Tag: Summer Solstice

Summer Solstice 2025

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , ,

June 20, 2025 at 10:42 PM EDT is the Summer Solstice.  This is a point of inflection for my year.  For the last couple of months, the longer days temporarily color my mood brighter.  Added to this is the knowledge that the days are still getting even longer.  Even if the weather is often not optimal, I revel in the astronomical ascendancy of the Sun.

But starting on June 21st the days will be growing shorter.  Now granted this is the fairest time of the year.  The sun is tropical and the heat sears into my soul.  And this is like an elixir of youth for my tired old bones.  But psychologically I recognize that the rollercoaster has reached the top of the highest peak and for a split second it is poised between rising and falling.  Just long enough for us to look around and see heaven around us just before the bottom drops out of the ride and we plummet back to Earth.

And so, for the next two months I drink in every photon of sunlight and revel in kids free from school and looking to fill up their time with play.  I see that there’s a new Superman movie coming out soon.  Maybe it’s a woke nightmare.  Maybe Superman is a Biden/Harris supporter.  But maybe he’s still fighting for truth, justice and the American way.  I’ll find out.  And if it’s any good I’ll bring the kids.  We’ll spend way too much money on lousy popcorn and watery soda.  But We’ll get to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the 2025 son of Krypton.  Who knows, maybe he’ll surprise me.  Or maybe we won’t see it because the reviews are terrible.  But we’ll find stuff to do.

I have a feeling this is the summer we do some fishing.  Dunwich is mostly soggy so there are plenty of lakes and ponds full of what pass for bass and trout.  I think I can get most of them to cast a line in the water.  I haven’t been fishing in twenty-five years.  That’s a long time.  I think it’s time I did.

Objectively speaking, I’m a relic.  I’m much closer to the end of my life than the beginning and now I can actually feel it.  Even maintaining my present vitality requires discipline and work.  And even that is a matter of delaying the inevitable.

And yet, every day is a gift.  We interact with our fellow creatures and try to be useful and positive.  Encouraging the young and facilitating the efforts of those trying to make it a better place.  Those are things that even a relic can accomplish.

So, here’s the official beginning of Summer 2025.  I will do my darndest to make this a successful season for me and Camera Girl and the rest of the clan.  I’m looking forward to all of my rituals and all of the little joys of summer.  Barbecues, local baseball, fireworks, the Dunwich Fair, Fourth of July, Labor Day and all the rest.  We’ll make sure we feel the sun before it retreats back into the hell that is New England Winter.

At least, that’s my plan.  Enjoy.

Summer Solstice 2024

photog Current Events ,
SONY DSC

So today is the longest day.  I believe it.  Hot, hot, hot and sunny too.  Beautiful.  Well, the pessimist says from now on the day is getting shorter all the way to Christmas.  Well, sure.  But, so what?  It’s a beautiful ride.  And right now, only a fool would begin sighing and whining about decline.  The Earth is reaching the greatest tilt of the North Pole toward the sun and we can feel the giddy spin as it starts its long descent.  What a gaudy act to follow, perched here in the dead zone of Dunwich.  Watching the stars wheeling on midsummer’s night and the lightning bugs dancing around the swamp makes me smile to think that some people think all this was the act of random chance.  The 10300 required factors needed to make life, any form of life, happen in this universe along with all the other astronomical, physical and chemical precursors for life line up to give us lightning bugs.

No, I’m sorry.  This world was made so that I could exult in the splendor of this yearly crest.  The top of the Ferris wheel, the top of the roller coaster.  What a fine time to be alive.

Summer Solstice 2023

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Today is the longest day of the year and the first official day of summer.  Regular readers know that I have an inordinate attachment to summer.  This probably developed when I was a child and despised school as a form of imprisonment.  This week has been unpleasantly crowded with commitments that have kept me from writing and performing my other blog duties.  Well, it can’t be helped.

Most of the news today has to do with the submarine that has disappeared during a trip to the Titanic wreck site on the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.  From what I’ve read, the guy who runs the company that brings sight-seers to the Titanic was piloting the sub.  Opinions about whether the trip was a senseless death trap or a brave adventure seems about evenly split.  As someone very familiar with pressure vessel design, I wonder if carbon fiber as a structural material is well understood.  Materials like stainless steel and other alloys have been tested for decades to understand their reaction to pressure, temperature, corrosion and other factors.  I guess this situation will probably bring to light the details of this company’s policies with respect to design and risk.

Elsewhere in the news, Hunter Biden and Donald Trump and their comparative treatment at the hands of the Justice Department is providing supplementary examples of what a two-tier justice system means in practical terms.  We’re all going to learn over the course of the next year and a half whether the awakening of the American public to the realities of who runs this country makes any difference at all in how those in charge behave.  We may find that they now have nothing to fear from us at all.

On the Ukraine front, the summer offensive by the Ukrainians has been ongoing for about three weeks.  It’s not completely clear whether the operations are probing attacks or some kind of multiple axis maneuvering.  At this point, the Ukrainians have lost about 20 – 30% of the tanks and armored vehicles that the West provided them since December.  This is due to the extensive minefields that the Russians have laid out in front of the defensive lines that they built.  Maybe there will be a successful penetration of those Russian lines in the near future but so far it doesn’t look promising.  There’s a NATO meeting coming up in Vilnius, Lithuania on July 11th.  Speculation is that the Ukrainians have until that meeting to show that they can use the equipment and training that the West has given them to make significant progress against the Russians on the battle front.  We’ll see how that turns out.

As far as the economy, prices continue to soar on just about everything and companies report lower earnings.  Of course, “no recession in sight.”  But that may be just the new way the economy is reported.  Basically, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.  Well, we’ll see how that goes in the fall when the election is in high gear.  Once again, maybe our masters no longer care what we think or say.

On the home front, Camera Girl continues to stuff me with splendiferous foods whenever I return from the various annoying errands, I’ve been assigned this week.  Tonight, is eggplant stuffed with sausage and rice.  I guess I shouldn’t complain about living in bondage if it includes good food.  But of course, in Biden’s America the sausage will be replaced with crickets.  So, there is that.

Summer Solstice 2022

photog Current Events, OCF

Well, here we are.  The longest day of the year.  And every minute of daylight is already spoken for.  We’ve got a party coming up on Saturday to celebrate my grandson’s high school graduation.  And Camera Girl has a list of chores as long as my arm!

Cut the lawn, install air conditioners, clean the barbecue grill, buy some gasoline, weed the garden, and on and on and on.  Normally I like to set aside the solstice to quiet contemplation of our small place in the limitless grandeur of the cosmos.  But I guess instead I’ll be scraping grease off of a barbecue rack.  I don’t suppose Aristotle had to put up with this kind of stuff.

But that’s alright.  The party isn’t the only thing on the list.  I have to get some supplies for the Yellowstone trip and this is the week when I have to figure out what lenses to pack.  And that means I have to do some testing of lens quality.  I have to decide whether I can just bring the manual 10mm Voigtlander lens or do I have to take the 12-24mm Sigma too.  Autofocus is not very important for landscape lenses but having the long side of the 12-24 might be useful under some circumstances.  I’ll have the 35mm 1.4 along but there’s a big difference between 24mm and 35mm.  I’ve decided to leave the 200mm macro and the 135mm 1.8 at home.  The 90mm macro is much faster and brighter than the 200mm and the 200-600 lens will cover all the telephoto requirements.  If I’m being honest there’s a good case for taking the 10mm, 35mm, 90mm macro and the 200-600mm lenses and nothing else.  But something tells me I’ll drag the 12-24mm along just for the sake of completeness.

Camera Girl has been kind of upset over a hawk that’s been killing the birds that come to her feeders.  So far, it’s done in two mourning doves and a chipmunk.  And insult to injury, it plucks the feathers off its victims before taking them away.  I’m sympathetic to her feelings for the birds.  She really enjoys watching the various species that are attracted to the feeders.  But my sympathy doesn’t extend to chipmunks.  They’re just striped rats in my book.  They’ve dug a couple of tunnels on this hill on one side of the house and have had a population explosion.  I’ll gladly pay that hawk a buck apiece for every chipmunk head it delivers.

I saw that DeSantis had a press conference where he countered the White House’s complaints about his administration not ordering vaccine for the 6 month – 5-year-old Floridians.  DeSantis very reasonably stated that the evidence that the regulators were pointing to for approving the vaccines for such young children was extremely unconvincing and so just as with the 6 to 11-year-olds, Florida wasn’t recommending people vaccinate their children.  He also wasn’t preventing it.  It would be a private decision between parents and their physicians.  Once again DeSantis comes away looking like the only grown-up in the room.

I guess we’ll have to wait a while longer for the Supreme Court to spill the beans on their decisions.  It will be interesting to see if Roberts manages to frighten any of the conservative justices away from overturning Roe v. Wade.  I’m also interested in how the Second Amendment case turns out.  These are very important cases.  A lot depends on their outcome especially with the mid-terms coming up.

Well off to the salt mines.