Notes from an Evening watching a Blue Moon Supermoon

August 30, 2023. A pastel orange supermoon rising.

I live in a rural area Southwest of Duluth, MN. We live here because we have a couple small gardens and the growing season is two weeks longer than on the North side of the city. Our property has a remote feel, bordering a 40 acre swath on the one side where a couple dozen young bulls graze for half the year. Across the gravel road to the West there are trees, shrubs and trails where untamed animals journey by on their way to whatever is next. The back of our property slides into a wide, plegmatic section of a creek which the locals call Rocky Run. Our house is set back from the road about the length of a football field and the home next door to the South is tucked up near the road so as I sit here making these notes there is no light pollution from any direction as I watch the moon propel itself into the sky above the treetops.

On the other side of Rocky Run is a gravel pit where a variety of Northern Minnesota wildlife hang out. We've had wolves, coyotes, deer, bears, and even a cougar now and then passes through our neighborhood. At this moment I'm seated in the darkness out back, listening to the night, watching the moon while typing up my impressions and observations. 

About fifteen minutes ago there were coyotes chattering down below in the gravel pit. They did their little sequence of yips, then listened. A minute later the alpha male gave a call which sounded a little nearer, over my right shoulder. No more sounds from the coyotes afterwards.

Other sounds tonight include cars and trucks scrolling down Highway 2, Maple Grove and the Midway Road; the buzzing of mosquitos; the chirping of crickets (unless that's my tinnitus, which it may well be); and very little else. 

The moon glows. It's not blue. Rather, as it broke above the horizon it was a pale orange. Several cars pass. Near silence again.

They say that God speaks in a still, small voice. What a contrast to the contemporary sensory assault we get through the media. Talking heads, sound bytes, high volume hyper messaging, Tik Tok mania, animated podcasters and amped politicos.... all dedicated to keeping us jazzed, stimulated, distracted, delirious, juiced, provoked and fired up, all in the name of keeping us "informed."

Laptop on my lap, typing my observations in real time.

The moon continues to rise, radiating and aura. It's called a Blue Moon when you have two full moons in the same month. It's not descriptive of the moon itself.

Truly silent now. One car way off in the distance. Nothing passing on the highway. And now that car has passed as well.

In the shrubs to my right I hear the sound of an animal of some kind, a scratching sound, quiet but noticeable. 

More silence.

Throughout this time the stars have been emerging. A jet plane way up in the stratosphere is silently gliding by, red and white lights flashing.

Time passes. Now there is the call of what sounds like a goose in the distance to my back. The bird makes a half dozen calls, then waits. After a minute lapses, there is a call from the North, somewhere in the cattle pasture. A truck passes and temporarily drowns the plaintive calls that soon re-commence.

Another plane quietly passes overhead... and the lonesome goose continues his or her melancholic wistful call.

This supermoon, purportedly 17% larger than normal due to its proximity to earth, looks like most of the moons I've seen over the years. The universe is so vast of a backdrop that this 17% is hardly noticeable except when it first breaks the horizon. Or so it seems.

Were you watching the night sky last night? Where? And what did you see?

A Good Day for Randomness

"He saw what he did not see."

My dreams seemed exceptionally vivid upon waking this morning. There were a whole series of images and scenes which varied in their degree of bizarreness, many involving people I know. In some scenes I was part of the action, in others just a spectator. One scene was somewhat shocking, and some exceedingly involved. The very last featured John Malkovich. I was watching him as he boarded a train. He was dressed in somewhat loose fitting Oriental attire and there was a side door onto the traincar which was low to the ground (much like a subway platform) and in a childlike, goofy way he would step into the compartment and sit himself onto the floor. As he did so, some brightly colored object of enormous size like a multi-colored cash register would fall out from under his shirt or even come out of the sleeve. It would make a clatter on the platform and he would giggle and the authorities would take it away. He would be standing outside the train again, and would then go through this act again. Four or five times in a row, as Malkovich sat down inside the compartment, a large object would tumble out onto the platform. Each time, he would smirk or laugh, trying to conceal his merriment. I got the impression he was a holy prankster of sorts.

Like many dreams, it all seemed so real as I was watching. But when I woke, it no longer mattered that I didn't understand what was going on.

So, for a few minutes, I will make a list of random observations from my desk, from about my walls, the floor. Today is a good day for randomness. And like my dreams, it doesn't have to make sense, yet it will be -- to some extent -- revealing.

501 Great Writers, a book I received for Christmas. Published by Barron's, Julian Patrick general editor.

A Medica card, UnitedHealthare.

A Sony MagicGate Memory Stick for my camera, purchased on EBay. It doesn't work for some reason. Let the buyer beware.

An Olympus Digital Voice Recorder, model WS-110. Made in China, I recently recorded and interview of George Barris, of Batmobile and Mokeemobile fame, using this device which has a USB plug-in so you can download recorded files onto your computer and play them with Windows Media Player or iTunes.

A couple packages of Post-it brand page markers for marking pages in a book or magazine. I have a pink one marking the page of Geoffrey Chaucer in the book 501 Great Writers, and an orange one marking the page of Arthur Rimbaud.

Two flash drives, one with the letters HIN on it. HIN stands for Hot Import Nights.

A Post-it note with my cousin Gary's phone number on it. Gary was my favorite cousin growing up and we used to talk about living on the same block when we grew up. He became a fireman, and later fire chief I believe, in Oklahoma. I became an advertising and PR guy in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Sometimes things don't go the way you expect.

A Verizon cell phone, slim black, always on vibrate.

A 2.5 gig Mobile Hard Drive. My Sony Vaio laptop crashed about six weeks ago and a computer wizard extracted all its contents onto this little silver box about the size of a 3 x 5 card. 2.5 gigs seems fairly incomprehensible to me. My first Mac, a 512Ke, had no memory for storage at all, just a disk drive slot where your pushed in the 512K disk. It had about 1000 K of "working memory" I believe. My next Mac, the SE, had a 20MB hard drive. I enlarged its capacity with a program called Disk Doubler.

An envelope with Wilmer A. Wagner's Advance Directive, or living will. I pulled it from my file cabinet because it's about time I make one for myself, just in case. Two friends of mine who are my age have had heart attacks recently.

A Seagate backup drive. It holds 100 or 200 gigabytes, I think.

An AMSOIL G-1406. This is a piece of literature which I wrote and designed back in 1997 when our company introduced the Quick Lube program and XL-7500 synthetic motor oils. AMSOIL was the first synthetic motor oil to satisfy API certification standards in 1972. The founder had been a jet fighter pilot in the Air National Guard, and was determined to use jet engine oil technology in cars. And he did it. Because of the extended drain intervals and cleaner operation, these oils have genuine environmental benefits. This literature item was designed for use as a point-of-sale piece for a counter top display which I also had a hand in designing.

An off-white plastic wall outlet with two slots.

An empty beer bottle, Full Moon.

A couple nickels, one here and one there.

A list of things I have to do today. But first, I'd better walk out and get the paper and feed the animals. We're down to a cat, three ducks and two dogs.

Four harmonicas, one of them a Hohner Marine Band in the key of C. One is a Hohner Golden Melody, D, and two are Blues Harps, in C and G. I also have a complete set of Johnson Blues King harps which I purchased on eBay and keep in a satchel. The four cited are my favorites. The two Blues Harps were purchased when I was a freshman at Ohio University.

What kind of random things do you see from where you're sitting as you read this blog entry today?