Musings

Our Left Coasters departed today, and left behind this image of the gorgeous 4th fireworks across Puget Sound.

Posted at 8:26 PM | 1 Comment »

This picture and last night’s picture were taken one day and five-and-a-half minutes apart. We had rain in the late afternoon, which, I’m guessing, sapped some of the dramatic color.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Sky speculation

And from the sky descended an airplane carrying precious cargo…loved ones visiting from the Left Coast.

Posted at 9:44 PM | Comments Off on Aren’t we lucky?!

Look at all the visual contrasts! Color, shapes, living vs inanimate—the whole shebang!

Fireworks began precisely at 9:15pm, and they’re now booming in various locations in the southern direction…with nothing sounding in the northern quadrants. This is audio contrasts?

Posted at 9:44 PM | Comments Off on Delving into contrast

Sometime in the dark hours, I woke up and was fuzzy about why I woke up. Soon, I realized there was a snuffly noise outside…pretty sure it was a deer, perhaps the doe we’ve been seeing, calling to her wee fawn (tracks just over an inch long).

By dawn, we had rain.

Then, it stopped for a few hours and I went down to the beach.

Sometime around two, more rain came in, with lightning, thankfully in the distance. Just after three, the power went out. And the rain quit. So much for the mint sauce I was planning to make for our communal dinner.

The power came back on about 7:30. I was so happy.

Posted at 9:38 PM | Comments Off on Living with weather

Oh, and another fatality in the lake in the food web shifts accompanying the zebra mussel infestation—no live clams, only clam shells. The mussels cluster on the clams, and pfft, the clams don’t survive.

Posted at 9:56 PM | Comments Off on Three shells

The grass came on fast this year, and is much taller than in recent years. Why?

Here’s why. There was very little snow last winter, as in multiple locals have told me they used their snowblowers only twice…twice total. That’s in contrast to near daily or even twice a day. No snow.

So, when the temps began to rise in the spring, the soil got warm faster, and the grass began growing earlier, and it “went tall.” Normally, it is unable to span this path when it lodges. Also, we usually can look over the grass heads and get glimpses of the lake. Not so this summer.

We had rain overnight and in the early hours of the morning, but then most of the clouds scooted and I waded in the lake. Yes, the clear water looks beautiful, but it’s clear because of the infestation of zebra mussels (native to Eurasia, brought in ballast water to the Great Lakes, then spread by fisherfolk and boaters). Zebra mussels are filter feeders removing plankton and whatever from the water. This does help the eagles and other predators to see prey, however. The mussels therefore upset the food web big time.

Posted at 9:47 PM | Comments Off on Natural history update

Our lake is shallow; I always heard the deepest place was 15 feet—sometimes 12. Off our beach a short ways is a rock bar perhaps five feet below the surface where fish sometimes congregate. This morning, fisher-guys were out there. Turned out they were from our neighbors’.

Very happy for the young guy in front—he caught a 3-lb, 22 inch walleye! The fellow in back showed him how to fillet it after they got the requisite proof-of-fishing-success photos on land. That is a big walleye for the young fellow to take downstate (on ice), and contribute to his family’s dinner.

Posted at 8:38 PM | Comments Off on Great fishing story

Today’s theme was rain. Not merely wet. Not sprinkles. Rain. And continued rain. Which is good for the natural world as things were a bit dry.

Unrelenting rain days like today when I was a kid we played war on the “sun” porch with five decks and perhaps four kids…that takes a while…as in: the game may never end. Or we did picture puzzles; we had maybe twenty to choose from and we never got through them all in a single summer. Thankfully, there weren’t enough rain days for that.

There were more geese on the sand beach, impossible to pick out in this murky photo, including as many as a dozen goslings.

Posted at 8:45 PM | Comments Off on Dreary and sunless

Before coffee, I got confused about…well, I thought it was the longest day of the year, so I stepped out before sunrise to look up. Of course, the phone compensated for the darkness and made it darned light. And I got the solstice wrong; it’s tomorrow.

BC here is Before Coffee

Posted at 9:43 PM | Comments Off on Confusion BC