I stopped and took this panorama of the stormy sky over the city on the way home tonight.

There’s often talk about making English the official language of the US. In preparation, we are studying Old English. If they make English the “official” language, we will have to go back to the English from between 500 AD and 1066 AD to get the most pure English. After 1066, and all that, English becomes riddled with French, Spanish, Italian and Greek. Take the rose,  Sceptered Isle, featured in the lead photo as an example. It’s a David Austin “English” rose, but while Isle is derived for Old English, sceptered is Greek. While “sceptered isle” is from Shakespeare referring to England, in reality no Anglo-Saxon god or king would be caught dead holding a mariconada (oh no Spanish) scepter. A battle axe, yes, scepter no.  Therefore, Sceptered Isle would have to be changed to Battle Axe Isle.

Pope is derived from Old English, and there is probably a lot of liturgical Latin in Old English by 500 AD. However, Sorbet Bouquet is a real problem for the English purist. All French, with no good Old English words to replace them. Once English becomes the official Language of the US, we will have to dig up all our Sorbet Bouquet Rose bushes and throw them out.

I did my midterm re-qualification for my CCL tonight. I scored 100% with both calibers. It’s actually very easy to score 100%, but surprisingly enough, about half of the 14 people who took the refresher tonight did not score 100% on the shooting. I felt I especially had to score 100%, since I didn’t want to be put to shame by our governor who scored 100% on her qualification a couple of weeks ago.

Kitties rule tonight on the photos. Rosencrantz and Diné like to snuggle up on the bed which is like a landscape with the “cat magnet” blanket covering all of our pillows. Guildenstern was pensive on the step, and Puck poofed when Rosencrantz and I walked around the corner of the house yesterday morning.

It’s 4:00 AM! Do you know where your arachnids are? This one built its web on the gate at the irrigation ditch, which I discovered when I went out to turn in the water at four this morning. The web was destroyed when I lowered the gate to dam the water. With each turn of the wheel, the web slowly collapsed until it disappeared once the gate was down. The poor spider held on till the last minute then dropped on a thread toward the water. I grabbed its thread and pulled the spider back onto the wheel —then I headed back to the house in the muted light of an overcast moon.

The moon is almost full tonight. It was quite striking rising behind the cottonwood trees. The moon is so bright that it’s difficult to expose for the moon and get any detail surrounding it.

Our Frankenflower sunflower is still producing beautiful blosoms and Sorbet Bouquet continues to produce interesting blooms.

Only 9 days into September, and cold, wintery weather is upon us. This photo was done on my way to work after getting numerous x-rays of my hips and lower spine. I went to an arthritis doctor this morning, and she decided a lot of my pain is actually bursitis that’s related to the ankylosing spondylitis. One comment she made that was interesting is that she thought the condition I had in my knees when I was 9 years old was probably an early manifestation of the ankylosing spondylitis; however, in 1968, spondylitis was not very well defined so the doctors wouldn’t have known to look for it. She gave me a sheet of exercises and I go back in six weeks to see how I’m doing and get the results of the blood tests and x-rays.

I stopped by the post office at sunset, and the bats were streaming out of the bat house on top of a pole at the edge of the soccer field. By the time I got where I could get a photo, the last two bats were dropping out of the box.

Fall is in the air with cooler nights, warm days and evening thundershowers. The roses and kitties seem to really like this time of the year.

 

 

Our first zipper spider of the season, which means we should start seeing other garden spiders. I love spider season.

I rode my bike past the cemetery this morning and I thought to myself that I should go do photos of it in the afternoon. I liked the photos of the old San Ysidro Church much better.

I’m having a lot of back, hip and joint pain. It kept me up most of the night and has continued to bother me through the day. Riding my bike helped drive away the pain for a couple of hours, and it’s not quite as bad tonight as it was last night, so I’m hoping I will be able to sleep tonight.

I finally got up around 2:00 AM this morning and looked at my email. All the stuff I get from on-line catalogs from over the years all of a sudden started driving me nuts, so I spend about an hour unsubscribing to 99% of the sites that send me ads and specials everyday, sometimes multiple specials in one day. That should cut down on the amount of email I have to trash daily.

After unsubscribing to probably 100 web catalogs that I have bought stuff from over the past 10 years, I revamped http://www.tandlphotos.com. I went back to bed about 5:00, but still couldn’t sleep and finally got up at 7:00 and started cat-herding and other chores.