Musings

Really, this is truly a “one that got away” shot (courtesy JCB).

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Fishing reality

I’ve shown you ducks, goslings, reflections, and other miscellany from Piedmont Park, so let me add this detail from a now-closed structure, rather futuristically (for his times) anchoring Shakespeare for a few nights (rather unfortunately called Shake at the Lake).

Posted at 9:51 PM | 2 Comments »

Love the wee bits of decoration we spot on the older business buildings during our walks….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Architectural detail

For the last two years, we’ve seen lots of ducklings at Piedmont Park, but this year we’ve seen only one. Previously, I don’t remember any Canada geese reproducing around Lake Clara Meer, but this year there’s one set. Cute!

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

Label on the famous Bigfoot RMJ camper.

I know Robert and Mary Jo because years ago, Robert was my boss at a long-gone plant nursery on the outskirts of Portland (Oregon). I only worked there one summer, and only part of that ’cause I headed back to Michigan to attend KayakWoman’s wedding to the GG, held in the sunshine on the beach near Brimley. Because I went to KW’s wedding, I missed R&MJ’s.

That fall I continued to work for Robert, planting trees on a sloping field a few miles from the nursery. That time is a blur, for the most part, but I remember working bent over in misty rain, knees embedded in soft, dark brown, slightly moist soil, hands in gloves, placing bare-root trees in their new homes.

Posted at 5:12 PM | Comments Off on Long-time friends

From atop Brasstown Bald, we descended the old road, now known as Wagon Train Trail, enjoying unwinding vistas, and watched over by the Brasstown tower.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Brasstown browse

Ecologically aware members of the general public in this country tend to do a better job thinking about the implications of their choices about what they ingest than thinking about “downstream” effects. Sometimes we consider problems with fertilizer washing into our waterways, but less so the chemicals we send out our homes’ wastepipes. (Exception: Jay—but you’re not “general public”!!)

Cornelia Dean, in this NYTimes piece, details the problem liquids that typical households deliver to treatment systems that often just pass them on without trying to remove them. I’d heard about hormone problems in water creatures and the presence of antibiotics in streams, but it’s far more than that. So, your new acronym is PPCP, meaning pharmaceutical and personal care products. Find PPCP in a water faucet near you. Notes an environmental scientist, “it is a mistake to consider all of these compounds safe “by default,” and…more must be done to assess their cumulative effects, individually or in combination, even at low doses.”

I had no understanding of buying bottled drinking water until I lived in Oaxaca in 1989 and the tap water was not potable. I have never seriously considered it here in Atlanta (“our water tastes good”), but I may have to reconsider—but not in individual portions, only those large water-cooler sizes (returnable ones, too). Too bad here we don’t have the trucks cruising residential neighborhoods with refills, their drivers yelling “Aaaahhhh-gwaaaaaahhhhhh!”

Here’s a Mexican-Spanish vocabulary word: garrafón—large bottle or carafe, (a perfect size for household use).

Posted at 12:28 PM | Comments Off on Potable water

JCB & I were in the kitchen. Weird noise overhead—not the washer. JCB dashed to the window; I recognized it, a distinctive motory, grinding, deep, penetrating resonance.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Sound above

Today I’ve been thinking volcanoes, which sent me to the dictionary to check out a few technical terms:

tephra

air-fall material (pyroclastics) ejected from a volcano during eruption

ash

fine tephra particles <2mm in diameter

lapilli

tephra particles 2–64mm in diameter; multiple forms

volcanic bombs or blocks

tephra objects >64mm in diameter

fugacity

a thermodynamic property of a real gas that, if substituted for the pressure or partial pressure in the equations for an ideal gas, gives equations applicable to the real gas (this one has my head spinning)

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

The yellow dusting on all exposed surfaces confirms that it’s pollen season, and everyone always says it’s pine pollen. I’ve examined some of those wormy things that the oak trees are dropping, and they leave yellow smudges on the sidewalks, so I’m thinking part of the yellow dusting (current count exceeds 5K) is from the oaks, too. This makes additional sense because in this part of town we have many oaks and fewer pines.

Yeah, I know the pine pollen grains are very large, and the oaks, not so much*, but still….

* …as Jon Stewart would say….

Posted at 10:34 AM | Comments Off on Pollen constituents