These two hawks were hunting from one of the trees on Meadowlark Lane on the way home, which provided quite a distraction for me.
Category: Clouds
Lost in Spam
Spam is the scourge of the Internet age. I get one legitimate comment on this blog for every five spam comments, and only about one in 100 emails is legitimate. There are sometimes useful things like grasshopper tobacco cures cancer, miracle weight loss with urban sunflowers, and how to make yourself irresistible to women drivers. On the other hand, I hate Dr. Oz and even if a “Flex Able” hose is the “end all” for garden hoses, I would never buy one. Then there are the emails from DHL telling me there’s a problem with my package. I assume they are euphemistic male enhancement emails. But the spam messages that really get me are the ones notifying me I’ve been inducted, or more like abducted, into the “Who’s Who of Professional Women!” I’m not sure when I became an honorary woman, but I’m told I’m a “Who” among them according to the daily emails. I guess I have no standing as a professional man since I have never received a notice of being a “Who” among men. As much as I mark these spam mails as spam, they just come double or triple — one or more to my in-box and the rest to my spam filter — keeping me lost in spam.
The Blog Before The Storm
I took this photo just after midnight on Friday morning. It was so windy and so much rain on Friday night, that the lightning was never clear, just bright flashes and loud crashes. Since the clouds are building up again, I thought I better get the blog posted before the storm hits and we lose power again. We got home at 4:30 pm yesterday and by the clocks that keep a memory of the time they went off, the power had been restored just an hour before we got home, which, if correct, means we were without power for 21 hours. The June bugs and roses are happy after the heavy rains, and Rosencrantz was enjoying a patch of catnip in the late afternoon light that was falling between the thunderheads building up in the western skies.
Bird, Bee, Flower and Clouds
We watched the final stage of the Tour de France, and the multi-media, light extravaganza they projected on the Arc de Triomphe was spectacular. If the church could could produce the same quality of multi-media production to illustrate the pastor’s points as the Tour de France’s light show did for the awards ceremony, I might buy into the multi-media projection during the service. Then again, if churches could give multi-media shows half as good as the clouds over the Sandias, they might be entertaining.
A hawk was blending with the insulators on the power pole — good hunting strategy. The bee/wasp in the second photo is as BIG as it looks. I’ve been trying to get a clear photo of this critter for a long time. It never lands for but a split second and zips around very quickly. I finally got it in flight. The Asian lily was backlit nicely just after sunrise, and the clouds were quite entertaining throughout the day.
Touch of Blue
I love the dramatic skies we get this time of year.
Anasazi Building
I dropped my car off the get the tires replaced at the Downtown Goodyear garage, and passed by the Anasazi Building on my walk back to the office. They are making progress on it as you can see from the first photo taken yesterday and the second photo taken in May of last year. The Sandias had waves of clouds crashing over them this morning. I took the panorama across from the Balloon Museum and Laurie took the last photo from our property about the same time.
For the Hail of it
We had a major hail storm in Corrales this afternoon, which Laurie bravely recorded. By the time I got home, we just had large lakes along our road.
Let Your Light Shine
I’m listening to a course on the history of Christian theology, and the last lecture I listened to was on how Christians came to the idea of the soul separating from the body and going to Heaven or Hell when they die. Believe it or not, the idea of the soul going to heaven when one dies is not in the least bit Christian in origin, or even Jewish for that matter, but purely from Plato. If you stick by the Christian tradition, Christ returns to establish God’s Kingdom on earth and resurrects those Christians who are saved to be part of the Kingdom of God on earth. So why is the idea that our souls go to Heaven or Hell when we die so prevalent in the Western Christian tradition? Mostly because Augustine was well versed in Plato and liked the idea of a separate body and soul, but he still believed there had to be the resurrection of the body before the soul could achieve complete happiness. One problem is that Paul and the other New Testament writers believed Jesus would return in their life-time, so there was no problem about what happened when a Christian died, but as time wore on, later Christians became anxious about what happens when they die. In a simplistic way of looking at a very complex and drawn out issue, Plato had the easy answer — good souls go to Heaven and bad souls go to Hell — but then there are the questionable souls, that, again because of Augustine, are believed to end up in purgatory, at least in the Catholic tradition!
Ducks in a Row
After I dropped Laurie off to sing in the choir at the early service, I went over to UNM and photographed the ducks and the architecture. The clouds were building up over the Sandias on my way home, so I stopped at the jetti sculpture on Coors and got the shots of the Sandias, clouds and sculpture.
Monsoon
Three thirty PM the clouds let loose and we got a nice downpour. The Monsoon season is underway.
Off Center & Not Even 