The eclipse and the grand daughter

I have been horribly deficient in posting anything due to an extremely busy life, but I did want to get these pictures up.

Two weekends ago we went to our Grand daughter's to celebrate her 9th birthday, and while we were there the solar eclipse occurred. We bustled around trying to find a way to watch it (pinhole in cardboard, layering photo negatives), when we realized that the leaves of the trees there made hundreds of projections of the event:

This shot was taken during its peak, the so-called "ring of fire." Don't think that was what Johnny Cash was singing about . . . .

Here's the birthday girl with a bit of the eclipse on her face.

One of the things I found rather stunning was that my Grand Daughter had gotten absolutely no information about this monumental occurrence at her school. I guess that it doesn't fit the cookie cutter teaching which now passes for education in our country. I remember learning a lot about such current events when I was in school, and they were approached as opportunities to teach science or politics or whatever. It seems the increasing emphasis on testing for what is called "progress" doesn't allow such distractions.

If you're not pissed off, you're not paying attention . . . .