Scarlet Pimpernel

Aye, laddie! Grab yourself a few drams of single-malt Scotch, call everyone a bastard, and... oh wait! You said ENGLAND! Sorry, my bad! My Scots-Irish background got in the way! But seriously, I hope you have a fun time there! I've been to England/Scotland a couple of times years ago (mainly London and Edinburgh). It was great, and I hope to go back again sometime! I do recall that at various local pubs, I never had the same beer twice!

A belated happy birthday to you, mappy!!! I hope you had a good one! Everyone deserves something good on their birthday, that's my philosophy and belief.

...or a Guardians fan!

Now that the summer solstice has just passed, I begin to wonder...when does the sun angle no longer allow for near triple-digit temperatures or hotter?? I'm guessing maybe...around Dec. 21 typically???

It's over. Winter cancel!

You know...I heard someone joke once (maybe it was a comedian?) that we should live our lives in reverse. Start out dealing with death, then go through any pains of old age (get off my lawn!), then have a regular job with a good salary, then party it up in college, deal with high school, then be a kid again without any real worries, be a toddler not having much knowledge of anything, and finally...end your life as an orgasm!

I'm worried that as soon as the heavy snow rates start, we'll be right near the back edge and it won't be anything more than a low-end advisory event that will melt by Thursday morning... ... ... Oh wait, sorry, I was stuck in January again!! It's May 12th, please proceed as normal!!

LOL indeed...though to be fair (and trying not to tread the politics line too much!) using "Gulf of America" is almost certainly a requirement now, no matter what one may think of that terminology. I suppose one can get around it by simply saying "the Gulf region" or something like that. Getting back on the topic of weather, this upcoming soaker is much needed (obviously!). Will be interesting to see how some of the heavier amounts work out.

A spectacular double-rainbow from last Sunday (May the Fourth Be With You Day!!!)

Thank you! A lot of people in my neighborhood have them in their yards, and there are a lot of those planters along several roads that have them as well each year. Very stunning flowers for sure! My favorite perhaps are the ones that have the reddish and yellow color streaks on them. Hope you're able to see lots of nice ones at that garden when you go in a couple of weeks! Seems like they're a little earlier than usual (?) perhaps, even around here in metro DC. I saw them just starting to come up the other week, and they're now really out and going.

And a few more!...

@mappy...TULIPS for you! Several images to follow...

Agree. Unlike perhaps some in here, I really like good March snows when we get them! Who cares if generally they get melted away within a couple of days. And we've had some solid ones over the years. I'm not a big fan of 40s-50s and cloudy/drizzle, but you cannot escape that around here in March or April (sometimes even May!). So you deal with it and enjoy either the snow events we do get in March, or the 60s-70s pleasant spring weather as things come alive again. And I also agree, we'll see God-awful heat and humidity soon enough, and for far too long of a time! That much is guaranteed every single year. Actually, outside winter when there are snow chances (such as they are!) my favorite season is fall...the changing leaves, crisper evenings and nights after the heat of summer, it generally tends to be pleasant out, plus looking forward to all the upcoming Holidays the latter part of the year.

LOL!!! Nah, I wouldn't do that! I guess I figured people might wonder why the hell I didn't just crop it to be right in the middle of the image. Which would have been fine, I normally do that afterward with lunar photos I take. But in this instance, I noticed all the stars visible around it, so I wanted to crop it such that they would also be visible. Plus, just an artistic license here, sometimes keeping space on either side of a main subject creates an interesting balance, or imbalance. If I had done a time series of the eclipse as it approached totality, I would have centered it of course, for that. In fact, 3 years ago (last total lunar eclipse visible in this area) I did just that. For this one, knowing there would be a lot of cloud cover and the fact that it was middle of the night (3 years ago was near sunrise, pre-dawn hours, and it was clear!), I didn't really care to wander outside several times hoping to capture gaps in the clouds. So I decided to just go out right around totality. I almost was going to give up on this one, to be honest! I went out around 2:45am, wandered around looking in the approximate area where the moon was supposed to be and...nothing! Very frustrating. I was about to just call it a failure and go back to bed, when I then saw it in a thin gap through the clouds. I stuck around for about 20 more minutes, there were more decent gaps here and there, and I grabbed several shots (hoping a few would turn out decent enough!).