HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009

Time to toast the New Year! We live 4 blocks up the street from this tower. So when the bells go at mid-night I will think of you!

Happy New Year to:

Those of you who follow these musings and meanderings on a more or less regular basis, namely:

[1] my Auntie Mary in Canada
[2] the ladies in southern USA who keep in touch with their comments. (Don't despair if you feel you are not getting through. I do receive the comments but for some reason you are not able to have this confirmed! Resolution for the New Year: figure this one out.)
[3] Dietrich in Oberstdorf
[4] Inger and Helga in Sweden
[5] Christina in Glasgow
[6] Our Man (and Woman) in Vancouver
[7] The Glasgow CVD contingent with their 2 babes
[8] Jane in Kelowna
[9] Iain who shares the router!

Those of you who are just passing through! (These are represented by the red dots on the map at the very, very bottom of this blog site. Quite amazing!)

GULLS GATHERING

It is New Year's Eve. The golden sun shone all afternoon so I went down to the pier to visit my feathered friends. It was very cold and a sheet of ice under foot! (And this is down at the sea-side!)

Great lighting but the temperature keeps dropping as the sun got lower on the horizon. Nothing for it but to leave the pier and cross the shore road to Café Creme for a latte and 4 chocolate profiteroles piled high in a big sundae dish.

'S NO ART

In all this snowy weather I have been out with my camera. Tramping over to deliver some Christmas cards I came upon the sledge run on the north side of Kilmardinny Loch. From afar I could hear a roaring sound. It reminded me of the arrival of the herds of cattle in Obsberstorf as the herdsmen and women brought them into the village from the high pastures.

The dull, roaring sound was of the plastic sledges as they screamed down the icy slope. Then there were gales of laughter as mums, dads and kids ended up in the bullrushes at the edge of the loch!

I took the following (original) photo (bottom) using a telephoto lens. It is of a young mum getting ready to set off down the slope on her sledge. It was about 3:30 pm; the sun had just set.

The first photo is the "better" one, i.e. I changed the contrast in the original one. Rightly or wrongly I feel that most of the photos I take at this time of year (with the sun low and the shadows long) require little or no "improvement" - one of the definite pluses of living at this latitude.

BLUE MOON

It seems that this month of December 2009 is special. I was fascinated to hear on the radio yesterday the following item:

"Helen Mark [radio announcer] celebrates December's Blue Moon with artist Elspeth Owen, who is living outside and walking every night as part of an eccentric and unique project. When there are two full moons in one calendar month, the second of those moons is called a Blue Moon. Elspeth Owen, who is in her 70s, has decided to live outside between the first full moon (on the 2nd of December) and the second full moon (on the 31st). She wants to discover something about the dark, about fear and about using her senses differently."

(You can hear the whole radio programme by clicking here.)

I thought a blue moon was just a song by Richard Rogers written in the 1930's.

So ... there is going to be a second full moon this month and the second time it appears is going to be on New Year's Eve!

A newspaper in Everett, Washington (here) states:

"The astronomical definition of a blue moon has nothing to do with the moon having a tinge of the color blue... It all has to do with mathematical odds. The synodic period of the moon, is 29.5 days. That’s the time it takes the moon to go through all its phases as it goes from evening crescent to full stage and back to morning crescent. That means we have a full moon every 29.5 days, and since the average length of a calendar month is little over 30 days, it’s bound to happen that we’ll have two full moons in one month every now and then."

(However, it was noted that but noted that the "two full moons in a single month" meaning couldn't be explained satisfactorily. Read about it here. Apparently the writer of an article in 1946 had misinterpreted a page of the 1937 Maine Farmers' Almanac.)

Finally, as to the term "blue moon", it appears to be that no one really knows for sure how the term evolved ... but it does shed some light (sorry about the pun!) on how we get the expression for a rare event happening "once in a blue moon".

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Photo: Flicker website here.