Life in the deluxe lane
Monday, 8 June 2009
Yup, when there’s a basket of these fresh-picked from the garden on the kitchen table, and it’s starting to sprinkle after a dry spell, life is pretty darned good.
Locally, anyway.
Musings
Gloomy skies don’t stop us
Sunday, 7 June 2009
We were on the move today, and had thought about taking the ferry over to Mackinac Island, but spitting rain at the straits caused us to rethink our plans.
Instead, we drove west to Bliss, then down to Cross Village, which is quite a place. Leg’s Inn there, established by a Polish immigrant, is decorated along the roofline with upside down stove legs. We stopped along the beach and took a few photos of the churning skies over Lake Michigan.
We dropped down an extremely scenic (“heritage”) road from Cross Village to Harbor Springs. We found a nice sandwich shop with good bread and a stack of Sunday NYTimes amidst all the fancy places at ritzy Harbor Springs. From there, we continued south to Petosky and then Traverse City, before cutting inland. Nice.
The weather never improved greatly, but we had a great run even so.
Whoa-hoh! (boiling clouds)
Friday, 15 May 2009
Drove across the piedmont north-south (that is, I-75 Atlanta<>Macon) today and can report: 1) the roadside grasses etc. are still lush and green (unlike the last few years); and, 2) local rain cells make for a gorgeous sky!
Tower silhouettes
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
Perfect evening for watching the sun set out by the pool…and then the ’skeeters came out, so we decamped to the balcony, and the sunset extended for hours.
Thanks, M!
Stump garden
Monday, 11 May 2009
Our next-door neighbor is quite a gardener, and has given the stump socket new life. All the rain we’ve been having has helped the transition process. The hostas and ferns are watched over by a poke plant that’s shooting up and getting huge! I love keeping track of it through the kitchen windows. A chipmunk also hangs out in the stump garden….
The wheel of life….
BTW, with all this rain we’ve been having, Atlanta’s main drinking water reservoir, Lake Sidney Lanier, is within 6 feet of the desired summer levels. Seems like it should be a bit higher this time of the year, but this is so much better than it’s been….
Better image
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
’Maters are bloomin’ now (and have been for a couple of weeks).
Hey, it’s really a cool camera…. Here’s a better still….
Weather alert!
Saturday, 2 May 2009
Heavy rain, mixed with light hail, for a while this afternoon, but not too long (I hope; it’s raining now; I’m going by the radar maps). Happy tomatoes!
Milestones and bits
Monday, 27 April 2009
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.
As I write this, it is raining…*
Thursday, 23 April 2009
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….
Hot/sunny, but I remember windy/rainy
Saturday, 18 April 2009
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.