Friday, 26 February 2021
For several days, I heard that today would be rainy. I anticipated that I would find that a bit of a downer when the grey arrived. Turned out, yay!, didn’t bother me. I even walked in the mist ☔︎ that hung around into the afternoon. In shorts.
😉
Thursday, 25 February 2021
Yesterday—wait, no, the day before, I noticed the first early-blooming weeds in flower mode…and, yup, today I heard pollen count info on the morning news. So, pollen-count info should be added to yesterday’s list of evidence that the seasons are changing.
This is a hot-pink fringetree bloom…fringetrees are in the Olive family (Oleaceae), typically with white blooms.
Tuesday, 23 February 2021
No flaw in today’s weather whatsoever.
Might not have been so happy if I had to pick crocus stigmas, such teeeeny little things!
Monday, 22 February 2021
Here’s the moon doing its daytime thing. Speaking of daytime, I can tell the days are longer than they were. Loving it.
🤨
Seems tacky to note that with a half-million Americans dead who were alive a year ago, killed by the Covid, the vaccine distribution is ramping up, and this is a light…(no tunnel illustration, just a light…artsy is sometimes fartsy).
😉
Saturday, 20 February 2021
We skated through The Time of the Polar Vortex, because we had no polar and no vortex. We had some cold, yeah, but mild cold, not polar cold. Here’s camellia proof; the inner petals will be just fine.
Tuesday, 16 February 2021
I know this is a battered specimen, yet it’s the first hyacinth I’ve found in my neighborhood wanders this year. So, it’s a record-breaker!
I was additionally surprised at my find because the overnight temps dropped below freezing last night, and it stayed cold all day, and will drop further overnight tonight. I know the polar vortex is a nightmare elsewhere, and the comparatively mild cold here lacks parity with the snow and power outages elsewhere.
But. For here: brrrrrrr. As in: wore my Goretex neck gaiter for my ENTIRE walk (first time this winter). And my gloves for all but the last half-mile.
Thursday, 11 February 2021
After several lovely days of sun and warmth, we’re in winter mode, and winter here means rainy. I listened to the morning meteorology report and zoomed out early to miss the rain. Instead I got misted on, while if I’d headed out in the afternoon and timed it properly, I could have missed the precip entirely.
Mist. Missed. Didn’t intend to do that!
Watching “Only Connect”—name drawn from the EM Forster in “Howard’s End”: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.” Show is addictive.
Thursday, 4 February 2021
Evidence of how windy it’s been lately—the pine-needle top dressing has redistributed from it’s careful alignment along the sidewalk edge, revealing…subsoil?
I keep thinking this is true: wind can only be captured in a photo through physical bits affected by wind…and not the wind per se.
Monday, 4 January 2021
I took a different street today early in my trek, one I’ve been down before, but not lately. I had forgotten about this bed with extremely early croci until the color awakened my eyeballs, pfffft! Wow!
Later, it occurred to me for the first time that picking the saffron crocus is truly backbreaking work, as these flowers are darned close to the ground!
Thursday, 24 December 2020
Not surprisingly, I imprinted on my childhood and teen-hood seasons with respect to the calendar (in the Midwest), and based on that, we are now in winter, early winter, but still winter. Fully winter.
However.
Yes, um. Now I live in the piedmont Deep South. And here…well, December does not have ice storms and snowbanks…maybe a bit of white, but not sustained white. And white only perhaps umpf years out of every decade.
So, here we are: December on the calendar, with recently fallen (piedmont GA) oak leaves and lichen-decorated stone steps. So aesthetic.
So not winter in the Midwest.