It took a ridiculous amount of attempts, but we finally think we found the comet. We drove up into the foothills again, kind of parked on the edge of someone's private drive, and did everything we could to locate it. Our son-in-law warned us, you can't see it if you look directly at it with the naked eye. Our daughter told us to look just down from the big dipper. When it was hard to be sure we were in the right place, I thought maybe I could outsmart myself, and use the night mode which I had just discovered on my phone (hadn't needed it before). It was an automatic five-second exposure, and all I had to do was hold my breath and be still that long. I did capture the comet, but even blown up on my TV, it's hard to see. In the picture below, it's straight up from the left side of the power pole. When you zoom in, you can faintly see a tail on one of the "stars."
Once I figured out the night mode, I had a little fun. I tried desperately to capture a shot of lightning in the very active storm to our north. Mostly I just got long exposure shots that belied the fact that it was well past full dark. It took a solid forty tries, but I eventually got one tiny burst at the beginning of a ball of lightning, and I called it right there. I was done. I also put the camera on the back of my car to steady it, and took a photo to the south, and that came out well.
We started the evening with the kids, where Mr S-P presented Dino with her first truck, a classic Tonka that he found at the Restore Warehouse yesterday. I'm certain it won't be the last.
Finally, it's probably weird of me to get so attached to animals that I have never and will never meet. But I have followed a lot (a lot) of cat accounts on Twitter, plus a few dog ones, and one sheep farm. I need the cute simplicity of pet pictures to provide relief from the dreary horror of daily life in Rona Times. One of my top three favorite accounts is Kevin and Scampi, two housecats in Great Britain somewhere. Scampi is a young tabby boy, and Kevin is his fluffy older sister. Or rather, she was. Out of the blue, they announced that Kevin had taken a turn and gone to the vet where they discovered an advanced tumor. They ended up letting her go. Here I am, thousands of miles away, getting upset at the death of a cat I never saw in person. This has been happening an awful lot lately. Kevin was probably the fifth or sixth one this month. I really don't know where to go to escape the stress and misery of day-to-day news if even Cat Twitter is so bleak right now. What's left?
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