Musings

In honor of today’s summer temps (high about 80°F, low about 60°F), I present a picture of the snow that accumulated on our patio furniture on 1 March, this year.

Recent birthdays: The Botanist is 92 and planting the garden. Another (terror-)pair is something over half that.

We’ve officially transitioned to summer here, based on the upstairs becoming “too hot” without AC—but only in the late afternoon/evening (so far).

I sat through upwards of two dozen papers at the SAAs last week, and only bought two books.

We joined the commemoration of the lively and well-lived life of JN Chamblee, sadly claimed by cancer earlier this month.

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On swine flu, the best I’ve read is here. Author David Kirby fingers confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, as one critical link in this outbreak, and notes:

“Classic” swine flu virus (not the novel, mutated form in the news) is considered endemic in southern Mexico, while the region around the capital is classified as an “eradication area”—meaning the disease is present, and efforts are underway to control it. For some reason, vaccination of pigs against swine flu is prohibited in this area, and growers rely instead on depopulation and restriction of animal movement when outbreaks occur.

But remember: most people are recovering, including all cases outside Mexico (so far). Repeat if necessary….

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Earlier today I figured out that the stimulus money that is flowing to the states through the National Park Service totals $700 million (a small percentage of the total American Recovery and Reinvestment Act monies), and lowly Georgia is getting, tada!, a mere 0.33 percent of that (at most)—or just under $2.5 million. If all states got an equal amount, Georgia would get $15 million. Yeah, I know there are many important projects out there; I felt the need to point out the pattern, however.

Posted at 3:32 PM | 1 Comment »

This gully is in the Mixteca Alta, which I’ve written a bit about here.

So, while much of the world was going about its business, I was cooped up inside an architecturally insipid hotel downtown listening to interesting and not so interesting papers on archaeology. Last night’s crop was really good, today’s more mundane….

The picture is of a “slide” someone put up (in these days of Keynote and it’s awful MS imitator, they’re no longer slides, but what to call them?), showing a huge erosional gully. The ladder is 4 m tall—that’s 13 feet. And the soil at the height of the guy standing on the ladder was deposited maybe AD 1400, so all that soil above his head was deposited in the last 500 years, then the whole mess suffered the erosion that made the eroded face we’re looking at. If that makes sense. (The soil at the bottom dates to about 7500 BC or so. That’s one heck of a lot of soil when you consider there’s a whole modest valley with this kind of deposition!)

Lesson: if you’re going to take away the vegetation in a mountainous region with friable soils, either maintain the ground surface or watch it wash away. There’s no middle ground.

*…and somewhere nearby I’m sure there’s plenty of red soil eroding (whosh!), too….

Posted at 9:14 PM | Comments Off on As I write this, it is raining…*

Just for variety, here’s a gorgeous photo of rainy night last week (yes, in Georgia!), unPhotoshopped, courtesy JCB.

It’s sunny and hot today. I put my tomato plants (I’m lame; I bought them) in the ground yesterday, and they look pretty happy today. I’ll get some newspapers laid around them tomorrow, I hope, to hold in the moisture and discourage weeds. Maybe they’ll have enough sun to bear. They’re in the newly sunny area in the front yard; always before I planted them in the too-shady back yard and I grew tomato plants and not tomatoes.

Posted at 4:37 PM | 1 Comment »

It rained last night, pretty heavily at times. This morning, the winds came with the rain, whoosh for quite a while. Small branches fell and we heard some ominous sounds from afar—thankfully for the afar part. I went out to photography the white azalea that’s in full bloom and found the branches droopy under a heavy load of precip.

To get away from the roof and diminish the scary wind noises, I did some reading downstairs during the w-o-r-s-t of it, and came across the following in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007). Here’s the setup. Spring is coming, and the turkeys that weren’t sacrificed for Thanksgiving and other feasts—meaning the hens—begin to experience the springtime tide of rising hormones, but BK doesn’t understand that that’s what’s going on with the hen with droopy wings. She finally figures it out and hies off to the internet and the library for the animal husbandry information she needs, and which didn’t arrive with her two-day-old chicks the spring before. Since most modern US turkeys come into the world via artificial means, hatch under heat lamps, and are sacrificed before they reach their own springtimes, appropriate council, she discovered, is…rare. She finally digs up a fifty-year old agricultural self-help book and gets some advice (p. 322):

I had more than just sentimental reasons for wanting to see my turkey hens brood and hatch their own babies, however unlikely that might be. I plowed on through my antique reference for more details on nesting and brooding, and what I might do to be a helpful midwife, other than boiling water or putting a knife under the bed. My new turkey-sex manual got better and better. “Male turkeys,” I read, “can be forced to broodiness by first being made drowsy, e.g., by an ample dose of brandy, and then being put on a nest with eggs. After recovery from the hangover, broodiness is established. This method was used extensively by farmers in Europe before incubators were available.”

Got it?

Posted at 1:43 PM | 1 Comment »

In acknowledgement of the many tornado watches and general bad weather, the network stations stayed on local reporting for hours during the late afternoon/early evening. Right here, we got a bit of hard rain, maybe momentary hail, and lots of dramatic skies. Basically, the scary stuff was around us, rather than over us.

Fine with me!

* The weather maps broadcast by the station we watched most of the time displayed purple dots, or sometimes blotches, which we were told was where hail was falling.

PS Normally I like purple!

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

This morning we enjoyed Fun with Delta.

They sent us to stand in the hallway, having checked our tickets, but without letting us out of the building. Then after maybe ten minutes while JetBlue passengers to Orlando were sent ahead of us, they let us out of the building and onto the tarmac. And stopped us again. We waited in the cold breeze, most of us underdressed home-bound Atlantans (I’m guessing). After maybe five minutes, they sent us back into the boarding lounge. Not good. After a couple of minutes they said the flight was indefinitely delayed. Really not good. Then they told us to line up for them to find us alternate flights. Majorly not good. And this was in an airport already backed up from flights that were cancelled the day before. Super not good. Then, the dam broke and they wisely wheeled a plane over from the opposite side of the field, and let us board. Happy people! We got seated and the pilot came on and said that the toilet was leaking in the discarded jet, and they couldn’t get it stopped. For our flight anyway. Lucky us, there was a backup plane!

We walked home from the MARTA station, noting that pine pollen season has begun and that the, tada!, dogwoods are almost all in bloom!

So, today we left the ice-storm weather behind and returned to springtime!

Posted at 8:35 PM | 6 Comments »

Despite the in-and-out/now-and-then rain, we did get a good walk in, well, good if you’re a young toddler—fine for the rest of us. Still, we got to hear the wind in the treetops and to scuff our feet in the muddy road, and we noted that the puddles that had been almost dry yesterday had been renewed.

Posted at 6:45 PM | Comments Off on Dripping pricker plants

Forsythia: half aging blooms, half new leaves a’comin’.

Ornamental fruit trees: full bloom.

Daffodils: still vibrant, but almost ready to begin fading.

Redbud: almost out to full out.

Rainy walk today, but fun, ’cause it wasn’t that warm, so pleasant to stroll bundled against the precip.

Posted at 10:14 PM | Comments Off on Spring report

This was sunset yesterday, with the sky uplit from reflections off the blanket of snow on the ground. I’d forgotten how much reflection all that fresh-white can make.

Tonight, just about the only snow left is 1) in the shade (deep shade), or 2) on the grass where there was no sunshine this afternoon.

So, the sunset sky today? Oh, pretty much the same-ol’ same-ol’ and not particularly interesting….

Posted at 10:31 PM | 2 Comments »

At 1:45 pm, the big flakes came down like this was Alaska—you can see them above. But, no! This was only Virginia-Highland!

By 5 pm, we’re back to rain, which is washing the slush off the streets. And, scarily, the wind is picking up, and it’s supposed to be gusty all night….

Oh, no!

Posted at 5:22 PM | Comments Off on Winter’s white