Puppypictures!

I would have been more on-time with this, but Certain Witches were hogging the Semagic.

Batch 32! (with a bunch of photos from Myfanwy of Sirius (and Samwise), some of which actually belong to Batch 31)


Also, I promised Blade that I'd show her what a Royal Poinciana (Flamboyant, Delonix regia) looks like:

• General front yard foliage


• Poinciana blossom


• Flowers and mature pod


• Clump of flowers


• Flowers and pods again

And just because:

FIRST SIRIUS SIGHTING, WHAHOOOO!! His helical rising was actually August 1 according to one website, but A: that's still too close to the sun to see anything that date, B: Miami's horizons aren't, unless you take a boat out onto the Bay and hope it's a clear morning on top of that. I was working an overtime shift, that, once I got through with work and packing up and Panera and driving home and getting attacked by puppies and all, made it feasible for me to stay up that little bit longer to look to the horizon, such as it is (between roofs and trees, actually).

I had some entertainment of a sort while I waited - Mercury was conjuncting Venus! Now, Venus is so easy to spot (she's apparently around full phase right now, too), but figuring out which glimmer was Mercury? A little trickier. This is only the second time I've ever knowingly seen the planet. Horizon issues, remember? As the sky started to glow gemstone blue, it became more apparent when the speck of off-white below Venus brightened a little, to my eye, instead of fading like the stars. I tried taking a photo.

Well.

'Tried' is the operative word.

Take a look, if you want to have a snigger. Curse my sudden but inevitable poor low-light photography!

I got all vexed by clouds to the south, thought I'd spotted Sirius struggling through the excessive humidity, went inside to do... oh, something, came back out to look again and realised I'd been rooked by a ringer. Hey, c'mon! They were heavy clouds, it would have been the right amount of filtering, and the star was in the right place at the right time! (It might have been Murzim, beta Canis Majoris.) Here is the real thing. Yes, it's another pathetic photo, but it's better than nothing. Isn't it? Kinda?

Through my binoculars, Sirius looked gorgeous. That low in the sky, his light was getting refracted like crazy, so the effect was that he glittered prismatically, flashes of red, blue, green... really beautiful. And also shining very strongly against a sky that had definitely lightened to a luminous, transparent lapis blue.

Now to wait a month or so, so I can see him at more convenient times....

I can't sleep.

I took a melotonin tab, it's not like I'm not tired... but instead of being able to go to bed when I got off-line, I checked dogs for ticks. Then when I lay down and got settled, I felt one tick crawling on my arm, then another biting my side. When I came back into the bedroom from depositing the little fiends where they belong, I found a tick walking across the floor.

Then up the side of D'Argo's couch.

Then - Yvonne, you'll appreciate this - three on my PLUSH corgi, Chadwick.

I started moving ye olde pile of t-shirts, and found they'd set up condominium living in one of my sweatshirts in the pile. I noticed a glue-trap in one corner of my room and started using it as a depository, so thankfully I didn't have to keep running back and forth to the bathroom with pinch-fulls of ticks, because I kept finding more. It must've taken me the better part of an hour to stop finding another tick every time I turned to a different direction. The corgis were rather cross with me disturbing their sleep. Tough, kids. Better than them biting you.

So now I can't sleep for twitching. Every tickle has imagined legs.

*whimper*

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