we typically avoid (margarine, oil, shortening, refined white flour, powdered sugar... yikes!), we thought it would be bad form not to help out a friend in need. ;-) I swear I gained at least 10 pounds passing judgement on those amazing cupcake samples, and this sublime flavor (teehee) was one of our absolute favorites. 

This one's still in its paper baking cup so you can't see the "cake" part, but it has a lovely soft green hue with little flecks of lime zest through it. I don't have the cookbook or the recipe, but I found it online. They are beguilingly pretty and deliciously vegan, but they are also epic sugar-and-fat-bombs that are highly addictive! You've been warned... :-) 

And here's the margarita recipe I promised, so you'll have something to wash down your cupcakes with...

Pomegranate Margaritas

Ingredients:
1 cup tequila
1 cup triple sec (or orange liqueur of your choice)
3 TBSP agave nectar* (optional)
1¼ cups pomegranate juice
¾ cup fresh squeezed lime juice
4 cups ice

Directions:
Mix the tequila, triple sec, and agave nectar. Stir in the pomegranate and lime juices and ice. Serve and enjoy!

(We had ours without salt on the glass rim, but that's certainly an option. Update: Also optional is the agave nectar, we've since discovered! They're equally delicious without any sweetener).

I also found this very similar recipe (minus the sweetener but adding the salt) that just serves one... in case you prefer to drink alone or don't need to make a vat of it to unwind with your lushy friends after a grueling two-day yard sale!) :-)

We didn't get to bed till midnight, so we took it pretty easy on Sunday, BW's last day of vacation. One thing we did was take the girls to visit Mocha and go on a hike, and I got a few fun photos during that outing that I'll share in my next post. See you then! :-)