Thursday, 17 August 2017
Photo from last December.
Without context, this looks like it could be a satellite photo of a bleak landscape with a fault or chasm bisecting it.
Truth is that it’s a not-new chainsaw cut of a redwood, with some fungi or sap or something making the elevated, gnarly formations.
Friday, 11 August 2017
No, that’s not the Doc’s response when he looked at my foot today.
It’s how my new cast became a cast.
The longer story is that the Doc is very happy with my healing (especially X-rays), but there remains sufficient swelling that he did not remove the sutures today, but will do so in two weeks. In the meantime, he had his assistant put me in a hard cast. I got to pick the color….
The last cast I had was a l-o-n-g, l-o-n-g time ago and it was white plaster, like you see in old movies. My new one is made from a wrap that’s activated with water, then molded around my leg at the proper tightness and angles, and left to finish reacting, which will actually take 24 hours to full rigidity, although it became pretty solid within three minutes, through an exothermic reaction. That means it threw off heat, which I could feel on my foot and leg, but only barely.
And here’s a pretty, captured for me by the Guru (thnx!!). White ginger blossom and buds.
Friday, 4 August 2017
Ms Becky came by today. She got a steel knee several months back, and is in the pushing rehab phase. We discussed the sensations and mental pictures associated with having metal in your body. She has named her knee Fred, to indicate her acceptance of it.
So now I’m working on a name for my plate-and-pins-whatever-is-in-there.
Sunday, 23 July 2017
I think there’s a stealth insect on the stem just below the second set of flower branchings, with its back to us.
Thursday, 13 July 2017
We’ve had so much rain lately that the foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) has become horizontal. Not hard rain, mostly, but precipitation just keeps oozing from the sky. The branches on the trees and more downturned and the grasses are a bit smooshed in some places, in part from the wind—lodged.
Wednesday, 12 July 2017
Big birds. A pair of sandhill cranes inspect wavy railroad tracks.
Small bird. Pretty sure it’s a spruce grouse. Eat many pine needles. Interesting choice.
Here’s the east side of West Bay, which I call Grand Marais Bay in my head. From ground level.
Here’s approximately the same direction/angle from Droney. In spite of some serious wind. Tough drone!
On the ground, the water-topping flowers are in full display.
And we found a swan family—four cygnets!—browsing.
And a solo loon…posing…or watching us back.
Tuesday, 11 July 2017
We’re getting toward the end of the lupine, with many fully in seed pods. A few are still opening at the tips, however.
Farm news: ML and DL have installed a new dock! It’s a beaut! Smells like fresh lumber.
I channeled Diana the Huntress (21st century version) and stalked the shallows for the lithe and limber lacustrine annelids, finding eight in about ten minutes and removing them from the breeding pool. And the lake. It may have been the perfect stick I found for catching them and tossing them into the brush that brought me luck. But not them.
The late afternoon became overcast and waves of drippy rain, straight down, so the windows all could remain open.
Monday, 10 July 2017
On warm days like this, we are taking advantage of the insulation that this cottage now has that it didn’t when I was a youngster. By that I mean that we close the windows late morning and “keep the cool in” until late afternoon. The temperature on the porch, with the lovely new ceiling fan (last summer?, I think), does drift with the day, being cooler than the house in the early morning, and much warmer by late afternoon, when the sun streams in. Today’s popup storms brought the temps down for a while in the mid-afternoon, but the skies cleared and all was soon toasty as normal.
BTW, I’m pretty sure this is feverfew; it’s not from our place.
Sunday, 9 July 2017
The black edges and blotches on the basil plants seem to have retreated, I think due to the slacking of the daily rainstorms. Almost time to make some tomato sauce! [And I have a stash of canned San Marzano tomatoes for delectable flavor, too!]
The sun catches the ferns by the back door just so in the mornings….
And by the time mid-afternoon arrived, so had cloud cover, and by cocktail hour the rain arrived. Not a hard rain, mind you, and perhaps not enough to set the basil back.
