Mooned

I'm often unable to get back to sleep after giving Lizard his 4 a.m. pills. I'll often curb the frustration by working on snowflakes, which sometimes relaxes me enough to get back to sleep before my own 5 a.m. alarm goes off. Sometimes even crochet doesn't work, so I fire up the computer to check the weather, record the overnight low for my 2023 crochet temperature project, and check work email, although I try very hard not to begin working before I'm supposed to...

The work computer is in the spare bedroom we've converted into an office. I have blinds over the window to keep the sun from bleaching my books and melting my computer equipment. If I'm in there with the light on, I often don't notice the sunrise, and I often miss it.

On May 17, I was working on a snowflake in the home office prior to sunrise when one of my bosses began emailing me copies of receipts from his then-current business trip for his expense report. He was two hours ahead of me, so he wasn't truly trying to put me to work that early. :) Thanks to audible email notifications on both computers, I jumped up from the work computer to silence my personal computer in the bedroom so as not to wake Lizard, who'd actually been able to fall back into deep sleep after his pills. (I have my work email set up on both computers because work email archiving renders the work computer useless during the process, and I can respond in a timely manner from my personal computer.)

Had I not jumped up and run into the bedroom, where the shades were still open because the sun had not come up, I would have missed the extremely narrow sliver orange moon just above the horizon with Jupiter right there, nearly touching the moon, as if the Heavenly bodies were best of friends. Coolest blessing in the world for me at that moment. I was SO thankful I had been able to see it! I wished I could shoot it!!! The sun would have crossed the horizon and erased any trace of night sky lights before I could grab my camera and drive to a suitable photography location. Many times these days, I have to be grateful I'm able to watch magical moments and not worry about recording them photographically.

I later searched the internet and found the lovely photo above (by Colorado photographer Lars Leber) of what I'd been able to briefly enjoy.

And then I set to work trying to recreate what I had seen in AI, or artificial intelligence.

Oh, the frustrations!!! I actually ran out of paid time in the program for the first time ever and was given a choice of buying more time or waiting until June to try again. I was not tempted one bit to pump more money into AI. And, even though it wasn't as brilliant and colorful (and Jupiter isn't nearly as close to the moon because I had to wait for a cloudless morning), I was able to photographically capture the phenonenon last week when Jupiter appeared on the opposite side of our moon. (Handheld, I might add. I didn't have time to dig out the tripod.) Once again, what I create with my camera or in Photoshop is better than anything AI can muster.

Tweet

Pin It