The one time I saw a skunk in the wild, my first thought wasn’t to take photos 
. But I’m glad you are braver than I was! They’re pretty creatures.
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BBC published recently an article about the ‘the sunset awe effect’. It seems that watching a sunrise or a sunset has positive effects on health, at least partly because of an ‘awe effect’:
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Cool article @knor !
When I was a college freshmann in the spring of 1986, there was a fantastic exhibit of works of Diego Rivera pulled from museums all around the world. One was a reunion of 20 sunset paintings he did in Acapulco while recovering from surgery. They were all arranged on a grid on the wall. I spent hours with those paintings, sometimes just studying in the gallery, where I could look up at them now and then.
The pictures won’t load right now. THere’s a cloud in the sky. But a Google search of “Diego Rivera sunset paintings” will get you a nice selection of them.
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I think I saw that painting in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
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Canadian fires smoke at Lansing Michigan’s Capitol City Airport this morning, when I was on my way to work. It’s even smokey smelling inside the state library today.
Pray for adequate rain in Canada.
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Interestingly, Michigan Republican lawmakers have apparently sent a letter to Mark Carney, saying their patience has run out. In contrast, as the Canadians are doing as much as they can to control the fires and the increase in fires over the last decade is because in large part of American global warming related activities, it makes sense for Mark Carney to write back that Canadians’ patience has worn out with us.
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Canadians cannot make it rain.
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I think that the Michiganians are speaking without understanding.
Some Michiganders will do that.
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Looks like the sun got tired of the smoke and is resting on the highway!
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In Europe, the attitudes are a bit different. Climate change is boosting long hot and dry periods, especially in the Southern Europe. When there are weeks of drought and temperatures reach above 40 degrees C (>100 F), it feels natural that there are many wildfires, wide areas burn and the smoke drifts long distances. People suffer but understand that ending the wildfires is not easy. And people also seem to understand that the heat wave kills more people than the fires. The recent heat wave is estimated to have killed crudely 12’000 people in Europe.
What may be similar is that there is great reluctance to act in ways that would slow the climate change. Ordinary citizens may do something small but in the political circles, ‘enterprise-friendly’ or ‘business-friendly’ are more popular words than ‘environment-friendly’.
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In Oregon that was true when we had the terrible fires a few years ago.
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Was that storm damage in the second photo, Randy?
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Thanks! Sorry, it’s just cedars falling into Rattlesnake Creek, on the North Country Trail. It’s a place my 12 year old daughter and I like to jog, and the dog likes to drink and wade. The fungus caught my eye on a fallen poplar, with its unique, velvety red. The pines caught the sunlight–they aren’t very big, but I think they are part of an old CCC Depression project, possibly too close together and damaged by tent caterpillars a year or 2 ago. They always remind me of a worshipful church, though
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“North Country Trail”? My first thought was to wonder if it was connected to the place Bob Dylan sang of here. But I checked and he was from Duluth, Minnesota.
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I did not know that he talked about the North country or that he was from Duluth. That’s really interesting. Interestingly, the North Country Trail does go through Minnesota all the way from North Dakota to New England through Michigan
But I’m not sure that it was set up back then
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