Musings

I never heard of “the twisties,” a term commonly used by gymnasts and in the news after Simone Biles used it. She meant that despite all her practice and experience, her brain no longer knew where she was in space as she did a vault or other maneuver. The potential penalty for a gymnast can be serious injury; SB managed to land safely, thankfully. The twisties are difficult to banish, to overcome, and to conquer. As Emily Giambalvo put it in a WaPo story, “Simone Biles said she got the ‘twisties.’ Gymnasts immediately understood” (28 July)

And after experiencing the twisties once, it’s very difficult to forget. Instinct gets replaced by thought. Thought quickly leads to worry. Worry is difficult to escape.

I’m wondering if it has a faint relationship to when I mistype a (common) word, and my fingers/brain repeat this error until I super concentrate and somehow return once again to the correct letter order.

Or perhaps more likely, this finger-blip is nothing like the twisties.

Posted at 7:38 PM | 2 Comments »

Laundry day means laundry and gro-shopping, all in one speedy 35 minute window (plus drive time). These days all we do at the ’dro is wash ($5 per triple load; we did two), then bring the damp fabric piles home to hang out. [Yay for MaNachur’s dry cycle.] We don’t have much line, so we used convoluted algorithms for carefully doubling up the sheets (old country technique).

Posted at 8:22 PM | Comments Off on Retro strategies

Road sign, heh. A bird’s dust bath. Must have been darned energetic to clear away that much gravel.

I’ll throw this in. A double-wedge of illumination on the swamp ditch, plus artsy tree branches.

I can tell the sun’s moving away from full summer mode. The low angle light in the morning continues much later. Which I appreciate in my attempt to walk in shadow.

Posted at 8:15 PM | Comments Off on Road sign, plus

The story here: I spotted many “black”birds congregated in the top branches of this dead elm. But. I took so long fumbling with the phone to get the camera on and pointed, that many flew off to the left. Another time.

Here I attempted to capture the visual contrast of the darkness under the trees, and the light in the distance in an open meadow(?). I like that dark under zone, which really isn’t well illustrated here.

Update: The haze I reported on Monday is Rocky Mountain fire smoke, even though I couldn’t smell smoke (too high? too dissipated?). It was even hazier today. Still no smoke smell.

Posted at 6:37 PM | Comments Off on Tree tales

I’m proud of myself. I headed out to the deep morning shade to find and remove phototoxic cow parsnips. This one is old enough to bloom, and is on the neighbor’s side of the fence. I figure it likely spawned the ones on our side of the fence. Bye-bye, mama.

This evening, we took advantage of a free concert at the Erickson Center. This is most of the crowd, and I’d say it’s very large for the middle of almost-nowhere. [Don’t ask me about the cement pad—don’t know what it’s for; the band played from an elevated, roofed stage behind where I was standing.] Darned fine Celtic and Celtic-inspired music by a trio from the Marquette area.

Posted at 9:38 PM | Comments Off on Win-win

Almost ripe is not ripe enough. That lower berry is getting there. A bird may well nab it before it’s fully ripened. Greedy buggers. [Black raspberries.]

I’m working on late-day sun protection for the “sun” porch, since we’ve lost so much of our vegetative protection to MaNachur. Seems pretty uptown for this cottage.

Posted at 7:00 PM | Comments Off on Timing

First data point: green white pine cone. Parsed, this means a new, this-year’s pine cone, essentially ripening.

Second data point: we attended two (!!!) social functions today. Vaxxing makes this possible in these pandemic times.

Posted at 9:34 PM | Comments Off on Marking time

The coast in this case is the Mother Lake, that is: Lake Superior. Great view from Crisp Point Lighthouse.

We worked our way east from there. This is Little Lake, which is a little lake, quite round, right next to Superior, with a short connecting waterway that cuts through a dune. Little Lake was and is a safety harbor for small boats that faced bad weather. I was surprised to see the diversity of plants in shallow water from the dock. Two loons noted our arrival from close to shore, working their way farther out as we hung around.

Next stop: mouth of the Two-Hearted River. That’s it in the foreground, with Superior behind the sand and stone.

The Two-Hearted water is tinted by its time in cedar swamps in the upper catchment. It is not dirty.

Posted at 8:33 PM | Comments Off on Clear water, color variations

Walking through the swamp, I found many puddles because it rained off and on for the previous dozen hours or so. This was the only puddle a vehicle hadn’t run through and churned up. Clarity!

And this was the hyper-green view toward Mud Lake, although all you can see is the creek, narrow and supporting a substantial population of duckweed with its tiny leaves. That’s not the name of the body of water on the Goo-Maps, but that’s the name I learned. And it is a shallow, filling, hummock-rimmed pond-lake, so it’s an appropriate name. I think the Goo-name is from non-locals…my pet hypothesis.

Posted at 9:35 PM | Comments Off on Reflection reality

A major milestone, really mile-bridge: crossing The Big Mac. Which we called it before that burger got the name.

I fussed about how big the line would be at the toll plaza, but, zip. Or maybe a half-dozen vehicles. At other times we’ve waited as much as 20 minutes. Also, the maintenance crews that usually block one lane were not working. Lovely traffic flow!

However, in the middle of nowhere—almost, really the west edge of Naubinway, no traffic getting through east or west. Never did figure out what had happened. No trash on the road, no crushed vehicles, no ambulances.

Where we were stopped, we watched a little drama play out. Someone driving a pickup pulling perhaps a 30-foot travel trailer decided to turn around to escape the halted line. He was particularly unskilled. Someone got him back into traffic the first time he tried to back the trailer up. But five minutes later he tried to make a u-turn forward. The pickup ended up across the deep-ish ditch, with the rear wheels in the deepest part of the ditch, all wheels turning with no purchase, and the front end of the trailer laying on the gravel road-side, and some of the plastic plumbing flopping loose. Scratch one expensive travel trailer.

So glad to be at the cottage. Lake very placid. Expecting overnight lows in the upper 50s. Also, there’s been rain since we left, so plants are back to green.

Posted at 9:02 PM | Comments Off on Watching and watching