Earlier today we discussed whether the neighborhood squirrel count had decreased lately. Data from our library walk suggests…about the same.

By mid-afternoon, we could see the weather change, and the big fluffy flakes began to fall. The ground stayed warm enough that we made it to the Big Eighty-Four celebration, up in Buckhead. And home again, after. We played taxi, glad to have our 4×4, and especially glad that most people avoided driving.

* This is a peach tree, BTW….

I forgot to mention that when we were out on Sapelo Island over the weekend, we saw an orange tree. Isn’t the Spanish moss artistic?

If you really feel like reading, this is where I was on Saturday (Ashantilly Plantation, north of Darien) and Sunday (Sapelo Island, east of Darien).

Yeah, this was a rainy day. Meteorologists say this storm is headed north, and will dump the white stuff in the northeast. Here, though, it’s coming down in buckets.

And, yes, those are live oaks (Quercus virginiana) festooned with Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides).

No native Spanish moss decorations in Atlanta, so you know we drove to the coast. In said storm. We saw the front three times. This photo is from the last time, when we were on the driving tour at Harris Neck. In spite of the waves of fierce precip, we saw a flock of turkeys, and, later, after dark, a small herd of deer (we were going slowly, so no worries about a deer-Prius accident).

Sunshine plus special holiday equals busy Piedmont Park. Even though you don’t see anyone in this shot!

I’ve never seen this building open, but I think, at least at one time, it was a welcome center. We also walked up to the main gates on the west side of the park, which usually front a too-busy street. Today, however, the driving traffic was moderate and tolerable.

View of South Fork Peachtree Creek through the woods, Morningside Nature Preserve, just after the dedication this morning.

It was pretty low-key participation, but JCB and I attended the dedication of Atlanta’s newest park, the Morningside Nature Preserve.

For being pretty darned foggy, the weather was reasonably cooperative—it wasn’t raining.

Most of the people there seemed to have participated in the making of the Preserve. There were also a few people who lived nearby.

Then: us.

John maintains that a likely journalist showed up late, but I didn’t notice.

Advance head’s-up: There’ll be a Weekly Ponder on Friday on thesga.org about this—but not until 5 am Eastern on the 18th….

We did get out for a loop through Piedmont Park, and saw more activity than I had thought we’d encounter, given the cold and gloomy weather.

We saw what must have been a photography class mustering by the lake, almost twenty people with cameras, and some even with suitcases of gear. They seemed a bit disorganized.

We encountered a few exercisers, mostly solos, the mid-day crowd, I guess, who are different than the early- and late-day folks.

The dog-walker count was down, but still present.

For your visual pleasure, here’s a photo of what must have been a practice(?), in the outfield of one of the baseball diamonds in the active oval. Too cold for shirts and skins, so the guys went with the obvious. I loved this moment, when the football, otherwise the focus of the action, sat there abandoned and ignored.

Speaking of attention, I must now wrangle another triple batch of bourbon balls, and roll ‘em a little smaller this time….

Ran across a technical article about Yellowstone geology, especially how the caldera-hotspot has moved across the earth’s surface (from our point of view) over time. Here’s a WikiP image of it, and here’s a bit of a discussion of it….

All this seems a bit trivial, as I also have been thinking about Nancy and her partners, speed-making a movie over this weekend; technical name: challenge film-making…. It seems to me that a big part of the process is figuring how much you can arrange ahead of time—and doing it!, to leave time for the important parts that can’t be put off. Anyway, if her group’s film wins, it goes to Cannes for screening!

It’s rainy out there this morning, with precip expected to continue into the evening, albeit at decreasing intensity.

I’m up early, or rather at my winter normal of 5-5:30 am (no matter when I go to sleep, oddly and unfortunately). I’d rather have more sleep in these dark hours, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

Anyway, absent walkable weather (for a while), and with time on my hands (for a bit), I thought I’d break my pattern and blog early. Very early!

And, to bring sunlight to the day, I select this photo from earlier this week: the new outdoor pool at Piedmont Park (which seems nearly overfilled from recent rainfall). It’s part of the renovations there along with the new parking garage and gardens installed by the ATL Bot Garden. While this hardscaping etc. provides interesting new visual scapes, I also hear that the ABG now turns away local garden/plant groups they used to let use their meeting rooms, which seems a poorly conceived management trend.

I admit it; this photo’s from yesterday.

Today, it’s too overcast for this scene to be the least bit dramatic…bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) on the banks of Lake Clara Meer.