Musings

No flocks of phlox blooms any more this spring.

Posted at 10:47 PM | No Comments »

Until today when I dug into The Great Database In The Cloud, I didn’t know that fringetrees are native to greater eastern North America(ish), including the Southeast. And here’s a specimen to delight and amaze!

Posted at 7:43 PM | No Comments »

We strolled around the lake at Old Fourth Ward Park…

…and encountered a napping mallard family…

…and a pair of large-ish turtles…that may be a family, also…we couldn’t tell.

Posted at 7:49 PM | No Comments »

I guess these are called flowers; certainly, they look like them, like tulips…hence, the common name: tulip poplar. The trees are darned tall, so I only ever see the fleurs on the ground, or, here, on a sidewalk.

Posted at 9:28 PM | No Comments »

Over last week and the weekend we binge-watched “The Residence,” which we thoroughly enjoyed…and recommend. Tonight, we tried the first episode of “The Mountain Detective,” which took us to terrain (French Alps) we haven’t visited…interesting, and worth seeing another episode…a plan for tomorrow.

Posted at 9:53 PM | No Comments »

Every spring these days, I find myself surprised at the yellowy green of the new growth…and then I forget to watch it transition to the dark green that the plant will sport for…well, for years, or, I think its lifetime.

The Botanist always called these types of evergreens Taxus, and I never thought anything about it—I simply internalized that these are Taxus. I just looked it up and that’s the genus (aha!), while the common name in English is yew. There’s plenty of variation among the Taxus species, so the most efficient name is…tada…Taxus, when you’re not sure which species you’re looking at. Ah, taxonomy.

Perhaps I should have saved this post for the 15th? 🤣 🤣 🤣

Posted at 9:31 PM | No Comments »

The rain continued all night and into the morning, then stopped, then restarted for part of the afternoon. Yeesh. During that time, it seems like the trees did a huge amount of leafing out (this was when it was still raining and the fresh, new leaves were limp with precipitation weighting them down).

Posted at 9:40 PM | No Comments »

Lovely morning.

Rainy afternoon (this was at 1:41pm).

Still dripping and drippy, but not terribly windy.

Posted at 9:09 PM | No Comments »

I looked behind me soon after I left the house on my dawn-ish walk and I saw the sun had almost arrived.

I rounded a couple of corners, tromp tromp, and I saw the almost-up sun illuminating the firehouse floor.

Posted at 9:28 PM | No Comments »

I can’t even bring myself to think about what all these shenanigans emanating from the White House are costing us, and I don’t mean money so much as good will and esteem, and things like that. Instead, I’ll think about the pollen count or something else that’s very positive. 🤣 🤣 🤣

Posted at 8:36 PM | No Comments »