We Were Howling At the Moon
Maybe we were not really howling, but we felt like it. Maybe we just mumbled a little as we watched out for biting fire-ants on the ground.
We had a tradition on our old blog of remembering the natural world at least once a month. We have a trusty moon-phase clock over our keyboard and screen, and we remember to interrupt our Herculean labors to take our camera outside, extend the telephoto lens to its maximum power, glance over our shoulders at the passing cars and hoping they don't call 9-1-1 as we crouch in the darkness, and snap some photos of the rising moon. The pictures are never the same, the characteristics of the moon as it shines through the atmosphere give a certain variation to our observations. Here in last night's photo, there is the hint of a silhouette of some live-oak leaves in a tree. In case you did not know, the live-oak is a family of trees that have little leaves that stay on the tree nearly all year round. They are hardy and drought resistant and are found throughout the western part of the United states.
And this is a harvest moon down here in the South, or the West, or in-between as we are, last month was still pretty hot for a traditional harvest. We missed out on the Moon Festival, we checked the date on the lunar calendar, it was celebrated last month.
Here are the traditional characters: Middle Autumn Festival (Which some of you may or may not see as Chinese characters, depending on your browser settings): 中秋節 or the equivalent Pin-Yin alphabetic characters: Zhōng-qiū-jié. Well, no moon cakes or other tasty treats for us, we don't have a lunar calendar handy at our desk but we did get a small tripod out and glanced heavenwards to pay homage to Earth's celestial companion. So we had our own private Moon Festival, perhaps we will compose some moon poems this evening.
We don't have too many astronomy books, someone purchased all of our stock recently in one fell swoop, and even though it is the beginning of November, we still have one moon related item. We have a theater program from "Teahouse of the Autumn Moon" from a traveling cast in the 50's that included the unlikely pairing of Eli Wallach (we remember him from the Clint Eastwood movies, for those of you who don't know them, he would be the "Ugly" character, named Tuco in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly hit Western movie) and Paul Ford (who later became the irascible character Colonel Hall in the old Sargent Bilko series):
We had a tradition on our old blog of remembering the natural world at least once a month. We have a trusty moon-phase clock over our keyboard and screen, and we remember to interrupt our Herculean labors to take our camera outside, extend the telephoto lens to its maximum power, glance over our shoulders at the passing cars and hoping they don't call 9-1-1 as we crouch in the darkness, and snap some photos of the rising moon. The pictures are never the same, the characteristics of the moon as it shines through the atmosphere give a certain variation to our observations. Here in last night's photo, there is the hint of a silhouette of some live-oak leaves in a tree. In case you did not know, the live-oak is a family of trees that have little leaves that stay on the tree nearly all year round. They are hardy and drought resistant and are found throughout the western part of the United states.
And this is a harvest moon down here in the South, or the West, or in-between as we are, last month was still pretty hot for a traditional harvest. We missed out on the Moon Festival, we checked the date on the lunar calendar, it was celebrated last month.
Here are the traditional characters: Middle Autumn Festival (Which some of you may or may not see as Chinese characters, depending on your browser settings): 中秋節 or the equivalent Pin-Yin alphabetic characters: Zhōng-qiū-jié. Well, no moon cakes or other tasty treats for us, we don't have a lunar calendar handy at our desk but we did get a small tripod out and glanced heavenwards to pay homage to Earth's celestial companion. So we had our own private Moon Festival, perhaps we will compose some moon poems this evening.
We don't have too many astronomy books, someone purchased all of our stock recently in one fell swoop, and even though it is the beginning of November, we still have one moon related item. We have a theater program from "Teahouse of the Autumn Moon" from a traveling cast in the 50's that included the unlikely pairing of Eli Wallach (we remember him from the Clint Eastwood movies, for those of you who don't know them, he would be the "Ugly" character, named Tuco in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly hit Western movie) and Paul Ford (who later became the irascible character Colonel Hall in the old Sargent Bilko series):
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