Saturday, 31 May 2008
Using the infamous JCB graphics logic, you’d expect we would have bought a bottle of this, but for unknown reasons, we gave it a pass….
My grandmother used to drive a red pickup from this era (approximately). I loved it when we were allowed to ride in the back to town. The rule was you sat down and held on with both hands. Wheeeeeeee!
Friday, 30 May 2008
Lilacs! I love lilacs! And you don’t often find blooming lilacs in ATL….
This evening we met our personal beer distributor for a coupla Guinness—or was it more?—at the local Irish pub. Yum!
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Even though The Botanist is temporarily elsewhere, the strawberries patiently ripen. Almost!
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
You’ve heard of soap-on-a-rope; here’s a flag on a cable!
The iPhone is a great travelers’ tool.
One thing I find particularly useful is the real-time traffic info displayed on a map. Today, however, for the first time, we had faulty data. The iPhone indicated poor conditions along our route in Cincinnati. We decided to chance it and found…traffic running 5–10 mph above the speed limit. Well, at least the error went in our favor.
Monday, 26 May 2008
This is the scene I now see from the kitchen window (note eerie, ghostly white banding from reflections of the slats of the blind). Moss is dying on the blacktop between the stump and the house, out of view in a foreground that’s cropped from this picture.
In other news, I’ve posted a family-favorite recipe, a well-loved potato salad I made for our weekend feast. It’s really tasty, but more time-consuming than most of my recipes (yet still less complex than many fine recipes out there!).
* Actually, all ecosystems are in reactive, adjustment mode, I think.
Sunday, 25 May 2008
Before the floods of light we now get by midday and through the afternoon heated up the front yard, JCB and I went out to do some tidying. He picked up a bunch of small pieces of ex-house, including small, clear glass fragments (window glass and honeycombed safety glass from the shower door/wall), and I moved the tattered herb garden to a safer locale.
Saturday, 24 May 2008
It’s a fact of life: the body will die.
Yeah, I heard someone say that entirely without irony on the (streaming) radio….
Friday, 23 May 2008
As I understand it, tepalcate is the Mexican-icized version of the Nahuatl word (perhaps tepalcatl) for broken ceramic…. I’ve seen a lot of them, and even washed quite a few….
Thursday, we strolled to a nearby restaurant*; it’s billed as Mexican, but I would describe it as Mexican-influenced, rather nouvelle, and generally Latin. I neglected to ask where the chef is from. They’ve had a few. One was of Puerto Rican descent and from NYC, so you can tell the “Mexican” part is loosely interpreted.
One wall is textured, and painted a lovely deep red. It’s ornamented with small broken prehispanic ceramic shards on wire spikes. As near as I could tell, they’re real. No reason not to be. Many, many fields have lots of these, broken by generations of plowing….
* Their web page fails to open, so why name them and why provide a link?
Thursday, 22 May 2008
I was perhaps a wee bit boasting over the weekend when I said that I knew what this tree is called. Then I doubted myself (quietly, in private), so I thought I’d better look it up.
Common (English) name: monkey puzzle tree. Scientific name: Araucaria araucana. New common name: pehuén (from Mapuche). Native of the south-central Andes, both east and west slopes (says the web).
Turns out I had the name right, but didn’t know the coolest data-bit: this specimen is a male!
Ancillary data-bit: these trees are cousins (relatively speaking) of some of the trees fossilized in the Petrified Forest in Arizona.
For more info, here’s the wikipedia entry….
