Sky and missed chances

Couple of days ago, I was returning from a local Freecycle foray (all my forays are local nowadays, since my free time is in increments of about 15 minutes, the max I can leave HS without special arrangements, anyway very local trip) and saw a field of sunflowers, all at peak. A whole field of them facing my way, and a flood near the roadside, reflecting them wonderfully. At the time there was traffic and on these narrow roads there's no side of the road to pull over on, if you don't want to end up a statistic, so I thought I'd pop back later in the day when there was no traffic, and get pix of them.

One of the things I do for HS to keep him anchored in the outside world is to take pix with my digi and show him what I've seen and enjoyed. He hugely appreciates this. Even pictures of the parts of the yard he can't get to.

Soooooo. later on that afternoon, I nipped back up that same road, and noticed, hm, a tractor, that wasn't there this morning, but what the heck, it will be a nice feature in my pictures. Found a good turnaround, where the tractors turn, in fact, so I could be, illegally, off the road for just long enough to take a picture or two.

And realized that the tractor had HARVESTED my sunflower scene! there was the flood, and there beyond it newly turned earth....well, I know they're a cash crop, and all that, but heck they could have waited ONE DAY for me to get the picture. I guess the farmer agreed with me that they were at peak. Sigh. No pix.

Today, the skies were wonderful, a low humidity warm sunshine perfect day, and I saw a sundog in the sky. You know these? we get them quite a lot, a chunk of rainbow on a cloud. You sometimes see them at four points of the compass up in the sky, wonderful fleeting sight. Mostly they're a winter phenomenon, so this was unusual.

Dashed into the house for camera, ran out, and there was the sundog, gone. I told you it was fleeting.

So I present for your entertainment a few nice sky pix, and ask you to visualize a lovely chunk of rainbow on the second cloud from the left....which reminds me strongly of the old joke where a proud mom says to her friend, listen to that violinist on the radio. I told you my son would make good! friend listens, very impressed and says, wow, you're right, he's wonderful. Oh, that's not my son, that's Itzak Perlman, but it's exactly how my son would sound if he practiced..or the joke about buying a piece of the ladder that Jacob dreamed of...

Lovely afternoon, HP and I out on the patio enjoying birds and clouds and the little dog next door trying to burrow his way under the fence to visit us. And the fullgrown sparrows still insisting on being fed by their exhausted parents. One bird right near us, clearly a kid, not worried about us at all, was standing in food, asking to be fed. Tired out mom pecks up some seed, stuffs it into the baby's beak, and stalks away. You could just see her thinking, dammit, other people's kids move OUT at this age...