Musings

This from yesterday….

One real benefit of hiking in the mountains on a rainy day: the creeks are rushing and burbling and delightful!

Posted at 6:33 PM | Comments Off on White water noise

Not that YOU can tell, but the black spot in the background in the middle of the frame, rushing down the slope away from the hikers on the trail above, is a bear, about 1/3 grown. S/he was with Mom and sibling (not pictured). This was up above Dockery Lake, mid-afternoon, in off-and-on light drizzle.

Nice early spring wildflowers, especially violets or species that look like violets.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Bearly visible

Just for variety, here’s a gorgeous photo of rainy night last week (yes, in Georgia!), unPhotoshopped, courtesy JCB.

It’s sunny and hot today. I put my tomato plants (I’m lame; I bought them) in the ground yesterday, and they look pretty happy today. I’ll get some newspapers laid around them tomorrow, I hope, to hold in the moisture and discourage weeds. Maybe they’ll have enough sun to bear. They’re in the newly sunny area in the front yard; always before I planted them in the too-shady back yard and I grew tomato plants and not tomatoes.

Posted at 4:37 PM | 1 Comment »

Found murals in the restaurant at the State Farmers’ Market—yeah, same trip earlier this week—this from the entry area ceiling—Stone Mountain and paddlewheeler. Of all things.

Posted at 10:11 PM | Comments Off on Repeating myself

I was so seduced by how gorgeous the lilies-of-the-valleys were when we were at the market yesterday, but the only blooming specimens were in the middle of the broad tables, and I had to reach-reach-reach to photo them, so I only got crappy images.

Posted at 6:53 PM | 3 Comments »

Today’s highlight was taking a long lunch and going to the State Farmers’ Market, a 150-acre installation south of town that’s also touted as the “World’s Largest Roadside Fruit and Vegetable Stand,” an excursion we shared with our neighbors.

We first lunched at the Oakwood Café on the premises. Once sated, we commenced our wander. Most of the stands (actually bigger than stands, if you ask me) that were open seemed to be attended by Mexican-American entrepreneurs, and I had great fun chatting with them. Two (guys) told me that I spoke very good Spanish! The only reponse is to say, “¡Usted, también!“*

I even saw guaje pods, which Wiki-Pee says are Leucaena leucocephala, “a mimosoid tropical tree.” These are not commonly seen on this side of the border; some people say that the name Oaxaca is derived from guaje (say gwah-hay). What fun!

Upon our return, we became immersed in a small financial morass, making this and that payment and deciding with the CPA to apply for an “automatic” extension of time to file (as we often do). Bleh.

BTW, no rhubarb. And no vendors who really knew what it is, either….

Extra points if you’ve read H. Allen Smith’s humor novel Rhubarb, about an orange-red cat who owned a baseball club (if I remember correctly)….

* It means “you, too!,” if you didn’t guess….

Posted at 6:23 PM | 2 Comments »

Loved basking in the design simplicity and aesthetic at the Apple Store during a short visit this afternoon.

Really loved the brief tour of Bob’s garden—brief because it’s a small back garden. His parsley was playing host to this insect, which I inadvertently put in partial shadow with the camera lens—oops.

Posted at 7:25 PM | 2 Comments »

It rained last night, pretty heavily at times. This morning, the winds came with the rain, whoosh for quite a while. Small branches fell and we heard some ominous sounds from afar—thankfully for the afar part. I went out to photography the white azalea that’s in full bloom and found the branches droopy under a heavy load of precip.

To get away from the roof and diminish the scary wind noises, I did some reading downstairs during the w-o-r-s-t of it, and came across the following in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007). Here’s the setup. Spring is coming, and the turkeys that weren’t sacrificed for Thanksgiving and other feasts—meaning the hens—begin to experience the springtime tide of rising hormones, but BK doesn’t understand that that’s what’s going on with the hen with droopy wings. She finally figures it out and hies off to the internet and the library for the animal husbandry information she needs, and which didn’t arrive with her two-day-old chicks the spring before. Since most modern US turkeys come into the world via artificial means, hatch under heat lamps, and are sacrificed before they reach their own springtimes, appropriate council, she discovered, is…rare. She finally digs up a fifty-year old agricultural self-help book and gets some advice (p. 322):

I had more than just sentimental reasons for wanting to see my turkey hens brood and hatch their own babies, however unlikely that might be. I plowed on through my antique reference for more details on nesting and brooding, and what I might do to be a helpful midwife, other than boiling water or putting a knife under the bed. My new turkey-sex manual got better and better. “Male turkeys,” I read, “can be forced to broodiness by first being made drowsy, e.g., by an ample dose of brandy, and then being put on a nest with eggs. After recovery from the hangover, broodiness is established. This method was used extensively by farmers in Europe before incubators were available.”

Got it?

Posted at 1:43 PM | 1 Comment »

I haven’t been paying attention. The herbs that I rescued last year from under The Tree mostly survived the winter in fine fettle. The sage is so nourished from the spring rains and recent warmth that it’s blooming—well, almost!

Title does not refer to me….

Posted at 7:43 PM | Comments Off on Budding sage

Once upon a time….

Ummmm. I guess we’re beyond that right now….

No “Easter feast-er” in this household (tomorrow). Instead we did things up royal tonight. Yippee!

Posted at 10:27 PM | 1 Comment »