Greetings,

Well, we made it to August. I’ve always thought of that as the hottest month of summer. I guess we shall see. It seems like July was the month with the most sparks in the sky. All I had to do was put up a nice big antenna to attract what seems like record thunderstorms up here at Bonita. Every afternoon. But, some rain has hit the ground so we’ll take it.

In this issue, the video is with Nik Cola and a good number of the images from both Bonita Creek and the Chandler studio. Such a sweet young lady. And she’s very comfortable in her body, what do you think? And proud of it as she should be.

Tomorrow we pack up and move to Chandler for over a week. I’ll teach a 1on1 class with a gentleman from South Africa with Elley as the model for both days. I’ve already clarified how much I love to teach, so that will be great fun. Having an evening to shoot with Elley in the middle is a nice injection of creativity with my camera since I haven’t had a shoot of any kind for over a month. That may be the biggest break in my career.

I’ll include pictures of the pages in the French Calendar on sale in Europe in the gallery. I’m still shocked and honored to see my work in something as nice as a French calendar. That would be right up there with getting published in Playboy back in the day. Well, almost. Pretty cool and nothing I would have expected when I started this photography/Art journey.

While I’m in Chandler, I have a few other shoots lined up that I’m looking forward to. And I hope to book a few more while I’m there. Talk about a change of pace from living in the country for the summer. I weed-whacked the front half acre this morning, and tomorrow morning I’ll get the back half. And I started up the fire pit and burned off some brush we’ve trimmed off the trees and bushes up here. My arms are kind of weak as I type this. And that’s after an hour-long nap in the swing on the upper deck. I wish I could say the drone of hundreds of humming birds put me to sleep. They are building a new cabin behind us and making noise. Although, once you are retired, hearing other people work can be soothing. Even with jackhammers and backhoes.

Geek on. For the last few days atmospheric propagation has been very poor. When the sunspots act up, and solar flares happen, it can change the charged particles in the ionosphere (hence the name, Ions), and it can cause our signals to either bounce back, that’s good, or fly off into space where no one will ever hear it. Bouncing is good, and it hasn’t been happening much lately. But it is by degrees. I’m listening to a ham in Denmark now, but he’s weak. So, you can imagine I monitor the space weather…basically the sun.

So, both of my favorite endeavors involve the sun, just like our lives themselves. And both have heavenly bodies, as it were. Do you know if we didn’t have a moon, there wouldn’t be life on Earth? The gravity from the moon helps keep things mixed up down here as we spin. Kept the soup mixing as it were.

Stay cool, happy, and healthy!

Dave

And if you’d like to give me any feedback on these Museletters, feel free! I love to hear from you all! - Contact form