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We’re entering into day 2 of our somewhat yearly furlough for our staff where we give everyone an unpaid 24 hour furlough to visit their homes around the world and that includes those staffers who reside here in the sequestered, government shut down, sort of non-functional, U. S. of A. Now don’t get the idea that we here at the Institute are anti-government in any way. No sir, many of us are high school graduates and veterans and some have even been to cities that have colleges in them so we’re not exactly a bunch of dummies up here.

Our problems here at the Institute seem to echo the nation’s problems at the moment. Our staff is slow to return to work, some of them citing travel difficulties. Our researcher from Lapland for instance, can not get back to work because there are reindeer on the runway. I think this is just an excuse because every time I’ve been somewhere where there are reindeer on the runway someone goes out and swats them in the tookus with a cattle prod, which they call a reindeer prod, and in moments the runway is clear. So that excuse is not going to fly, so to speak.

Why would they even come back, if they’re not getting paid and the working conditions are sub-standard? you might ask. Well it’s because we have squirreled away tons of food and we feed our people regularly, free of charge, to make up for the slight deficiency in pay. Some may say that their diet of rootabeggies, Bulgar, and their choice of emu or muskrat and Lamprey on Fridays, gets tiresome but hey it’s free.

And best of all when other government organizations are turning away widows and orphans, the homeless, veterans too sick to work and the rest of the halt and lame because of no funds, we are providing little box lunches and treated well water on a daily basis for those federal workers huddled around the electrified gate of the Institute. We don’t ask anything in return other than they sing our praises in the streets, and recycle the cardboard container their lunches come in.

But enough of that, we know our elected officials in Washington have only our best interests at heart and put our welfare above even their own interests, and we believe them when they say they’re not running our government like they were hired to do to protect us from terrible things happening to us, because someone they don’t agree with might do something they don’t like. When you look at the logic of it, it makes perfect sense. Shutting it down seems like the only solution then. So we support them, sort of. If we didn’t I guess we’d have to fire the whole damn lot of them and get someone in there that would do the job they’re supposed to do. They say that is what elections are for but I don’t know if that concept has been operating at peak efficiency lately.

I know, you want to know about today’s picture. Since Ray Everett and Curtis Leroy, our twin resident picture choosers haven’t made it back yet, we’re told they didn’t get out of Yosemite quick enough and are now trapped there until they reopen the parks. They went to see their aged mom who works as a park ranger there to supplement her Social Security. The sad story is she was furloughed the day they got there and was outside the chained link fence while her two boys were trapped on the inside of the fence looking for her. Now all they can do is hold each others fingers through the rusty barbed wire. It seems that the guy who has the key for the padlock on the gate has been furloughed and they can’t find him to get the gate unlocked and now this has turned into another preventable national tragedy.

So we have had to rely on the kindness of strangers to choose the daily images. Each day we select one of the huddled masses down at the gate and allow them to choose one picture for the day’s post in return for weeding in the Institute’s garden and a full meal of their choice at the commissary. This image is not a picture of a forest fire but it is a picture of what is known as a solar conflagration visual exhibition, or SCVE, where the rising morning sun shines through the fog in the valley leading up to the headquarters building here at the Institute and lights it up like the third of July. I think our little chooser did a fine job and just for those of you who are curious she chose the Lamprey for her commissary meal even if it wasn’t Friday.