Wigged, twigged? Something….
Friday, 25 March 2011
Just what do you call a white redbud that doesn’t make you sound…logic-challenged?
Musings
They’re ba-a-a-ck! (dogwoods)
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Cooped up. And I did it to myself. I’ve had a “chore” hanging over me, and today I attacked!
Trouble is, this wasn’t the chore that was on today’s to-do list….
Sigh. (Can’t say it hasn’t happened before, though, haha.)
A watchful gaze…sees
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Azaleas ready to pop, after dark.
He had taken to smoking cigarettes and every time he made one we all stopped to watch. In his vest pocket he carried a sack of Bull Durham smoking tobacco with a round tag with a bull on it hanging out. He also had a thin packet of cigarette papers called LFFs—Loafer’s Last Friend. He would hold a paper curved in his fingers of his left hand and fill it with tobacco. He had a way of holding the sack in his right hand so he could pull it open and shut with his teeth. When the bag was back in his pocket, with the bull showing so we would remember jokes about it and laugh, he would roll the cigarette and seal it by drawing his tongue along it. Then he would h’ist his leg and strike a match on his tight pants.
This was what I liked most to see. He would stretch his duckings leg till the blue was almost white. Then he would draw the match toward him, barely letting the head touch the cloth, and it would flame up a reddish yellow. He would hold the match still till the flame was clear yellow and then light his cigarette. He let me try in, but I did not get my duckings leg tight enough and the match stick broke.
Lots to like here: “cigarette” is never nicknamed or shortened, LFF’s full title is presented blandly, the solid sentences, the graphic imagery. But, mostly: the detailed observation.
How much of Owens’s technology and terminology is…historical quaintness now?
Passage from William A. Owens’s 1966 This Stubborn Soil: A Frontier Boyhood, pp 159–160 in my paperback Vintage Book edition.
White knight, white flower
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
There are some days I feel like I’m spinning my wheels, and, sure enough, I have a hard time putting my finger on what I got done.
Today I met a somewhat higher standard, but not a particularly rigorous one. I did track down a few dust bunnies (maybe more like dust-ponies), and I did venture out for some groceries, and, um—see what I mean?
I did find a super-helpful 2010 article by Tina Thurston that helped me understand the Bronze Age in Italy and Europe; she combines archaeological data and archaeological theory, rather than being cowed by the writings of the ancients…. Yippee!
Thurston, Tina L. 2010. “Bitter Arrows and Generous Gifts: What Was a ‘King’ in the European Iron Age?” In Pathways to Power: New Perspectives on the Emergence of Social Inequality, edited by T. Douglas Price, and Gary F. Feinman, pp. 193–254. Springer, New York.
Druids near Druid Hills?
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Lettuce bowl, by TH. (Doc Chey’s is big on rice bowls, and other yummy dishes; we like “bowls”!)
On our way home from erranding, I was driving and the JCB was looking out the window checking out the neighborhood. The weather was fine, but slightly overcast, kinda wintery, but warm and springy at the same time. (This is the South; “spring” and “winter” are relative terms.)
Going past parkland down by Little Five, JCB said something to the effect: there’s folks up on the hill; it looks like there’s some religious thing going on.
“Solstice Sunday,” I said (although my words were alliterative, I was wrong; it’s the equinox).
And now, at least in this time zone, it’s spring! (By the moon, stars, and whatever that isn’t the local climate.)
Berries…coming on…
Saturday, 19 March 2011
Yesterday at the Bot Garden, we discovered…nascent strawberries! The berries are already forming right there in the flower-centers. I think these plants must have been “forced” in a greenhouse; they seem a bit ahead of the normal plant-speed—although today’s weather has aided and abetted plant progress—whew!—we broke 80 on the Farenheit scale….
The Guru and I wrangled technology, and did some pressure washing. Until the technology “sat down” on the job, and pffft!—no more progress. Well, the back porch is in good shape, and the side has gotten a good tending (REALLY needed it!). The front, the public part of our presentation to the world—untouched.
Conclusion: machine may now be “dead.”
I’m guessing…
Friday, 18 March 2011
These bleeding hearts (Dicentra spp.)…not suffering from the breezes emanating from Washington….
Sobering visual: the quake pattern around Japan in collapsed real time, plotted on a Google satellite map. Of course, this isn’t the whole area where the quakes have come, but this website says nearly 600 quakes (something like magnitude 4 and above) in the last 7 days around Japan. That fault, well, it’s moving!
Highlight of the day: luncheon at the BotGarden with Terry—we laughed a lot! And, she introduced me to MetroFresh owner Mitchell! Cruising!
Then, I dropped T off and headed home, finding the day’s mail on the Uncle Bob table….
What are the odds? For international travel, the Guru found a credit card that doesn’t charge additional for charges in foreign currency. So, following some strategy that is over my head, he had me apply, and, thankfully, it arrived today. So I called the activation number and the nice-voiced woman asked cheerily—and not at all mechanically—how I was, and I said, fine, the sun is shining, and I’m doing pretty well. Then, I took a flyer and said something to the effect that I guessed she was in…Idaho?…and maybe it was still wintery there? She cracked up—you’re a great guesser, she said—I’m about two hours south of Coeur d’Alene!!!
You’d think that’d send me right out to the nearest convenience store to buy a few lottery tickets!
On the new credit card!
But…no!
Happy Irish-day!
Thursday, 17 March 2011
For this day-o’green, a lily? I think?….
I spent this day emotionally wasted, not sure why.
Finally—finally!—I got out for some one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, and found the park busy-busy. The lake is now super-full, and the breeze yesterday blew the floating trash up on the lake-side walkway, which now is, um, unappealing.
Flowers for ya!
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
I’ve heard especially good personal news from three women important to me over the last five days. The life-changing kind. Nice!
On the mundane side (hardly seems to matter if you think too much about the nightmare in Japan and the…I won’t go on), we’ve broken the 80K threshold on our iPhoto count. Whew!
Imagine the smell
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
One of my all-time favorite books is The Desert Smells Like Rain,* by nature-writer Gary Paul Nabhan. Originally from the Lake Michigan shore in Indiana, Midwesterner Nabhan has lived for years in the arid Southwest.
He’s an ethnobiologist, which means he’s interested in how people use plants. Nabhan has worked with the Native American peoples near his Phoenix area home for years. He tells the story from which he got the name of his 1982 book:
Once I asked a Papago youngster what the desert smelled like to him. He answered with little hesitation:
“The desert smells like rain.”
I’m with the kid; dry dry lands don’t smell much when they’re desiccated. The rain changes the plants and soil, releasing lovely smells.
I suppose that’s a tenuous peg for this photo of the camellia today. The rain came down hard for quite a while. I presume the water accumulated to break some of the blooms away from the plant, as several dotted the ground around the plant. This flower, however, weathered…the weather.
* There’re two editions of Nabhan’s book. The subtitle of the 1982 original (the one I have) was A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country. The 2002 edition is mostly the same, but the “tribe’s” name has been updated, so the subtitle is A Naturalist in O’odham Country. The Tohono O’odham, formerly called the Papago, are desert peoples whose territory used to be the Sonoran desert, where today they have a reservation in Arizona. Read more about the Tohono O’odham Nation here. I mentioned another Nabhan book, Cultures in Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story (1998) back in fall 2007 when we visited the Indiana dunes where he roamed as a youth—on another rainy day. What’s that mean? Two rainy days; two days with GPN thoughts….