“I’m guessing flower pictures”
Friday, 30 March 2018
The Guru can read me like a book.
Of course, he had a hint; we went to the BotGarden today.
Musings
Gone pollen
Thursday, 29 March 2018
The last two days all these blossoms have been open. I keep catching the white out of the corner of my eye walking through the house, and it is so white and complete, my brain keeps identifying it momentarily as snow.
Nope.
And now it’s raining, and the blossoms will be all droopy tomorrow. And the car no longer will have a yellow cast from the pine pollen (for about two hours, maybe a bit longer).
One and two
Wednesday, 28 March 2018
One activity area. Chalk project by a pre-alphabet kid…my hypothesis.
One large, fine, dandelion. If this is Taraxacum officinale, it’s a European import—and it probably is. And it’s an invasive species across North America, no?
Another Old World species, and another fine yellow specimen. Definitely not “gone wild” here, just “garden variety wild.” Heh.
Beyond blooms
Tuesday, 27 March 2018
The botanist avoided magnolias for our yard (no super-protected place, as we were at the northern limit of their cold-tolerance)…but I remember one in town that our bus route went by, and I’d watch it through the spring. Love deciduous magnolias!
What’s this about a new human organ? How many centuries have people been doing research and surgery? Personally, I’m loving my interstitium*! Embracing my inner self!
* Spell-check currently does not know this word…. [Great irony and a small measure of sarcasm.]
Moderate success
Monday, 26 March 2018
I always struggle to get a nice photo of redbud blooms. This time I went for the downers.
Minutia
Sunday, 25 March 2018
I got distracted into photo metadata and learned a smidge about big-endian (and its opposite little-endian—duh; collectively: endianness), and their distant “friend” circle of confusion.
I think I have spent some time in a circle of confusion, but today I just felt like that was a distant memory.
Personal mysteries
Saturday, 24 March 2018
My first mystery: what is this flower called? I don’t ever remember an ID on it…. Kinda like a stalk of violets…which seems impossible.
My other mystery: pemmican. I read about a buffalo jump (stone walls for driving bison to a cliff, where they’d fall and be butchered) near Cut Bank, Montana…which we remember for the giant penguin statue (yeah, Goo it!). The archaeologists concluded that the folks processed the carcasses for several special items, including bone grease. For pemmican.
Just how many paleo-diet freaks today make bone grease? An almost lost art?
The pemmican brings up one of those repeating topics I think about…how folks preserve food so it doesn’t spoil and yet remains tasty (or a version of tasty). A culture’s food specialties are in two categories that smear together. One is the food served on a given day. The other is the way fresh foods are preserved, for example: wine, cheese, dried meat, pickled eggs, sauerkraut/kimchee, salted fish/meat, soy sauce…that kind of thing. Cannot require canning (for example) to preserve…. The cuisine then can use both preserved foods and fresh foods together….
Anyway.
Of architecture and horticulture (briefly)
Friday, 23 March 2018
I was quite flattered today when the Guru asked me for a France picture I had taken, then turned into a good desktop background. Good to me is dark, so the icons show up. The photo is an asymmetrical shot of the down-pyramid at the Louvre, heavily tweaked.
And this is a shrub I bought so long ago I have forgotten its name. Turns out that it thrives with spent coffee grounds dumped on its roots, and little additional horticultural attention.
Botanical endurance
Wednesday, 21 March 2018
Sorry, you people in the NE, for sending your way the brrrr weather that came through here. #jesssayin …plus, it’s still cold here.
How many of yesterday’s flowers will be zapped tonight? Predicted overnight low in this neighborhood is right at freezing (33°F). Brrrrrr.
Night weather: Twice
Tuesday, 20 March 2018
I’m calling this fancy azalea; I probably messed with the photo levels and skewed the image too much….
So, last night we heard the weather was coming our way, and we got in the new and fancy car, with iPads and laptop, and went to a nearby parking garage just before 11:30pm. The predicted weather included winds over 60mph and hail 2 inches in diameter. Who wouldn’t want to be safe, no?
What happened in our neighborhood was wind and rain, but not as dramatic as the weather that was predicted and the tornadoes that hit elsewhere. We hid out for less than an hour, but the parking garage rounded up; we paid with minimum grumbling. Yawn. We were safely in bed by 12:30am or so.
I’m calling this regular azalea—the pink—and a yellow-blooming shrub I don’t know the name of.
Tonight’s weather story is that the lows are supposed to be below 40°F, but not down to freezing. In our neighborhood. Welcome spring!