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When the moon hits your eye ...

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We went down by the river to check out the sturgeon supermoon last night.  It hung low on the horizon.  We couldn't see it from our house.  My daughter had pinpointed it on her Night Sky app.  Very cool app to have on your phone as we learned that it was Saturn hovering near the moon.  According to the Farmers Almanac, the supermoon draws sturgeons closer to the surface making them easier to catch.  Not sure what it would be called in Lithuania.  Maybe the pikeperch supermoon, as these are a more common fish here.

It was a perfect evening. We have our daughter visiting us from Australia.  So nice to have the whole family back together.  Our son was over too, but he had little interest in supermoons.  He was more concerned with the chicken curry he had on the stove.  It's pretty rare these days to have the whole family together and when we do no one seems to remember to take a picture.  Remedy that this weekend.

We tried to avoid politics.  Thinking more about what movie we could watch outside.    Daina wanted anything other than Jaws, which we watched last summer.  I jokingly said that Quentin Tarrantino considered it the greatest movie ever made.  I don't care she sharply replied.  Our son said he and his friends have been watching obscure Tom Hanks and Nicholas Cage movies as of late.  Purposely picking the ones with the lowest IMDb ratings.  Seems we finally settled on This Must Be the Place, a Paolo Sorrentino movie with a virtually unrecognizable Sean Penn.  Surprised the kids hadn't seen it.  Of course, more ideas will come in the days ahead.

Adas has managed to hook me on Kalnapilis original beer.  I  didn't think I would ever go back to this Lithuanian beer, but it uses Czech hops giving it a bit of a pilsner taste.  Of course, I like pretty much any beer cold on a summer evening.  There weren't enough so we experimented with a couple leftover beers in the refrigerator including a Genys sour beer that Goda likes.  A little too sour for my taste.  Like everywhere, Lithuania is awash in microbreweries, but sometimes the originals are better.

I remember a summer in the Great Lakes where we drank the local Leinenkugel's.  It was a good cheap local beer.  Most bars sold a draft pint for a dollar.  Gives away my age.  It helped wash down the pickled eggs that sat in a big jar on the counter top.  

I was leading a Historic American Buildings Survey team recording the Rock of Ages lighthouse in Lake Superior.  We were staying in Houghton and taking the ferry out to Isle Royale for three day shifts on the remote lighthouse.  It was literally shaped like a beer bottle, although the locals referred to it as a spark plug lighthouse.  I could see that resemblance too.

Learned a lot about seagulls that summer, mostly that they liked to eat their young.  It was brutal to watch.  Maybe they didn't like the ice cold water and so resorted to the easiest prey.  It was a bit like a Hitchcock movie as we wondered if they would come after us when all the gull chicks were gone.  We gave them food scraps hoping it would take their minds off the little chicks.  So much for Jonathon Livingston Seagull.

Back on the mainland we fell in with a local group of college students taking summer classes.  I was a bit older, having recently completed grad school.  A lot of fun evenings out under the stars.  Somehow you could tolerate the water more in the evenings than you could during the day, although it was the river connecting Portage Lake to Lake Superior that we swam in.  It was fun getting a bit of the local flavor, as the rangers weren't very friendly.  They kept to themselves both on and off the island.  It was kind of odd as we were all working for the National Park Service.

I say this because there were sturgeons in the great lakes.  Big ones too.  All kinds of stories of little yapping dogs lost to the sturgeons, and even a few haunting tales not much unlike Jaws.   But, for the most part the big fish kept to themselves.  You would rarely see them except on a moonlit night like last night, and then only the ripples of them swimming around you. 

Anyway, we had a nice walk by the river, returning home a little after 11.  I started singing Dean Martin's classic That's Amore until Daina told me to stop.  We checked out some of the constellations on Akvile's phone app.   I have one of those night sky rotating discs for this latitude but it is too complicated to figure out.  I will have to install it on my phone.  Goda was telling us how she is still trying to get used to the Australian night sky, using the Southern Cross as a reference.  Here everything revolves around the Big Dipper.   She got the best picture of the moon.

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