The last of April

In other words I won't be making a blog post before May is upon us. I know, Sara you just make me look bad with your daily postings. I just don't have it in me. People in your life want to see your human children more regularly than my canine kids. And let's face it, you're kids are more interactive with the blog than mine.

And on that note, I want to share some other peoples pictures with my audience today. I check out APOD or Astronomy Picture Of the Day on a regular basis. Maybe not daily, but most days, then I check the older ones I missed. Today's made me think of my friend Betsy and I thought I'd share it with everyone.

It's a husky in the sky! An Iditarod racer leaping through the stars. Anyway, enough of that crap, this was a picture snapped with a long 15 sec exposure near Fairbanks AK last month by a Mr John Chumack. It does truly look like a husky to me and the long exposure caught a lot of familiar stars to us northerners. Going clockwise let me see if I can recall what these all are... At the top is the Big Dipper. The bright white star to about 1 o'clock is Capella in the constellation Auriga. It is also the 6th brightest star in the night sky. The grouping of the starts there in the upper right corner is more of that constellation. The bright body in the auroral band of the front legs right at about 3 o'clock is Jupiter. Down from Jupiter toward the edge of the image is Betelguese or for many better known as the left shoulder of Orion. I do believe it in the top 20 brightest stars in the sky as well. The next bright object seen is Procyon in from the edge below the red body of Betelgeuse. Procyon is 8th brightest star in the night but is actually a binary star system. We can't see it's partner in shine there because Procyon is to bright and hides it from the beaked eye. Below Procyon out of the view of this image under the horizon is the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius. Then if you look left towards 8 o'clock you will see the shining red Mars in the sky. Then almost directly above Mars on the edge of the tail you will see Arcturus, which is the fourth brightest star behind Sirius, Canopus, and Alpha Centauri. Arcturus is part of the constellation Bootes. Okay, enough constellation education.

The other image I wanted to share with everyone is one from Betsy's blog. She took a really neat photo of one of my favorite dogs in the whole world. Behold, BLOSSOM!!!

Okay, so Betsy is an awesome photographer and you should look at her blog you can follow that above link to just because, but I just really liked this photo. Blossom is a puddle dog, and it captures her spirit well. And it's just neat how her reflections clearer than she is.

So, that's enough of other peoples work, let's talk about me today. Well, let's talk about today. I don't know about you all but it's wet here today. We're getting rain, which will help the spring come on a bit faster since it's been kind of dry after all the snow melted.

I don't mind rain. In fact, I love driving in it. It's just one of those things. What I never liked were the endless summers of it when every pair of boots yo own are damp and muddy. More than that, back home you would have summers that weren't wet, but weren't sunny either. They were just gray. Steel skied and oppressive. I used to joke that Anchorage looked like Gotham in the original batman movies You remember the ones with Michael Keaton as batman.

Anyway, I snapped these photos over the last couple days while walking the kiddos with my big camera. As you can see, things are a little more in focus.

Any day now the trees will be in full leaf glory. Until then, you can see, they're creeping out.

I can't wait! It was kind of funny though,I'm so unused to being around large trees anymore, I was walking with some locals yesterday and they noticed me jump and look up and asked me what was wrong. I explained to them that with the wind and the trees smacking together I was finding that I seemed to have developed a phobia living in Wyoming that a tree was going to fall on me. I told this to the guy yesterday and he kind of laughed at me I think, then when we were out walking the dogs and the wind was up the trees started moving him and I saw him kind of jump and look up too. It's not just me. Part of it though is you can see in the above pictures that this is a replanted wood. See all the trees in a line? Yeah, they didn't grow in at a natural distance or arrangement so they tend to make more noise than some of the other areas we walk in.

Someone asked the other day about how the old girl is doing. She's still trucking. You can see here that she still likes her walks. Her vision seems to be getting worse and she's been deaf for over a year now so she has to keep a leash attached so we can remind her to stay on trail with us. Sometimes I attach her to one of the boys which they all seem to go along with except Tucker.

He mopes if you do it and hangs way back with her. What a drama queen.

Sullivan and Emmitt don't seem to mind it though. I was watching her the other night on her evening ramblings and thought to myself "If I didn't know better I would swear that she has sun downers. Guess what, I looked it up and dogs can get sun downers. In fact reading through the signs and symptoms of Cognitive Dysfunction Syndrome, it sounds like her. Oh well, you get old your mind starts to go. Still love her ancient ass, and a dog can't make it to 18 without some issues. Now if she starts peeing everywhere and doesn't know who we or the other dogs are and doesn't take any comfort in us, then we'll have to look at doing something, but until then we'll keep on loving her senile self.

Sorry, no Emmitt pictures this week. None of them turned out. However these two photos are for you Betsy. I found you some fungi. I know how you are. These little yellow ones I think were taken with my little camera since I was on a dog run when I saw them.

This neat log however is just covered by these little shelf fungi. This one is we see daily as it's on our regular route. I shouldn't say regular, it's about to change as soon as we move. I still need to find some trails down in that area.

I was looking at this next months schedule and was aghast to see myself only working 2 days over the last two weeks of the month. Then I recalled that on the 20th we take possession so I will be cleaning the new house to prep moving in. Then the 22nd we move, and I will spend the next few days scrubbing the apartment in preparation to turn over keys at the end of the month. All in all, I think the days off will be used, and used well.

Lucky dogs, don't even know what good tenants they have. the apartment has been livable, but not ideal for us and the dogs. But it is almost at an end.

This picture is a repeat of the tree I had last time that I wanted to show the neat bark texture. I got a better picture of it with a creeper that is working it's way up to the canopy.

And an even better picture of it. I just thought the texture of the bark was cool. There's a few of them out there that I've seen.

Here is was trying to find out if this old tree was hollow all the way up to where it has broken off. I couldn't fit my head in and look up so I stuck the camera in. Nope, not hollow all the way up.

Well, that's about it for the day. I need to get these guys out and get some stuff done before meeting the guy this afternoon. I hope you all have a great day.

Uh oh, forgot something. Remember how I said I was hoping to get the scarf done the other night. Yeah... still not done.