
Kathleen came down from upstairs and said, “You should check out the sunset.”

She wasn’t wrong.
Part-time prevaricator
It must have been another misty Manitoba morning evening last night, because there was even more frost (edit: probably rime ice) on the branches and everywhere else. So when I went to pick up the week’s groceries, I grabbed my camera, too.
It was a misty Manitoba morning¹, but then the clouds cleared about 11 AM and the sun came out. I grabbed my camera and headed out at noon to see what I could see.
Which of these three do you prefer? I can’t choose.
¹ I honestly thought that was the name of the song, but I was wrong.
Having noticed the auspicious anniversary, I was thinking a bit about Dad. I thought I’d told this story already, but I couldn’t find it in a search of my site. Maybe it was just in my eulogy.
For most of my life, Dad had a beard. If you dig out the really old SRCI yearbooks, you can find photos of him clean-shaven. I think he grew the beard in about 1980 or so, and he must have liked the way it looked because he kept it for a long, long time.
He told me once that his plan was to win the lottery, do all the necessary publicity, cash the cheque, then shave his beard off and become invisibly rich.
It was a solid plan, too. If you saw a photo of him pre-beard next to one of him with the beard, you might be hard-pressed to say the two photos were the same person. JJ : Beard :: Superman : glasses.
Then one year, when he was working up in Lac Brochet, he and Mom came out of the north for the summer and… he was clean-shaven.
The first thing I asked him, when I saw him, was, “Is there something I should know?”
I just realized a few minutes ago that it’s been three four years plus a day.
(Thanks for the math lesson, Mom.)
I took a lot of photos in 2020. I like a lot of them. I’ve tried my hardest to narrow it down to my 25 30 favourites, and so here they are.
Saturn met up with Jupiter tonight, in case you hadn’t heard about it on the news.
It was cloudy here, but only partly cloudy, so I decided I’d take a quick run out of town with my camera equipment, to see if I could get any photos.
I stepped outside and discovered I didn’t need to go anywhere—it was visible from my driveway. So I set up there, and snapped some photos of Jupiter + Saturn in between the clouds.
In the boxes, top-left to bottom-right, are Callisto, Io, and Europa. Ganymede is too close to Jupiter for my lens to separate it.
The half-moon looked lovely, too, so I got some of the sunshine reflected off it, too.
All the photos were taken with my 55–250mm lens, at 250mm, f/5.6, varying times and ISOs.