Friday, April 23, 2021 (5 days before April’s full Pink Moon rises nearest to earth)

The sky’s contents are on my mind in anticipation of next week’s fullest rise of a nearing Pink Moon. I’m wondering how to rise to the challenge of capturing the anticipated moon majesty with my woefully inadequate cameras.

Yesterday afternoon, on seeing the moon’s early rise in a still-light sky, I decided to experiment. What a pleasant surprise, to discover that my zoom camera could capture decently a moon bathed in natural light.

Very early this morning while letting the dogs outside, I felt a beckoning from that same three-quarter moon, now setting and beautifully so over in the west. I didn’t go for a camera, because my past shots of moons setting in dark skies never have captured adequately all I yearn to see.

Good photos from a camera, aside from effective composition, are one-hundred percent about light. Take the photo of yesterday’s afternoon moon in daylight. Its details yesterday exactly are what my naked eye saw early this morning.

To illustrate here’s that afternoon capture, after computer software has darkened the surrounding sky. This version reflects much I’d have wished to capture in a photo of this morning’s setting moon.

These thoughts move my impressions beyond the moon and to sky-gazing in general. In thinking about watching the sky, I’m recognizing that this activity is and always has been never-ending. Aside from specific pursuits like the moon, the sky is an amazing streamer of much that fascinates.

There are general activities:

There are specific topics:

Acquiescing to being addicted to sky-watching lets me shift away, to return to that specific, fascinating, coming Pink Moon. Can’t help myself, must stay tuned.

Dear Friends: This calls for re-reading Shakespeare, who clearly and best articulated “sky matters”. Diana

Thursday, April 22, 2021 (In 5 days, April’s full Pink Moon will rise at its nearest to earth.)

This time of year brings the “squeeze weeks”, the few almost too chilly/windy that separate the coldest weather from summer’s warm days. It’s a waiting period before I start working with my horses. It gets me tackling around-the-home filler-activities. Last year, I spent these weeks trimming trees, and cutting and hauling wood to the dump. This year, I’ve begun a different project.

I’m transforming my RV garage from years-long of storing hay and creating a workshop. The area will hold tools that having accumulated clog nearly very space in my attached garage. The shop is a cool idea, but raises a question, “What’ll I do with the hay?”

For the time being. That’s a set-aside for answering later.

Most of us remain somewhat in a pandemic mode. We keep near home and try to stay busy and productive. We navigated the worst shutdown period with reading, streaming, knitting, painting and drawing, zooming, Amazoning, and sometimes venturing out to shop.

I still enjoy reading a whole book every week. I still fiddle with artsy stuff, it’s fun though I’ve little talent. These are great weeks of having time to think about and to grow a shop. Another question: “What’ll I do with this shop?”

That’s another set-aside for later.

This morning while perusing newspapers, I ran across an article about someone clever. Fighting boredom in her most confined pandemic period, she played around, scratching with a penknife on unpeeled bananas. She was able to turn those scratchings into little art pieces, took photos, and posted them on line. That has made her wildly popular, gained her a following. She’s begun teaching on line, the art of scratching onto banana skins.

Here’s her unique combat against shut-in boredom, and images of her clever art: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/04/21/banana-art-sketch/

Dear Friends: Creativity often just falls-out, as a by-product of just playing around. Diana

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 (Six days before its nearest-to-earth rise of April’s full Pink Moon)

The world has avoided street riots following a jury’s decision that Derrick Chauvin is guilty on all counts of murder. Most everyone immediately breathed normally again.

Achieving that difficult victory has been the easiest part of achieving social needs versus institutional practices. Ahead, America faces the challenge of reforming a long-standing key organization. Worst, it stretches coast to coast with a highly entrenched workplace culture.

Huge changes must start with top management. It requires muscle to redesign, readjust, and effectively monitor revised institutional policies, practices, and procedures. America’s leaders publicly recognize these needs. They’re promising to alter the entrenched and complex processes of policing.

Changing a long-standing institution means revising its top vision and the missions to support that vision. From those come goals for line personnel to embrace and adhere to. They must work with new hiring agreements, new methods to assess job candidates, and support clear work guidelines by ably assessing and rewarding performance.

An effective culture is circular. Goals from the top are directed to line managers. Those understand how to lead, support policies and procedures, oversee training processes, and measure and document performance fairly. Plus line managers must communicate well and negotiate actively with subordinates. Fulfilling the circle is reporting accurately up through the chain and back to top management.

Modifying America’s police work is a challenge that equals our leadership’s long-time attempts to modify another entrenched, but related, culture: America’s too-little control over sales of lethal weapons.

Dear Friends: Drawing on experience, we look forward with an abundance of hope and caution. Diana

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 (Seven days before the full rising of April’s Pink Moon)

While my brain tried to find something about which to write today, ideas rose but not interesting and motivating There were scatters of doings here at home that feel like big deals but wouldn’t sail in my mind’s breezes. Something illusive was preventing my charging forth with an idea.

That changed after I began seeing in today’s leading newspapers articles about the Chauvin trial, and its possible aftermath. Today, Minneapolis is poised for riots. An increasing majority is gathering around the courthouse, most believing Chauvin guilty of murder. They’re insisting and praying for justice in a guilty verdict.

It struck me that I, too, am worrying about that jury’s decision. A surprise, here in my home a couple thousand miles from Minneapolis and its street-threating massive rebellion. I’ve witnessed on television some of the trial, and yesterday’s closing arguments by the attorneys.

I’m aware of storing such information in a brain chamber, to await an official verdict. After that, I’d mix and match my impressions to the real outcome.

Or so, I assume, that’s me, how I feel and what I’ll do.

This morning, I recognize that I’m really very involved, have an opinion, and now see that that for years everybody’s been building toward the outcomes that may follow this jury decision. It’s been accumulating over time, “it’s all got to us”: gun violence, Black Lives Matter, police brutality, #metoo.

In this year’s brief beginning, we’ve witnessed random mass killings, one after another. The Chauvin trial is tapping an iceberg that tops the illnesses among huge populations. Social pressures have outstripped the once-commonly accepted social norms that for long managed to manage most of us.

Recently I’ve become more aware of America’s history, parts that school didn’t teach. The Constitution built on ideology and promises couldn’t have predicted great explosions of population and wealth that have altered national and world balances.

Today beyond our borders, Russia is ramped up and poised to attack Ukraine. North Korea is doing who knows what, and preparing to do who knows what. And here in the United States, we’ll likely witness pro and con outcries on Minneapolis’s streets, regardless of the jury’s verdict.

All that’s on my mind. Much reaches far away and gathers input from Minneapolis and Ukraine. Much is local, too, for nearby Portland is experiencing street riots and they’re increasing.

All this means that regardless of what that Minneapolis jury decides, the unrest will continue. What to do about policing? About wealth distribution? About economies after a year of shutdown. About Ukraine and North Korea?

Dear Friends: An awakening, to recognize how greatly world issues may affect personal anxieties. Diana

Monday, April 19, 2021 (Eight days before Pink Moon rises nearest to earth)

My last surviving hen, Welsummer, has outlived all others in my chicken flock. On impulse, in 2010, I brought home a dozen day-old chicks from a feed store. In those days, as a recent transplant from Los Angeles to Central Oregon, I found a country-like environment highly enjoyable. Eager to immerse myself in new adventures, I couldn’t bypass cute tiny chicks.

The growing babies were fun, offered lots of learning and provided too many eggs. Observing hens encouraged me to start identifying wild birds by sight and sound. Eventually, my bird life gained some inside talking-types, Quaker Parrots.

About my hens, unlike the common knowledge, each was smart and had an individual personality. Their behaviors singularly and as a group were fascinating. In five or six years, they aged, laid fewer eggs, and eventually began wilting before soon passing away.

I fought losing each hen, sought veterinary help, tried to prevent each from failing but couldn’t. Modern domestic chickens aren’t bred to live much past their laying years when generally they become unwanted.

Bird people know that birds well-cared-for can live for many years.

Now, I’ve only Welsummer who’s well beyond her egg-laying days. She appears healthy, shares space with my twin goats, looks terrific, is excited when I show up, eats well and behaves normally.

Well, almost. Here’s what I discovered yesterday in the goat house:

Actually, a few weeks previously she had laid an egg. Our friend, Susie, and I were offering treats to Welsummer who ignored us–very unusual. She looked stressed and worried me greatly. Suddenly, from her an egg dropped. It was unformed, she eagerly devoured it, and Susie snapped pictures.

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As Kathrine Hepburn tended to remark, “Who can say, who can say?” I will remark that today for breakfast, I’ll enjoy a beautiful fresh blue egg.

Dear Friends: May this hen keep outliving the average survival years for domestic chickens! Diana

Sunday, April 18, 2021 (Nine days before April’s full “Pink Moon” rises nearest to earth.)

Early today, one-quarter of the coming full Pink Moon descended in the western sky and reflected brightly in my bedroom window, awakening me. The bright quarter moved quickly, and before my head, feet, and camera were in gear, its light had skidded north, becoming hidden in a location where trees obscured my view of the horizon. Shucks, an easy shot missed.

Around midnight, few suddenly-awakened humans are at peak performance. I decided to read, and while preparing instant coffee nodded to a happy basil plant beside the sink. That plant had given me a little learning journey.

Maybe because my mind had been dwelling on moon travels or on seventeen-year appearances of the cicadas, I recalled my history with the basil plant. Weeks ago, I picked it up in a supermarket. Alive, tall and leafy, it rose from a bit of damp soil in a tiny container. The instructions, to set its container in water, seemed easy, I did and the plant lived.

In time, after I forgot to keep the basil wet, it drooped. I enjoyed having occasional fresh basil and wondered if the plant might thrive by a replanting in a bigger pot. I popped the sad basil into another container with lots of soil and plenty of water. The plant regenerated and bloomed.

This plant-keeper forgets, and sure enough, before long I again focused on the plant and it looked completely dead. Oh well, I shrugged, who needs a live basil plant anyway?

My inner person tugged against my impulse simply to pull and toss that basil. A better self nudged to me that death by neglect could have been avoided. Having nothing more to lose, why not water the plant before tossing it, just see what might happen?

The next morning, the plant surprised me, its lower leaves slightly lifted. The larger top leaves still were dead. I wondered if cutting away the heavy top leaves and reducing stems might better help the lower part regrow, but decided to let the plant be. Next morning, the entire basil was alive and even its highest leaves regenerating.

A renewed lesson to my better self: I love the moon’s various appearances, the cicada events, the intelligences of bees and octopuses, and also now, a simple basil plant. That almost-easy toss-away has reinforced an always-human need to keep working toward understanding, caring, and nurturing.

Dear Friends: A salute to rigid cycles: those of astronomic movements and of life itself. Diana

Saturday, April 17, 2021 (10 days before the fullest appearance of April’s “Pink Moon”)

During this pandemic era I’ve searched for ways to encourage my creative side, hoping to expand my usual ways of imagining and dreaming. I’ve been helped by carrying a camera and photographing whatever seems interesting. I don’t do much with my pictures beyond producing and sharing them on this blog, and occasionally on Facebook.

While looking through past photos, it seems some might have been worthy of a painting on canvas. One afternoon I tried to recreate in oils a photo of a bird perched in a tree with multiple interesting branches. My first version was a total flop. So were second and third attempts. Finally, I realized that the picture’s elements were too complicated for decent reproducing by a novice painter.

I considered art lessons. I’ll mention that watching online paints being mixed and applied is as boring as watching grass grow. These days, in-person learning opportunities are rare, and besides, I’m among those now tending to avoid gatherings.

Suddenly, a light dawned. I’d find things simple to photograph. Say, an item alone or a scene containing simple components. For painting, I could recreate a whole picture or isolate one of its components.

That’s why I focused on a lizard and a rock. I planned for the Western Fence Lizard in today’s header photo to become a painting.

The potential shot was at a distance and its background too isolated for real interest. Here’s a longer look.

It turns out that these pictures actually are pretty good, but maybe too complicated to paint. Closing-in more captured the creature looking straight through distance and back at me.

I’ll not try to create a painting. While there’s a simplicity of subject, there’s also a complexity of mood. Recreating mood challenges mightily a novice painter.

Dear Friends: Visualizing differently and adjusting camera-handling heightens creativity. Diana

Friday, April 16, 2021 (In eleven days April’s full “Pink Moon” will appear.)

A general consensus is that an almost-best video series was “Breaking Bad”. The series initially aired from 2008 to 2013, over five seasons with 62 episodes.

I didn’t watch the initial airing, but comments about the show matched in popularity another compelling series, “The Sopranos”. When “The Sopranos” appeared on Netflix, I tuned in and loved it. Later when “Breaking Bad” landed on Netflix, I checked it out. And Oh My Gosh!

I couldn’t pull myself from sitting through episode after episode. All was good about “Breaking Bad”, the script, directing, acting, photography, and its ending.

It’s a story about an underpaid high school chemistry teacher who suddenly is diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer. He worries about dying soon, leaving his family with nothing, and so, turns to a life of crime. Partnered with a former student and user who’s peripherally involved in the drug world, the chemistry teacher manages to create, produce, and distribute, a very powerful version of crystal meth. Their success quickly forces the two men into navigating the dangers of a criminal underworld.

Meanwhile the chemistry teacher leads a double life. He’s a family man, tells his family nothing about his involvement with drugs and the underworld. At the same time he continually produces meth and is under a heavy burden of having to launder incoming scads of cash.

His is a compelling story.

Now today, in the Washington Post is a story about one Barney Dale Harris. He’s a 40-year-old, popular Charlotte, NC, Spanish teacher, who also is the men’s varsity basketball and track coach, and is a student adviser. He has died from gunshots.

According to The Post: “Barney Dale Harris, a beloved presence at the Monroe, N.C., high school since 2017, [was] killed in a gun battle while trying to steal drugs and cash from a Mexican drug cartel.”

More about this: “Authorities found the body of Harris inside a mobile home in Green Level, N.C., on April 8. He was wearing a bulletproof vest that that failed to save his life during what Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson likened to ‘an old Western shootout.’”

Married for 21 years, Harris was the father of three children and leading a double life. His wife knew nothing about his involvement with the underground drug world.

This is a fascinating story because it mirrors “Breaking Bad”. It raises questions about when, why, and how Harris became involved with a drug cartel. The robbery attempt that led to Harris’s death included his brother-in-law. There’s no suggestion that either were users. These men seem to have been intent on stealing from someone associated to a Mexican drug cartel.

The Post also notes that this episode might have another chapter. Mexican cartels don’t forget, they get even.

Here’s a link, https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2021/04/15/teacher-cartel-shootout/

Dear Friends: This story suggests influence by a fictional series, we only can wonder. Diana

Thursday, April 15, 2021 (12 days until April’s full “Pink Moon”)

I’m about to go outside and feed the large animals and my last remaining chicken, Welsummer. Today’s header photo from several years ago shows an earlier flock hen and not Welsummer. It’s a pleasing capture.

Welsummer is on my mind because she seems amazing. She’s just turning eleven years old, looks thrifty and is energetic. Still occasionally she lays an egg. Mornings, I prepare chopped salad for Welsummer and my Cockatoo Peaches. They get mixed greens, and kale aplenty, with peas, beans, and shredded carrots.

You never know what’s on Peaches’ mind. His foot reaches into the bowl and he tosses pieces least interesting onto his cage floor. I don’t worry because the cage floor becomes a storehouse for his eats through the day.

But I’m outside and carrying a food bucket. Welsummer races to greet me unable to contain her excitement over the food container. She leaps and pecks at it, follows me to a feeding spot, and begins eating the instant salad bits hit the ground.

From yesterday, here’s Welsummer diving in.

My African Dwarf twins who share space with Welsummer are interested in what she’s eating. For some reason, probably because they’re untrained, aren’t into veggies. I’ll start working and teach them.

Some years ago my neighbor, Frank, allowed these goats onto his pasture. To my surprise, the animals didn’t seem to know what to do. They didn’t nibble grass, just followed me around with their heads up. I recognized that pasture grazing was new and they needed an introduction to it. Well, now I will work on introducing the goats to salads.

Dear Friends: After years and now down to my final hen and last goats, I’m still learning from them. Diana

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 (13 days until April’s full Pink Moon)

As a sucker for souped-up old vehicles, I laughed on finding myself parking beside an elderly Dodge pickup. It’s painted bright orange, with a lowered body. Best, its energetic nonviolent decals render it semi-ferocious.

Here’s its front view.

Some of its fun decals.

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This orange truck put me into mind of one I saw a couple of years ago. I was parking next to it and astonished by the creative modifications. Someone very artistic had it updated into a vision of gorgeous.

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While considering these recreated and loveable vehicles, I recalled long ago spotting an old Cadillac parked nearby. This photograph captures a perfect paint job that confuses where it might rank on a beautifying spectrum.

Fortunately, the art world offers plenty for individuals to like or dislike, which keeps Facebook massively popular.

It’s great fun to behold art social in nature.

Dear Friends: With time to gaze around, we find the big world offering much that astonishes. Diana