The Colorado State Open Thread is for all the people on earth and above and below it who might have an interest in the happenings and opinions of those who know about, live in, have visited or may even just be flying over Colorado. Please contribute to the discussion below.
I have always felt the night was a wonderful time. For years, I didn’t go to bed before midnight — it was just a habit, starting with late night studying, working into my early working years and then, eventually, I broke that string occasionally. I still usually don’t head to sleep until after midnight. If I’m on the computer, 3 or 4 AM is not an unheard of time to go to bed. It helps, these days, that I’m retired so I can sleep a bit later, but often I still have to wake up and and feed the four-footers in the morning. They sleep a lot, or even most of the day (Anni’s a cat, so 20 hours or so is standard for her), but sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can go back to sleep after that duty.
One outcome is that I love astronomy, including the various tales of Greeks and Native Americans about the various patterns and meanings that can be found in the stars. I haven’t run across any other myths and legends about the stars that I know of, but I’m sure they’re out there and available. I went outside a couple nights ago for the Southern Taurid meteor shower but I didn’t see any shooting stars. That particular shower is supposed to have a relatively high number of fireballs, the super-bright and sometimes exploding meteors. Estes Park often has good dark skies for observations of stars and meteors and I enjoyed watching the Milky Way spin around above me.
As for other, not quite seen things that might go bump in the night, we have cameras with motion sensors and lights around the house to help us notice critters that we otherwise would not see. This year has been particularly interesting, with sightings (and recordings) of bears, a mountain lion, a moose, and Monday morning in the wee hours, a shape that was just close enough to trigger the motion sensor and the light, but far enough away that the only thing that I could make out was a shape and two eyes that reflected the light back to the camera. I’m not sure if it was a coyote, a mountain lion, or just what it might have been, but I don’t think a bear or raccoon would move in quite that way. Over the three years we’ve been up here, we have also caught lots of bunnies, bobcats, deer, elk, a fox and a huge raccoon all making their way past our house, but the one on Monday was more of a sinister shadow. We live right on the boundary of the National Park, so it could have even been something more rare, like a wolf, or a wolverine or even a werewolf in lupine form? I’d post the video in the story here, but I don’t have it up on YouTube and I don’t know of any other way to do it.
Well, I stayed away from politics in this story — there’s plenty to write about Boebert but I just don’t want to this evening. We could take a poll of whether people like Daylight Savings Time or not. I think I’m just going to keep to the poll I wrote and I invite you to write about what’s traveling through your minds and I’ll try responding to comments. Have a good night and good morning. The floor is yours.