Bovine vacation wear
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
Bessie’s headed for the beach.
Plus the plants are obscuring the poor hoof-modeling James mentioned….
Musings
Differential exposures
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
6:41 this morning….
To my eye, it was nowhere near this dark.
Yard art
Tuesday, 10 June 2014
Found this yellow submarine (pretty sure of this ID) hanging out on a front lawn in the neighborhood when I was out before the heat of the day had built up. Or is it a tank?
Latitude and attitude
Monday, 9 June 2014
Yeah, I was in a mood, so the text is “upside down.” I especially love the white-lined blue-dot period. This was not taken during a night or during midsummer. Hah!
I’m in climate change shock. In this case the climate change is because we drove about 1K miles south over the weekend. We’re in a wave of humidity and the high temp today was about 4°F above average. The two combined—humidity and temperature—constitute an atmosphere thick enough to be carved, I swear!
Bonus! Bonus!
Sunday, 8 June 2014
Wouldn’t ya know it. Our first stop in GA was the rest area just inside the state line—and we made it before the toilets closed for the evening!
Just so there’s no mistake in the minds of even casual visitors, the state has installed a neon reminder high in a gable dormer of the realm you have entered….
We quartered a triangle
Saturday, 7 June 2014
Iron Triangle, Fostoria, which we explored from all sides.
Futzed around; got cottage closed and auto packed.
First stop was Cut River Bridge, which we never stop at. You have to pick which side of the bridge you walk on (can’t cross), and we walked the inland side, not the lake side. Michigan, overall, is pretty flat. For Michigan, Cut River is dramatic.
Our main stop, however, was a visit with McG in EL. What fun!
Bonus: when we got to our hotel, we were upgraded to a “premium suite.” Spiffy!
Two more things…
Friday, 6 June 2014
First, the lupins/lupines are beginning to bloom! Just today; not yesterday.
This second one’s trickier. JCB and I have seen a white!! raptor!! soaring above the grasses above the field and through the orchard, yesterday afternoon and today, too. Not many times, but a few. It’s white. Like, very white. With black wing-tips and tips on the tail feathers. At least that’s what we think we’ve been seeing. Haven’t got the glasses on it.
Went through two editions of Sibley’s studying all the pictures, and there seems to be only one possibility: gyrfalcon, white variant. It’s a majestic bird.
Inhale (use your imagination)
Friday, 6 June 2014
Do you say lie-locks or lie-lacks?
The Guru wrangled the lawnmower, traipsing across the ENTIRE lawn, all the nooks and crannies—no big rectangles here…. The sun was out and it was a hot, red-face-inducing job.
This being Michigan—one of the places where the saying goes “if you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes”—the weather indeed did change. The ten-minute window wasn’t met, however. Instead, the sun dipped behind clouds just as he was returning the mower to its parking place in the garage.
Sure enough, after he got out of the shower he checked the radar, and there’s a precip blob to the southwest moving our way….
Lawn now looks great! And so does the terribly strange screen-protected garden-mound sown with both seeds and sheep/alpaca/llama poop (thanks so much, Sherry!)….
Note sky
Thursday, 5 June 2014
Cloudless sky and pleasant-to-warm temps all day. New garden is drying under these conditions; I keep adding dishwater (my new chore).
Most of the apple buds are open. The trees are breath-taking. They have sound—buzzing bees.
We also fed the mosquitos and black flies
Wednesday, 4 June 2014
Farmer day—I got the “garden” planted—with basil, spinach, and lettuce. It’s so small that we’ll get max 10 plants of each! Kinda ho-hum, except that this planting rejuvenates The Botanist’s garden mound.
We also did once-removed farmering, visiting Spinner’s End Farm while the alpaca/llama shearers were there.
Four guys, each knew his job. They worked on two work spaces they had set up, alternating with balletic precision. Green Shirt is the head guy, doing the most delicate shearing, with the most junior fellow (it seemed to me) as his assistant—lots of head management for his helper. The second team did the wrangling (fetching and releasing), the foot management (front feet bound and stretched one direction; back feet the other—leaving the body-barrel poised for attention), the toenail trimming and shot (brain worms if I remember correctly), the teeth-grinding (special grinder for those lower front choppers), the cleanup trimming—I’m not sure whatall.
Interesting to watch—all four shearers knew their job and was so fluid at it. They had begun the shearing season somewhere in the south, working their way north across the Midwest, and from here were headed west in the next week or so toward Wyoming (or something).
There’s an unusual occupation for the income tax form: itinerant alpaca shearer. I wonder what they did for the rest of the year….