Musings

In acknowledgement of the many tornado watches and general bad weather, the network stations stayed on local reporting for hours during the late afternoon/early evening. Right here, we got a bit of hard rain, maybe momentary hail, and lots of dramatic skies. Basically, the scary stuff was around us, rather than over us.

Fine with me!

* The weather maps broadcast by the station we watched most of the time displayed purple dots, or sometimes blotches, which we were told was where hail was falling.

PS Normally I like purple!

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

I’ve been working on a White Paper. Just to be well, that way, I boxed some text and made the background not-white.

I got the info summarized in the box from:

Golledge, Reginald G., Meredith Marsh, and Sarah Battersby. 2008. A Conceptual Framework for Facilitating Geospatial Thinking. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98:285–308.

I did mention this is a drafty draft so far, didn’t I?

Posted at 6:27 PM | 2 Comments »

You can tell this is two photos clumsily stuck together, right? And that they’re at different scales? Right? The bloom on the left is maybe 2 cm tall. The poke salad on the right is about a foot high. Or it was two hours ago; most assuredly, it’s taller now.

I’m thinking the winter cold is now behind us (crossing fingers), and it’s time to get those tomato plants I bought last week into the ground.

BTW, that’s the stump from the tree that acted out last May in the right background of the picture on the right (ya follow that?). The little stumplet on the left is from a dogwood that got dragged down when the oak came down.

Posted at 6:50 PM | Comments Off on Thinking about scale…

A fellow hiker spotted this lovely specimen on Sunday, not me. I seem to remember that “May is Morel Month in Michigan.” Here, the morel season is long over by May, I suspect….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Shifted seasons

Here’s my ignorance: I thought lichens were a thing.

It turns out they’re a composite organism, that is, composed of two living things—a fungus and a fungus’ friend, according to the Wiki-P, “usually either a green alga…or cyanobacterium….” My sense is that they grow outward, so that bigger blobs are older than smaller ones (this is a larger older blob, although there’s nothing to give you scale—you had to be there…).

More Wiki-P wisdom: “Lichens are named based on the fungal component, which plays the primary role in determining the lichen’s form.”

Posted at 6:36 PM | Comments Off on Lichen mysteries

As I noted nearly a year ago, I don’t know exactly what this gorgeous wildflower is…. Love the dusting of pollen….

And, yeah, this came from the 2009 version of the hike reported here and here in 2008.

Posted at 8:45 PM | Comments Off on I still need to look up this fleur

Somebody not very cleverly chose to plant a row of these shrubs/small trees in front of apartments over by the library. The problem is that they’re thorny, and some of the branches are at eye and shoulder height*. Nice….

* Hence, passers-by have broken the limbs back away from the sidewalk. Poor trees.

Posted at 10:09 PM | Comments Off on Clever, too clever

Today’s email brought inside information about reorganization and finances at General Motors. The report is that employees are being sent out to collect refundable containers from the ditches and roadsides across the USA—this apparently is thought to be more productive and to have fewer strings than the Federal bailout.

Or so I heard….

Posted at 7:06 PM | 2 Comments »

Around here, April showers bring*…April flowers! At least rains this early in the month!

These were open yesterday midday, but with the rain we’ve had off and on (and sometimes ON-ON) since yesterday evening, I guess they opted to stay safely closed today….

* Apparently this is from a proverb known at least from the nineteenth century….

Posted at 4:26 PM | Comments Off on Weather adjustment(s)

Some people have been quite clever today. Me—not so much. The best I can do is to caption this Wisteria* Lane.

* Wisteria species are native to eastern North American and northern Asia. Two easy ways to distinguish among them are that the New World ones have unscented blooms and smooth (not velvety) pods—depending on what time of the year you’re doing your taxonomic investigation. So says Wiki-P.

Posted at 6:39 PM | 1 Comment »