Wintery whine
Friday, 27 January 2017
I’m wearing wool socks. [The cold returned.]
Musings
Haunted maybe?
Sunday, 22 January 2017
I’m being barraged by Henry VIII of England. First Wolf Hall. Tonight it’s Lucy Worsley’s version….
Yeah, I know Henry’s symbol was the rose not the pansy. My wee joke. Plus, pansies are blooming now and roses aren’t.
Tomorrow…
Friday, 20 January 2017
I tried not to think much today, not about the festivities in another city, but about the outcome and implications.
Mostly I managed to just become boring.
Preference?
Sunday, 15 January 2017
Do you prefer the green and living plant?
Or the dried castoff bud?
The first is some kind of yucca; the second, I think, is in the Araucariaceae family.
Fri, 13th
Friday, 13 January 2017
Creative use of glazed potsherds*.
Grass heads….
* The Brits call them shards. They are shards in that shards are broken bits. Sherds, on the other hand, are broken bits of ceramic, i.e., potsherds.
Dandy!
Thursday, 12 January 2017
While Someone was flying Droney-Roney [the Irish device], I was messing with the fish-eye…
…and the close-up lenses. [Yes, that’s a Dandy-lion.]
The macro-ed world (again)
Monday, 9 January 2017
First I thought I’d write about these ice mini-towers, maybe 3cm tall in total.
Then I saw these buds…when I looked at the close-up, gee, they looked crinkled and…unpleasant. Frost/cold is the culprit, I think. [Some woody shrub I don’t know the name of.]
I liked these mushroom gills the best!
Terrain change
Wednesday, 21 December 2016
We began the day with a beach-visit, and rewarded with mists in the inlets and expanses of shadows and sunlight, and just pure ocean loveliness. And haystacks.
Then, we tried closed-in views beneath massive redwoods and their forest friends, which include low-down rotting sibling redwoods and green ferns.
This pile-up will stick with me. Three giants that, over time, fell atop one another. I think the top one came down since we were here last, and the bottom two must be darned strong to make a REDwood splinter like that. You have no visual scale…these each would take something like five-or-more people to reach around (if you could get to them).
As we rolled among the mountains, if we crossed or went along a river, we saw more mist, as we had at the coast. Very decorative.
To pass logging trucks and hay trucks and refrigerator trucks, JCB sometimes used Ludicrous* mode. Very vroom!
We turned inland, and discovered Californ-y has a lake country. Reservoirs, really, but even sailboats.
We’re really heading inland at this point, with the redwood forests and higher rainfall of the coast behind us, replaced by these mossy oaks, some very gnarly.
Ah, the continuing lowered rainfall…the mountains are now hills, and trees are fewer and particular about where their feet are…drainages preferred….
And, whoop! Around the last curve and over a hill, and we faced flat. Central Valley flat. Massive flatness. Of course, there’s a downhill trend, but most of the other variation has been removed by zealous agriculturalists, making our home grocery stores’ bounty of fragile veggies possible through our winter months.
We also discovered that the flat ground hosts terrible traffic backups. Lost the better part of an hour in three of them. One hoped-for escape route that we tried ended in a surprise “road closed”; Plan Z required!
* “Ludicrous” term thanks to Mel Brooks. Homages on the screen are as recent as “Good Behavior,” where it was applied to a Tesla. Hrumph; Prius Primes, too!
Bloom vs gloom
Monday, 12 December 2016
I just named this photo heather, but I think it’s heath. A bit of goo–ing and I can conclude many are similarly confused.
The out-of-focus part is easy. It’s been spitty to drizzley to rainy out there, and there’s not much light for a photo. Still, the blooms stand out in the gloom.
Hallmarks comma personal
Sunday, 11 December 2016
One hallmark of the Pacific Northwest of North America is plants growing on plants. Maybe this is true elsewhere I typically roam, but here the parasites (or whatever the hitchhikers are) are varied and visible.
Another hallmark of the PacNW to me is salmon. Here we prepped it with a mushroom sauce that was a typical soy-ginger-garlic-honey mixture, with an extra boost from mushrooms. Easy, tasty!