I woke up early in anticipation of seeing some fog this particular morning. Early for me is a spunky 3 a.m. Your mileage may vary. I looked outside, and even though it was dark, I knew there was no fog as the stars were readily visible. Oh well, the weather guessers had misled me again. I puttered around for an hour or so, and decided I would go back to bed and that was that.

Next thing I know, it’s 7 a.m., and everything is bright and white outside. White as in foggy. I quickly rushed downstairs and grabbed the drone off the refrigerator where it lives, and hollered back to my co-pilot to get dressed and meet me out on the porch. She complied without complaint which is… well let’s not go there. I lifted off into the white and attained my maximum altitude of 300 ft. I could still hear the drone and see its red blinking nav lights, so we were good to go in that respect. I noticed that we had picked up a bit of moisture on the camera lens on the drone, so I resolved that issue by pointing the drone due east into the bright shining Sun for about a minute and the moisture evaporated off the camera lens.

Got a good look at everything; very interesting how the layer of fog blanketed most things, thinning out here and there. We are pretty flat here in this part of Minnesota so there were not many hills poking through. I did notice bodies of water were much thicker with fog and it looked like the sun was starting to eat away at this white blanket.

I panned around a couple of times and landed. Landing is as easy as pressing a button on the app and since the drone is gps-guided, it landed within about a foot and a half of where we took off. The rest of the morning was comprised of me thinking it might be a good time for a nap.

Later that day, I noticed a young Hummingbird at our feeder. For being little guys, they are quite aggressive with driving off other birds from “their” feeder.

This is the long play version of a immature Hummer preening and being joined by another Hummer.

Since I had been disappointed the night before as to the weather-guessers’ assessment of what constitutes a good reason to go outside and look at the  western horizon, I resolved to keep a “weather eye” on the sky and this coming night looked promising. We still had the smoke from all the western forest fires hanging over us and clouds that looked promising, so promising that they threatened to obscure the entire sky at times, but I had hoped they would thin out a bit towards sundown. And they did. Naturally those that predict the weather and fail, made no mention of the potential of going outside and viewing a pretty sunset, they instead were giving warnings of the potential for rain so they advised to stay inside and Be Safe!

The night before, while flying my drone, I noticed it had developed a twitch in the device that controls the camera. At first, I thought that the drone was mocking me as I have developed twitches of all sorts of late, and this is just the sort of thing that boys do to each other when they notice a weakness, weird behavior or even an odd colored shirt, in one of their buddies. A familiar behavior, of sorts. One that is normally cured by a slap to the head, but not something you can do while the offender is 200 ft in the air.

Here is what it did while landing the night before.

Tonight’s mission would be one of pictures, not video, so I had hoped that whatever had been causing the twitch would calm down enough to get some still images at least.
Here is what I saw when I got to altitude.

Here is a few minutes later.

Here we are looking South. That little bright thing, top, center, left is the moon.

The sun has finally set.

Just before I ran out of battery and have to land, here is a final look.

It is an amazing wonder to behold and it brings to my mind John 1:1-5. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Seek the LORD while He may be found; Isaiah 55:6 Our only hope is found in Christ, turn to Him and be redeemed!

We had a bit of sporty weather last night. Oh sure, the weather guys had slapped a “Tornado Watch”, which included the scare quotes, on us during the day, but lately it seems, they are mostly talking about a threat to the Twin Cities. We get included in the scare quotes just because we live in the same state and may have attended the State Fair once or twice in our lifetimes.

It was an odd day to begin with. Had my right ankle give me fits on Saturday, for no good reason, other than why not. Not so bad going down our stairway, but going up a big deal. And then, late afternoon, my ankle decided nothing was wrong and decided to play nice. Odd. Sunday rolls around and my body is telling me I might have been run over by a bus in my sleep. Everything but my ankle was complaining. I normally don’t stay home from church, but I chose to sit home just in case my ankle remembers yesterday’s antics.

Sent my wife off to worship our Lord and Savior, with her sister and mother, and fired up Zoom to participate that way, except the connection to Zoom stopped about 5 minutes into the service. This not being my first rodeo with the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2), I went to https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/48-5/paul-defends-his-apostleship-part-1 and listened to MacArthur go through Galatians 1:10-15, which is what our
Pastor Aaron is going through in our little church. My ankle did not complain once and the wife came home and told me it was a good service.

The rest of the day was quiet and sunny, as befitting a “Tornado Watch” type day. Evening shows up and I notice clouds beginning to gather. There was a big storm cell in northern Minnesota and the clouds were lining up north to south. It gets to around 8PM, the wife goes upstairs to read in bed. I am standing at the living room window, wondering how much battery life I still have in my drone. I had not charged it up from last time, but I checked and found I had 2 full bars out of 4, good enough.
Sent the drone up to about 150 feet and took a look around. The images are clickable and you can zoom in on them.

The sky had potential, but I did not have enough battery life to hang around and the mosquitos had begun to notice me. Brought the drone down to tree top level and the clouds had decided to get serious. It was getting hard to slap away the state bird and fly the drone, so I brought it in.

The images were OK, not great, just OK. It is now my bed time and I head upstairs. Not a peep heard from my ankle. Just as I close my eyes, I detect lightning and hear rumbles off to the east. And that continued for at least a half hour. I find out this morning there was even an F0 level tornado, somewhere in the Twin Cities. From what I recall, F0 level winds are what we would get for day time breezes in Kansas. Perspective, like punctuation, matters.