Miss Snot Face

You and Your Camera Can Take a Flyin' Leap...

Since the moment I met my horse, Ginger, my pet name for her has been Miss Snot Face, a reference I learned in my grade school days, when girls who thought they were better than everyone else acted "snotty". I did not make it up - it is what people said back in the Dark Ages.

Miss Snot Face lived up to her name today. The farrier made a special trip to my house to trim Ginger's hooves. Ginger does well with both front feet, but she does not like waiting on Terrie to finish those back hooves and wants to put her feet down. Terrie is not a very big gal, but she is pretty darned strong to wrestle Ginger for control of those hind legs. On top of this bad habit, for several weeks now Ginger has been quite concerned about something only she can sense somewhere south of her pasture. It might be coyotes, but I do not think a horse would be too worried about coyotes. Maybe a bob cat. I hope it is not a mountain lion. Something unusual has Ginger on constant alert so that made the hoof trimming even more fun than normal.

In addition to this bad behavior today, Ginger left her calling card for me in the barn. There are two stalls in the run-in shed which faces south. Ginger can shelter against the wind and rain, but about the only time I see her in the barn is when she needs to poop. She backs into the middle stall. She can fertilize the entire pasture, but she chooses to relieve herself in the middle stall of her own barn. I think she does this because she used to live in a corral attached to the barn, and the horse manure was removed about every day from the stalls by me. Sometimes, though, I think Miss Snot Face is making a very blatant horse statement, one just for me.

An Auspicious Sign

It was an auspicious start Thursday morning, the first day to return to work in almost three full weeks. The doe I have been watching for several months was in the middle of the road as if waiting for me when I crested the last hill before the interstate. One of her fawns remains with her, and it sailed easily over the west fence to pause for a brief moment in the center of the road, watching my approach. The deer's effortless grace is always to be admired.

A few minutes later, an eagle flying low from the north changed course to sail directly over my car as I was hauling toward the city. It is not every day a person is blessed by an eagle. The number of eagles has been rising in Kansas slowly over my lifetime. From never having seen a single eagle in the wild to seeing three within ten miles of my own home in the last twelve years is an auspicious sign. That little strand of happiness trailed after me the rest of the day.

A coworker who is a deer hunter in his real life explained it is likely the other fawn was chased away from his mother by a breeding buck, maybe still following his mother from a hundred yards back. Or he may have taken up with another young buck, and both are trailing a group of older bucks. I was thankful for this knowledge.

I am thankful for many things in my life - my family and friends, my home, humble as it is, and my time on this old earth.

Check It Out

My daughter has launched a new web site to sell her handmade jewelery: Flint Hills Gems

Best of success!

The Last Light

Last night the sky was glorious, the serene beauty overpowering the light pollution and clutter of our civilization. The horned moon low in the west, almost a true Cheshire smile, cast a mellow light above the skyline, and in the east, Orion rising on his ancient westward trek across the winter heavens. The atmosphere was so clear that red Betelgeuse and blue Rigel were colorful beacons anyone would have recognized had they only looked.

The Pleiades and Cassiopeia were above Ginger's barn, but it was Jupiter, seemingly stationed directly above me, that crowned the sky. It seems a profound evolutionary mistake that human beings only have a few decades beneath the living skies.

I recently learned that eventually the Light will go out in the universe, when all of the hydrogen is consumed by the uncountable stars. I imagined the last remaining burning star, the ultimate ending flame of light in an infinite expanse of utter darkness at the end of time. It made me incredibly sad. Nothing lasts forever - not winter, not life, not sadness, not happiness, not even light.


M74: The Perfect Spiral Credit & Copyright: Descubre Foundation, Calar Alto Observatory, OAUV, DSA, V. Peris (OAUV), J. L. Lamadrid (CEFCA), J. Harvey (SSRO), S. Mazlin (SSRO), I. Rodriguez (PTeam), O. L. (PTeam), J. Conejero (PixInsight).

Moon Feathers

The moon indeed possesses feathers.
It was only after moving to Spirit Creek, with the clear and panoramic views of the sky, that I finally understood the phases of the moon. I knew the moon was traveling around the earth and the phases were relative in relationship to the sun, but I was not clear in my mind how that made the moon appear in phases. When I observed for myself the full moon is opposite the sun in the sky and appears close to the sun at the new moon, I understood at last. It only took a little over forty years. Genius.

Many years ago, I received a Bushnell 60 mm telescope as a Christmas present. Included with the instructions for care and use, I found a newsletter devoted entirely to observing the moon. It contained a marvelous map of the lunar surface and ended with a few short paragraphs regarding an intriguing natural phenomenon known as "transient lunar phenomenon". It encouraged all amateur astronomers to be cognizant of the possibilities of observing a TLP. It included instructions for reporting any observations to NASA. It was before the internet, so people had to commit language to paper and physically ship the information via the United States Postal Service. Barbaric, I know.

This morning as I was scrolling through the full moon photos taken with my new camera, I remembered the request of NASA scientists for observations of the well-known phenomenon that has been witnessed throughout recorded history. It was a mystery to science in the late 1980's and I wondered if that riddle had been solved.

Thanks to Google, I instantly discovered that TLP has not yet been entirely solved by science.

From Wikipedia: "During the Apollo 11 mission Houston radioed to Apollo 11: "We've got an observation you can make if you have some time up there. There's been some lunar transient events reported in the vicinity of Aristarchus." Astronomers in Bochum, West Germany, had observed a bright glow on the lunar surface—the same sort of eerie luminescence that has intrigued moon watchers for centuries. The report was passed on to Houston and thence to the astronauts. Almost immediately, Armstrong reported back, "Hey, Houston, I'm looking north up toward Aristarchus now, and there's an area that is considerably more illuminated than the surrounding area. It seems to have a slight amount of fluorescence."
Though science does its best to suck the magic from our lives as brutally as a vampire drains his victim's blood, some things remain mysterious and wonderful, including the idea of vampires and the fact of transient lunar phenomenon. And, as you can see, I have irrefutable proof that moon feathers exist.

Cyberkit's Masterpiece

Cyberkit, a faithful reader of this blog and a long time personal friend, emailed this work of art to me. I believe this is the very genesis of an entirely new artistic photographic style. (The only thing that could have improved this would have been if Ginger was wearing a crown.)

Hold on, Cyberkit - when this image hits the internet, we are going to be rich, biatch!

Seven Billion and Counting

Recently, the number crunchers of the world determined that the human population of the earth surpassed seven billion people. As my daughter says, "Everyone is here!"

We must all be here at the same time for a good reason. Maybe, like Skynet in the Terminator movies, the population has grown to such staggering numbers in order that humans may become self-aware, sentient, enlightened. Oh, my existentialistic soul can dream!

Perhaps a great bursting awareness is soon to rip through space/time, maybe on December 21, 2012, and it will not be the long awaited doomsday predicted by the Mayan, Hopi, Nostradamus, and any number of religions, crack pots, and yahoos scattered across the world and through time. Maybe we will just wake up and KNOW things - like Americans should not be hogging all of the world's resources and fighting wars against people who have a different religion. American companies should not have sold the software to governments to spy and oppress their citizens via the internet. Of course, if they sold it to one government, I assume they sold it to my rich government as well. In America, the religion is profit. It is why we continue to dump uncountable numbers of cubic tons of chemicals into the water, soil and air with no compunction. Our deity expects us to go forth and multiply our profits.

Maybe we will wake up on December 21, 2012 and know that it is madness to believe we can continue to destroy the earth for energy, as if it is a right Americans deserve. We allowed corporate interests to manipulate our law to give human rights to a soulless entity. One thing those old time, savage Indians got right - they warned the laws that took everything from the Indian would one day turn and consume the white man. Silly Indians.

Are the kids in the streets across the country and across the world the stirring of some great knowledge that is reaching a critical mass in the human spirit? Are the numbers of people going to be sufficient to overthrow oppressive governments, oppressive social constructs and oppressive religions by simply being? I do not know.

What I know is that my drivers license is only good until December 21, 2012. It is my own personal Mayan calendar. If the world still exists December 22, 2012, I am going to go out, get in my car, and drive illegally. Yeah, that's right - drive on an expired license!  I am going to stick it to The Man, man!