While driving around lunchtime, I saw an airplane pass overhead, its contrail casting a shadow on the thin cloud layer below. I had my camera handy, and was stopped at an intersection, so I snapped a couple of shots. As often seems to happen, the first, haphazard one was the best.

The diagonal line extending down from the sun is, I believe, a sun pillar-like effect in the trails left by the windshield wipers. Also: Unless I’m mistaken, you can just barely see the edge of a halo in the feathery clouds at bottom center. It’s the slight reddening.

A few hours earlier, I saw this:

I glanced out the window while changing lanes on the freeway this morning & noticed the bottom edge of this halo. By the time I had a chance to stop the car and really look, the lower arc seemed to have disappeared, but the left side was sharply visible – as was a sundog. I rolled down the window and snapped a couple of photos while waiting for the light to change. Unfortunately, I couldn’t position anything to block the sun, so the exposure isn’t all that great.

By the time I reached my destination and parked, it had all faded except for a slightly bright patch in the clouds to the left.

First, some linkblogging…

And then the “fun” started.

  • Me: I’m going to focus on project X today!
    Computer needed for project X: I’m going to lock up today!
    Me: Argh!
  • Someone thought it would be a good idea to cover “Wonderful Christmastime?” 😯 (For the record: Shazam says it was Hilary Duff.)
  • OK, after 3½ hours stuck at 74%, I think I can assume chkdsk is stalled. *grumble*
  • Ate some blackberries I’d forgotten about from a week ago. Good news: I only threw out 1! Bad news: I should’ve thrown out 2. Blech!
  • Chkdsk round 3 is at 55% on Stage 5 of 5. Going to call it a night & hope my PC runs tomorrow. (According to Facebook, this posted at 5:55pm!)

Computer update: Disk check finished overnight, seems OK. Ran a backup just in case, but got some work done on that project!

A bright light at the edge of the photo oversaturates this view of a mall.

Looking up at a huge Christmas Tree under a dome, flanked by palm trees.We are South Coast Plaza of Borg. You will be overstimulated!

Seriously, after only 20 minutes at the mall on Saturday, I was already feeling overwhelmed. The children’s choir singing “Holly Jolly Christmas” right outside the first store did not help!

I miss the Ghirardelli shop. It was my favorite way to just retreat from the madness that is South Coast Plaza during the Christmas shopping season and prepare myself for the next hour or two.

Oh, yeah…here’s a better photo of the bridge and the mall segment formerly known as Crystal Court.

I finally got my H1N1 flu shot today. My allergist called me this morning to say that they’d gotten five — yes, just 5 — doses of the vaccine, and wanted to know if I wanted one.

The CDC has been recommending for months that anyone with chronic respiratory conditions (*cough* asthma *cough*) get both the swine flu and seasonal flu vaccines, so I asked about it the last time I was in for a check-up. The office was expecting it sometime in October. That stretched out to late October, then November, then they began to wonder if they were going to get it at all.

Distribution on this thing has been just abysmal. I mean, I got the seasonal flu shot in September. And there have been other areas of the country that got so many doses they started offering them to the general public more than a month ago, because they didn’t have enough people in high-risk groups who wanted it.

Meanwhile, H1N1 proceeded to establish itself as the main flu of the season. I wasn’t terribly enthused about the possibility of being completely wiped out for several days and quarantining myself for another week afterward…

I did research other sources, though perhaps not as thoroughly as I could have. I checked in a couple of times at my regular doctor’s office, but they were in the same boat. I checked Google Flu Shot [Edit: This was a service that let you search Google Maps for flu shot providers that had the vaccine in stock, and is no longer available.] at least once a week after it launched, though it was always either empty or full of locations marked “Temporarily out of stock.”

Actually, I’d pretty much written it off at this point, figuring the vaccine would be available sometime in, I don’t know, February or March, by which time I’d either have gotten the flu or wouldn’t be getting it this year anyway. When my phone rang I figured it had something to do with an appointment I’d rescheduled.

For the record: no noticeable side effects (so far), and hardly any pain. My shoulder hurts less than it did after the seasonal flu shot I got a few months ago, and even that didn’t hurt much (and only after a few hours). Also, there was a patient survey and information sheet that went along with it instead of the standard “I solemnly swear that I am not allergic to eggs” (they grow the vaccine in eggs) waiver.

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