Musings

Meet Acer palmatum. This maple is native to east Asia, from Korea north into Russia. Knock me over with a feather; I just read that there are over a thousand cultivars of this species.

Posted at 10:16 PM | Comments Off on Go horticulturalists

You can’t tell it’s the moon even, I suspect, but I’m sure it’s clearly waxing gibbous if you didn’t have the screen of vegetation and you’d been tracking the moon-change.

BTW, my dictionary indicates that gibbous is etymologically in a roundabout way from the Latin gibbus meaning ‘hump.’

Posted at 9:45 PM | Comments Off on What hump?

I thought about a light in darkness theme, but it’s too darned depressing. Instead, I propose leaf-light mosaic. Simplistic, perhaps, but a bit vivifying.

Posted at 10:03 PM | Comments Off on Art

Pareidolia is not psychodelia. The word I encountered today was pareidolia. This word is not in your everyday vocab? Not surprising.

It’s the idea that you, for example, look at a cloud and see a figure, face, a shape you can identify. But it’s just a cloud, and the figure is something that your brain came up with.

This word surfaced for me in an online article titled “Conversations with Caves…” by Izzy Wisher and others (here) The discussed pareidolia related to how the painted figures were placed on the concave and convex shapes of the rugged surface of cave walls. This happened a long time ago in the period archaeologists call the Upper Paleolithic.

Anyway, going forward…I’ll be trying to remember the word pareidolia. Relevance to today? Today, we had a relatively even overcast, so shape identification would have been…difficult.

Posted at 9:28 PM | Comments Off on Pareidolia

We social-butterflied again this weekend, hosting dear friends who live nearby. We discussed sequoias, caribou/reindeer, BBQ, and the recipe for maple syrup—and why homemade is incomparably better than the supermarket version.

Posted at 10:06 PM | Comments Off on Wide-ranging discussions

I call this the movie-star house. That’s because over the last six or so years it’s commonly a short-term rental to movie stars. The real ones. Like Oscar nomination types. I’m glad these folks like our neighborhood.

Posted at 9:42 PM | Comments Off on I’m not outing them here

I swear I can tell the day-length is changing. Of course, it’s changing every day, but when we move from a maxiumum or minimum, I THINK I can perceive the trend with greater ease. [Sky-light at 8:55pm local time.]

Posted at 10:10 PM | Comments Off on Silly me

I walked this morning in the coolness, nose-level or nose-down as is typical for me. Below this I noticed a one-foot chunk of wooden pole, triggering a look-up.

Yup, replacement underway. The upper lines and a transformer (?) have been switched to the new, taller pole, but the old one, albeit shortened, still seems to be carrying the lower lines.

You can tell it’s relatively early in the day, as the light is bright only on the tree-tops. [Proud of myself; photo was taken at 6:48am.]

Posted at 9:25 PM | Comments Off on Infrastructure updating

Here’s a different visualization of a bit of the neighborhood, both the angle and the exposure/crazy-camera. Looks almost like a jungle….

Posted at 9:37 PM | Comments Off on Crape myrtle framing

Around here, June was a bust for rainfall…we received close to zero-zilch. The last four days have more than made up for that deficit and launched us most of the way to our July average to boot.

The tough part is that it is darned humid outside (outside meaning: beyond the air-conditioning).

Posted at 9:23 PM | Comments Off on Drops do accumulate