Supernatural Events

Cosmos in the garden

Today we're supposed to have crazy heat, in the mid-90's (F) by midday. It seems hard to imagine now, with the temperature a comfortable 66º F this morning, but that's what the weather folks are saying and there's an orange heat warning. So Dave and I have arranged to go to an IMAX showing of "The Odyssey," which should kill off a couple of air-conditioned hours this afternoon.

Bailey will have to hang out at home, which should be interesting because we've never left her on her own for more than half an hour or so. But she's gotta learn sometime. If we didn't have a hosepipe ban I'd reward her with a kiddie pool so she could get in the water, which she loves, right in the back garden. Instead I'll take her to the Heath for a cooling soak tomorrow.

I took her to the cemetery yesterday. You can see how cracked and dry the ground is. There are several areas in the back of the cemetery where the paths have been blocked by fallen trees, and this is one of them. I'd have to limbo pretty low to get beneath that branch. Fortunately a new path has been worn to the left, allowing us to go around. (I see now, looking back at old posts, that this particular tree fell a couple of years ago. Some of the others falls are more recent.)

As we approached the fenced path that cuts through the center of the cemetery, I heard some anodyne version of "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" echoing through the air. (It wasn't The Carpenters version, which is pretty anodyne, but it was similar. If I had to guess I'd say Engelbert Humperdinck, though I have no idea whether he ever recorded "Jambalaya.")

A couple walking toward me were looking around, trying to figure out where the music was coming from, and we realized the source was a parked car nearby. "Oh, I thought we were getting a concert!" I said.

"Go on mate, join in. You know you want to," said the man, and we all laughed.

Sure enough, a woman had parked her car, opened all the doors and was sitting on a nearby grave, blasting "Jambalaya" for all it was worth. She was also on the phone. Bailey didn't know what to make of that, and neither did I.

I tried to take a picture of her showing the vast and moistureless blue sky. She's very squirmy around cameras and I got frustrated with her, but later I was happy to find this shot. It worked out after all.

Oh, by the way, yesterday we officially told the dog rescue that we'd like to adopt Bailey. (Technically we've been fostering her up to now.) They're drawing up the paperwork and they're going to make an appointment for her to be spayed. We went through the same routine with Olga and I remember it well.

Then, last night, we had THE ECLIPSE! I thought Dave and I might walk down to the bridge over the tube tracks, where we have a clear view of the western sky, in order to get a good perspective on it -- but then Dave put dinner in the oven so we didn't dare leave the house. We wound up being able to see it in our back garden until the sun sank below the apartment buildings behind us, and then we went out on the street in front and watched from there.

We used the colander method, in which a handy kitchen colander casts tiny images of the eclipse onto any available surface. You can see the little crescent-shaped eclipses on the white paper. The sky got surprisingly dark at its peak, and although I did not look directly at the eclipse, I did sort of let my eyes sweep across the sky and in that moment I got a glance at it. Very weird. I can see how our cave-people ancestors would have been terrified (and probably blinded!) by such an occurrence. I don't think I've ever seen a solar eclipse before.