The weather stayed clear for the eclipse yesterday. Here’s the traditional colander shot, awkwardly taken because it was difficult to hold a camera and a colander at the same time and there was only a tiny bit of unshadowed wall to project on:
And here’s a montage of images from the Dwarf Mini and a first stab at a video, 2 hours in 20 seconds:
Later we watched a small selection of Perseid meteors. A great day!
And today is our warmest day of the year: 34.1°C
A1 is reading The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee, which had lots of horrible people being horrible to each other and swearing a lot. Disappointing — like his mate Vaseem Khan he should stick to historical crime novels.
A2’s toilet tome is Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Delete your Facebook account NOW!
An unlucky bird must have flown full tilt into our window today. There was no corpse on the ground below so it must have flapped away with an aching head leaving a print of itself on the rain-soaked glass and a feather where its beak should be. Here’s a brief video:
A1 is reading The Burning Tide by William Shaw. A2 is reading The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee.
Welcome home Gez, to a warming curry cooked by A1 and followed by a damn fine cherry pie and damn fine coffee, after which we scored 10 on the GSQ with Faye as quizmistress.
It has been 25 years since we tied the knot at Lusaka Civic Centre so we celebrated with a lunch of baked potatoes, cold meats and salad with the family, who brought wonderful presents and an unexpected bottle of champagne. We had cherry cake on galaxy-themed paper plates for afters and scored a disappointing 9 on the GSQ. Must try harder.
A2 is rereading Bad Actors by Mick Herron.
A2’s travels took her past many rotting tree trunks sporting a fine selection of fungi. Here are some of them.
A2 is reading The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa. Time was, writers like Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe dug into the raw depths of the human soul. Now it’s all trains or cats 
Happy solstice! Here’s a glass of cream soda to celebrate. If you look closely, each bubble contains images of many other bubbles. Meanwhile, today storms are threatening to, er, bubble up, but just a brief shower so far. Feels very sticky though.
A2 is reading The Sacred Art of Stealing by Christopher Brookmyre.
To the naked eye there was only a hint of red high up but a photo revealed the green wavy curtains
It was a wonderful thing to see, at least on the screen, after so many nights of staring at black skies and taking black photographs. See the stars!
Another very warm and sunny so-called autumn day. A2 was out watching a very feeble sundog and willing it to brighten up when she looked up and saw not one, but two, very bright arcs nested together. Possibly a segment of a 
Not a very impressive one, but the first we’ve seen in ages!
Loads of these came out to 
A peculiar glow in the night sky turns out to be common in all cities that have sports grounds and is the reflection of grass-growing illumination on the Headingley rugby pitch a couple of miles away.
Happy birthday twins!
Happy Hanukkah and Lucia Day. Christmas Lights Man displaying as usual, with a giant snowman standing in the hall before he hastily shut the door. And Admin2 saw three Geminid meteors in the night [update: later we each saw dazzlingly brilliant ones].
