That’s right, it’s the winter solstice today, or technically it was at 21:48 UTC, the very time when the sun sank as low as… no, that’s not exactly right, it was actually when the Earth tilted… no, that’s not really right either, it was when the south pole of the Earth was leaned as close to the sun as it can be, the very thing that makes winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern. Had, you know, someone not screwed up and misaligned the Earth in its orbital plane, we wouldn’t be dealing with this seasonal crap, and you’d change climates solely by changing location.
Probably not, actually – there’d probably be something else that affected all that jazz – but what it means for us today is that, up here in the northern hemisphere, this was the shortest daylight period of the year, and those times will just be increasing again up until late June. Except for, like central New York, which has at least three more months of nearly daily overcast to cope with, because that’s winter in NY, one of the (many) reasons that I left. But we over the hump, is what I’m saying. I would have done something photographically to herald this, but we had near-overcast skies here too for most of the day and, really, there wasn’t a lot to photograph, and even less that was worth featuring. So to cheat (and put up an older image that is not in the Living In The Past lineup,) we have a photo from the summer solstice, June 21, only not the upcoming one but the one just past. This was one of those that I didn’t post then, so it counts as new material. It does.
I would say this is the first of the ‘Caption This!’ contests here, except no one is reading anyway so I’d win all of the prizes, which is a wash unless I find a really stupid sponsor to provide some. Regardless, don’t let your non-existence as a reader prevent you from sending in your entries anyway – the deadline is, oh, shall we say the winter solstice 2034? That should allow up to seven entries to accumulate…