Musings

View westward of downtown Atlanta (note Varsity sign)….

Remember the tornado that hit downtown Atlanta back on the evening of the 14th of March? Well, here’s a look at some of the remaining damage.

That’s plywood blocking windows in the Georgia Pacific building (center, brownish), and those black spots on the round Westin hotel building are more broken windows. The tornado would have come from the west(ish), so this may not be the worst of it. Some streets are still closed. Many fancy, made-to-order windows must be special-ordered, and thus will not be replaced for months. I hear the grass in the nearby parks was carefully combed to remove grass shards.

Posted at 5:52 PM | Comments Off on Downtown damage

I didn’t see this anole (Anolis carolinensis) doing any pushups, so maybe it’s a female.

I saw remarkably few birds on our walk yesterday. Maybe the (mostly) hardwood stands offer so little food, they’re barren of birdlife.

Speaking of a lack of resources, I’m worried that our current economic downturn is going to hit a bunch of people hard—people who don’t know how to live poor, either psychologically or the tricks and techniques for eating cheaply, scrambling for necessities, and the like. Which will make it worse for all of us.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

As near as I can tell: Trillium catesbaei, with several common names including Bashful Wakerobin.

We returned to northwest GA and redid the damp hike of late March. Despite light rainfall in the previous 24 hrs, we found the creeks and streamlets very easy to cross, and the hike delightful, colorful, actually, with carpets of new plants, mostly wildflowers and (sigh) poison ivy. I may be exaggerating a bit, however.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

Sometimes you just can’t make these things up.

Yeah, you’re reading it right: Dried Anchovy Tea Bag.

And, no, I have no idea how it fits into the cuisine, or even which cuisine. Asian, maybe Chinese, Korean, or Thai, is the best I can do.

Yum.

Is it medicinal? Does one sip anchovy tea while gambling? Do you feed it to relatives you don’t like? Mad uncles perhaps? Nasty landladies?

Or do you use it to make a soup base?

Then again, maybe this stuff is not so popular (or tasty), given the roughly 25% markdown….

I confess, I did not make the investment to give anchovy tea bags a try, or maybe I’d be dragging anchovy tea along on my next cold-weather hike—although not in the near future, given our current temps!

Posted at 1:55 PM | 1 Comment »

All the bees* buzzing around this tree made it an audio-arbol [arbol = tree (Span.)].

For this first time, this afternoon felt like marginal-summer. Hot. Fresh-mown grass smells with a powdery dry backnote.

I’m not quite ready yet….

* Our bumble bees are called humble bees in Britain. Apparently, humble is a corruption of the German hummel, meaning buzzing. Webster’s online says this bee is also sometimes called a dumble-dor. Ah, she’s not so original, that JK Rowling….

Posted at 5:34 PM | Comments Off on Spring superseded?

Iris, possibly a bearded iris. Apparently the fleur-de-lis is a (different) stylized iris.

Another warm afternoon, with blooms nearly everywhere I looked on our walk. The lovely sun is drying everything out, however….

Posted at 5:56 PM | Comments Off on Irrepressible iris

Turtle sunning at Lake Clara Meer.

Sunny today, with temps breaking 70°F. Shall I put away the heavy winter blankets?

Techno-discovery

high dynamic range imaging (often: HDRI/HDR; slow-load Wikipedia link), a compositing technique that yields an image with an exaggerated dynamic range, now easy(ish) to accomplish with Photoshop and its imitators.

Posted at 6:48 PM | 2 Comments »

A pink Hibiscus I saw in front of a store the other day…

Felt the need for something beautiful to look at….

Apparently Hibiscus are in the mallow family, as are cotton, cocoa, and durian. What a group!

Posted at 5:12 PM | Comments Off on Flushed pink

I know this plant as bedstraw, but without much confidence in that ID. A quick google suggests I’m right; there are a bunch of bedstraws, however, and I don’t know which this is. The genus is Galium, which this web site says is Greek for “milk”, and sometime in history the juice of the plant was used to curdle milk. Yum.

Just finished Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero (2007)*. Recommended. Some of his descriptions of the countryside struck me viscerally as do those of Cormac McCarthy. Somewhat tortured characters are also similar. Many are orphaned young. Ondaatje’s stories are entirely different from McCarthy’s, however.

* I didn’t read The English Patient (1993) or see the movie (1996), so I can’t make any comparisons.

Household victory: 2007 taxes completed, signed, mailed today.

Posted at 5:12 PM | Comments Off on Victories

I’m making up for lost time today by (finally) getting a dogwood picture posted; they’ve been blooming for well over a week.

In the meantime, a bunch of people are ignoring the blooms to ogle the green grass down in Augusta.

Posted at 3:45 PM | Comments Off on Bloomin’ dogwood