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When we were little, we all loved bright shiny objects, but for Physicist Joe Jordan it was a little different. He remembers a favorite family story that started when he was three years old. While visiting his grandmother in the Shenandoah Mountains, someone suddenly noticed he was missing from the dinner table. They found him half a mile down a dirt road. When his family asked what he was doing, Jordan replied, “Just looking at the moon.”

With each new season, we start fresh with high expectations for a bountiful harvest of vegetables and mouth-watering fruit, fragrant flowers to pick for bouquets and healthy plants to attract beneficial insects to the garden. As the months pass, it seems one problem after another crops up.

King salmon have started to return to the Santa Cruz Harbor, and anglers are already catching some from the jetties and surrounding waters. This is great news, as the major return of salmon is still one year away, when the catch will be a year older than the two-year-olds we’re seeing today. As the salmon continue to arrive, it is important to fish only from legally designated areas of the harbor while also adhering to fishing regulations.

Last fall I wrote about the predictions for winter rains in our area. The “Farmer's Almanac” predicted our "winter will be much rainier and cooler than normal." Weather bloggers online posted an impressive number of charts and figures predicting “a general dry trend.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said we had an equal chance of precipitation totals going either way.