Photo Friday: Summer flowers & the eclipse

Happy photo Friday, DMV! It’s August 28.

I went to bed early last night then woke up at midnight to catch the peak of the eclipse. There was just enough of a break in the clouds to catch the mostly darkened moon, with just a light sliver toward the top. I tried to take a photo but only caught a blurry mess with a white dot in the sky.

I went back to bed and woke up again at 3:30 a.m. to write today’s newsletter. I wanted to give readers a chance to send in eclipse pics, and sure enough, I got one from David Policansky, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“It was cloudy most of the time and even sprinkled a little, but there were some holes in the clouds, so I waited. Just past the peak … the moon appeared, and it looked like this,” he wrote.

As we close out August, I also offer you readers’ photos of summer flowers.

Angie Melton, 56, of Kensington, Maryland: “I've lived in the DC area for 34 years next week, but my husband and I visited the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens for the first time … on our 30th wedding anniversary (August 17). The blooming lotus flowers are past peak but still beautiful. The park is a surprisingly peaceful respite in the middle of DC.”

Audrey Hoppenjans, 49, snapped this pic in July at her home in Germantown, Maryland.

“A few years back we had the house power-washed, and I thought my black-eyed Susan was killed off,” she wrote in her submission. “Each year since I’ve seen little remnants of it trying to survive, and this year it has the most blooms I’ve seen! Just a little joy in my backyard.”

Christina DeVries, of Chincoteague Island, Virginia, sent this photo in June.

“My very joyful butterfly weed, which (thankfully) is recovering from the devastating King Tide we had here on Chincoteague last October,” she wrote.

Stacey Marien, 63, sent this photo she took the morning of July 30 in front of her home in the the Friendship Heights neighborhood of D.C.

“I host a CSA from One Acre Farms that is delivered on Thursdays. My partner Sean creates a water display with flowers from the yard to greet the customers picking up their vegetable bag. Sean was inspired by a trip we took years ago to Chanticleer, a wonderful garden in PA,” she wrote in her submission.

Thank you for sharing a glimpse of your lives! Seeing your pics is one of my favorite things about this newsletter. What is your end-of-August joy? Share your photos of life in the DMV here.

Please consider supporting my work with a one-time, monthly or yearly donation to help keep me going. Do you know anyone who would enjoy reading my Daily Dose? Forward this to them to help me grow. For newcomers: To subscribe, click here.

Did you know about there’s an enormous puzzle challenge this summer? 40,320 pieces!

“Almost 23 feet long, time to complete is estimated at 600 hours,” says the website of DC Puzzle Swap.

The Ravensburger puzzle was started at AwesomeCon in April, then separated out to 10 D.C. public libraries. And the public is invited to help assemble it tomorrow at MLK Library. (You can also bring puzzles to swap.)

My kind of fun!

Also …

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