Musings

Hmmm; that changes things big time.

Posted at 8:44 PM | Comments Off on News o’ the day

World’s slowest hummingbird. 🤣

Posted at 8:32 PM | Comments Off on Garden denizen

We drove and drove, and then we saw this milestone. All lanes were open, so we sailed along, then paid the $4 it takes to drive into the Upper Peninsula. The lakes looked glorious and sparkled. En route, we saw geese, a brood of turkeys, a deer, crows and flickers. At the cottage, I can tell a woodchuck’s been visiting our yard (rrr; they are voracious eaters).

Floral complexity continues to abound in the North Country.

Posted at 9:53 PM | Comments Off on Made it!

Meet Acer palmatum. This maple is native to east Asia, from Korea north into Russia. Knock me over with a feather; I just read that there are over a thousand cultivars of this species.

Posted at 10:16 PM | Comments Off on Go horticulturalists

You can’t tell it’s the moon even, I suspect, but I’m sure it’s clearly waxing gibbous if you didn’t have the screen of vegetation and you’d been tracking the moon-change.

BTW, my dictionary indicates that gibbous is etymologically in a roundabout way from the Latin gibbus meaning ‘hump.’

Posted at 9:45 PM | Comments Off on What hump?

I thought about a light in darkness theme, but it’s too darned depressing. Instead, I propose leaf-light mosaic. Simplistic, perhaps, but a bit vivifying.

Posted at 10:03 PM | Comments Off on Art

Pareidolia is not psychodelia. The word I encountered today was pareidolia. This word is not in your everyday vocab? Not surprising.

It’s the idea that you, for example, look at a cloud and see a figure, face, a shape you can identify. But it’s just a cloud, and the figure is something that your brain came up with.

This word surfaced for me in an online article titled “Conversations with Caves…” by Izzy Wisher and others (here) The discussed pareidolia related to how the painted figures were placed on the concave and convex shapes of the rugged surface of cave walls. This happened a long time ago in the period archaeologists call the Upper Paleolithic.

Anyway, going forward…I’ll be trying to remember the word pareidolia. Relevance to today? Today, we had a relatively even overcast, so shape identification would have been…difficult.

Posted at 9:28 PM | Comments Off on Pareidolia

We social-butterflied again this weekend, hosting dear friends who live nearby. We discussed sequoias, caribou/reindeer, BBQ, and the recipe for maple syrup—and why homemade is incomparably better than the supermarket version.

Posted at 10:06 PM | Comments Off on Wide-ranging discussions

I call this the movie-star house. That’s because over the last six or so years it’s commonly a short-term rental to movie stars. The real ones. Like Oscar nomination types. I’m glad these folks like our neighborhood.

Posted at 9:42 PM | Comments Off on I’m not outing them here

I swear I can tell the day-length is changing. Of course, it’s changing every day, but when we move from a maxiumum or minimum, I THINK I can perceive the trend with greater ease. [Sky-light at 8:55pm local time.]

Posted at 10:10 PM | Comments Off on Silly me