"Tomorrow Never Knows"

 The first half of May has been pretty much uneventful. But Tomorrow Never Knows what may come, so always have the camera ready. The first creature I took a picture of was one in which I have spent years trying to eliminate from my immediate area. Sadly, I have not succeeded, but I will keep on my quest. This beer was at Lou's Blues, a known sanctuary for this type of animal. I was waiting to catch a glimpse of the ever popular SpaceX rocket.

Right on schedule, the Falcon 9 made its appearance to the North of my location, the back deck...

As the rocket headed to space, the plan was to release more baby satellites called Starlink into LEO. The flock currently has over 10,000 flying across skies of the earth.

Sometimes the creature may be in your front yard. This guy is a regular in my back yard toward the creek, but he had wandered into bird feeder territory. I was cutting vegetables for dinner and shared a carrot. I figured a rabbit with a carrot was an unique shot.

House sparrow on my bird feeder...

Then a male cardinal...

Then a red-bellied woodpecker...

On Friday the 15th, I realizes after shooting down a Landshark (or two), I would head to Jetty Park at Port Canaveral for another Falcon liftoff. While waiting, I caught this shot of an osprey, a relative of the Falcon,  after it had successfully caught a fish.

There were a couple ospreys fishing with the surfers on the beach. This one came out empty-clawed.

And then the elusive SpaceX rocket appeared with a tail of fire. There were other birds around but this was my prey. Notice that the launch is just left of that pole on the far shore.

This SpaceX mission was to bring cargo to the ISS. Two birds with one shot...

A wide angle view of the launch. But this Falcon was coming back to the earth for a landing.

Although the video is not so good, I did capture a unique view of the return of the rocket to its nest. They have recently started landing at Zone 40, which appears much closer to the launch pad. In the video you can see the pole with the rocket to the left, same as the takeoff photo.

After spending time out in the field taking photographs, I usually like to stop for a hardy meal. Rusty's is the place for Clam Chowder and Raw Oysters. Watch out for the horseradish, hottest in the County. 

This weekend is the Thunder on Cocoa Beach, a race of large speedboats. On my way to the Port for the SpaceX shots, the Minuteman Causeway in Cocoa Beach was packed with people. They even had closed the southbound lanes of A1A and made the Northbound A1A into two-way traffic. I had never seen that done before.

I have been to the races several times in past years but I have my fill of speed boat photographs. I figured these boats across from Rusty's, would be my 2026 shots. The boats enter the ocean through Port Canaveral. They create a whole city of boats and crews. Most of the boats were at the party I mentioned in Cocoa Beach, but a few were being worked on at the Port.

Well, the first half of May flew by quickly. What's up for the rest of the month, Tomorrow Never Knows?

About Title

"Tomorrow Never Knows" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was released in August 1966 as the final track on their album Revolver, although it was the first song recorded for the LP. 

When writing the song, Lennon drew inspiration from his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD and from the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. The Beatles' recording employed musical elements foreign to pop music, including musique concrète, avant-garde composition and electro-acoustic sound manipulation. It features an Indian-inspired modal backing of tambura and sitar drone and bass guitar, with minimal harmonic deviation from a single chord, underpinned by a constant but non-standard drum pattern; added to this, tape loops prepared by the band were overdubbed "live" onto the rhythm track. Part of Lennon's vocal was fed through a Leslie speaker cabinet, normally used for a Hammond organ. The song's reverse guitar parts and effects marked the first use of reversed sounds in a pop recording, although the Beatles' 1966 B-side "Rain", which they recorded soon afterwards using the same technique, was issued over two months before the release of Revolver.