This is a photograph of the 2012 solar eclipse in the South Pacific. We were on a ship a couple days’ voyage north of New Zealand, and it was following the track of totality across the water.

Unfortunately the sea wasn’t completely still. I had set the camera for a long exposure, the ship rolled, and I ended up with this photo of a mostly-eclipsed sun doing a mad dance across the sky.

I managed some more successful photos which I posted elsewhere.

Some of you should recognize this. It’s at the Corning Museum of Glass.

I’d ask something like “what is this?”, but it would open the doors to floods of Cyrillic spam, so it’ll have to remain a mental exercise.

UPDATE:

If any of you guessed that this was the Periodic Table of the Elements, you’d be correct. One Pyrex container for each element.

The video screens provided a game in which you were asked to create glass with certain qualities, and you’d have to choose what elements to add to the glass mixture in order to produce the desired result. Which was more fun to play than it sounds.

It’s the Tower of Pyrex! At the Corning Museum.

In my last post, I mentioned that much of my life consists of dealing with bullshit, stuff that matters so little that there’s no sense of challenge or accomplishment in coping with it.

Let’s take last week as an example.

Firstly there was a cold snap, that climaxed on a full-on winter storm that knocked out the power and drenched the tree limbs in many inches of heavy, wet snow. We have three large elm trees on our property, and four big limbs came down, one hitting a corner of the house along with the pergola, and another landing on a boundary fence between our property and the neighbor. (Countless small limbs also came down.)

It’s impossible to tell how much the property was damaged without moving the fallen limbs, and I would need a much larger chainsaw than I possess to deal with all that. So we’re paying a specialist several thousand bucks to turn all the fallen limbs into mulch.

This wasn’t as exhausting as the usual bullshit, because all that was necessary was to call the tree specialists and book an appointment. (And of course write the check for the clean-up, which hasn’t happened yet.)

Then my car began showing a light telling me one of the tires was at low pressure. Of course it didn’t tell me which tire. So I bundled up to go out to the garage and inflate all four of them to what the gauge insisted was the correct psi. Next day the pressure was still low, and I had a bunch of errands to run, so I pumped up all the tires again and ran my errands.

(It had occurred to me that the winter temperature drop might have been responsible for the low pressure, but I couldn’t take the chance of blowing up a tire on our miserable country roads.)

So next day I took the car to Craig Tire, which has been tending my awful tractor tires for 30 years now. I have to hand it to them, they worked on the car for two hours— and could find nothing wrong. They checked the tires, they checked the sensors, and all they found was a small screw that hadn’t actually penetrated the tire. So they handed the car back, no charge.

I had spent several hours dealing with a situation that did not actually exist.

At least the pressure light is no longer on. And I highly recommend Craig Tire to anyone in the Greater Belen Area.

Speaking of pressure, I had noticed that the toilets in the house had become reluctant to flush, and experience has taught me that this meant another block in the line to the septic tank. Why the septic worked perfectly for 29 years, and has now blown up thrice in the 30th year, remains an unsolved mystery.

Anyway, this called for an emergency weekend visit from our plumber, and once he dodged all the fallen tree limbs and deployed his equipment, he solved the problem in mere minutes (and about $265.)

So that was where my energies went last week— plus of course the cough I caught a couple weeks ago and can’t seem to shake. A visit to Urgent Care assured me it wasn’t COVID, strep, or pneumonia, but that medical science otherwise remains baffled.

Anyone know a good witch doctor? If not to fix me, maybe to keep the house and car from breaking for a while?