Brian got a lot of work done today. I bundled the ivy and tree branches that were piled in the driveway for collection Monday. Tomorrow is a day off.
Here's the pole he was drilling in the section between my mom's house and the neighbors.
The picture on top goes to the left of the picture below. The old fence is leaning there against the house and will go up on the hill where Brian's working above. There's new fencing for fence and gate in the picture below. You can see the earlier pictures here. It's amazing how you get used to a space and don't think about how it could look if you made a few changes. Just opening up the fence changed the look a lot. This evening I thought, gee, we could take out some of the hill and put a little table for breakfast in there. Nothing 'is' permanently and often problems force us to something better than we would have done. In this case the bad gate is offering new opportunities.
It's actually raining in LA. Spent a lot of time today cleaning the garage and the yard, getting ready to put in a new gate. The old fence and gate are leaning badly due to tree pressure. But I'm still thinking skateboards and skateboardpark.com has some skateboard furniture I thought you might like to check out. There's more at the link.
This afternoon a black capped chickadee flew into our bedroom through this window, flew around a bit, and then out. I didn't actually see it myself, but I heard my wife's "there's a big spider" gasp and when I got there it was already gone.
Last week, while I was sitting here blogging, a nuthatch flew in between the window and screen of our living room window. The window was just barely open and it was fluttering around. I was able to open the window further and it flew off. This window is just below the one that a Northern Hawk Owl smashed into last fall. He dropped onto the driveway and I thought he was dead. But he moved, I got my camera, and video taped him getting up and flying off. You can see it at the link. No time for the camera in these recent encounters.
These are rather special moments, but a little strange. A few weeks ago a guest and I were having lunch on the deck when three nuthatches flew up to us. One landed on the table next to the guest's plate and one hovered over his chest while the third landed on him briefly. As I was writing this I heard a noise on the deck. A Steller (NOT StellAr) Jay was checking out the flower box, and then came within a couple feet of me.
I don't know what it means. As long as Alfred Hitchcock doesn't show up, I'm ok.
When I had sabbatical in 2003-2004 we rented our house and made one downstairs room into a storage room for a lot of our stuff. It never completely reverted back into a real room and it was still a storage room when we had house sitters while we were in Thailand earlier this year.
But the son of a good friend and colleague from Beijing will be visiting us for a month beginning Wednesday. Thursday both our daughter and son will arrive, one for two weeks and one for the weekend. We have some birthdays on Friday. And a week later my college roommate and his wife will stop by for two days before they cruise back home. All good fun. So the long slow rehabilitation of that downstairs room has been speeded up.
At this point, I could just put all the miscellaneous stuff into boxes and sort them out later, but we've been postponing the inevitable too long. My mother's garage is a model of what I don't want to do. So I've been going through stuff that's accumulated and putting things where they belong, in the trash, or in a donate box.
Eventually I want to clear the room out completely and make it into more usable space, but for now it will hold a mattress on the floor for the weekend. And maybe while the kids are here, they will find some things that they are now ready to take, trash, or give away.
The life cycle of most species is rather complex. In Wisconsin aphids spend the winter as eggs. When these hatch in the spring, they produce only wingless females that give birth to live young (without mating = parthenogenetic reproduction). Each female aphid reproduces for a period of 20–30 days, giving birth to 60–100 live nymphs. The nymphs look like the adults but are smaller. The nymphs mature and can produce offspring within a week when temperatures are high. Eggs within these females start to develop long before birth so that a newly born aphid can contain within herself not only the developing embryos of her daughters but also those of her granddaughters which are developing within her daughters. This 'telescoping of generations' means aphids can build up immense populations very quickly. Under ideal conditions, one cabbage aphid could produce 1,560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 offspring by the end of a growing season. (Obviously this doesn't happen, since natural controls – such as weather and predators – eliminate significant numbers of aphids.)
From Backyard Nature, a little more on the life cycle of the aphid:
An "average" aphid life cycle would be something like this:
In spring an egg hatches, producing a wingless female aphid who soon begins parthenogenetically producing new wingless females. Generation after generation of wingless females survive one another until hot weather comes or maybe the plant on which they are living dies and then suddenly some of the females grow wings and fly off. At the right you see what a winged aphid may look like, though they come in many colors and shapes. This new generation of female winged aphid very well may at this time find a plant host of a completely different species from that on which their spring generations have developed. For instance, Green Peach Aphids overwinter as eggs on peach and related trees but in spring they move to various weeds and agricultural crops, and then still later they move to potato crops, only in the fall returning to peach and related trees.
Typically late in the year when it's time to move back to the plant species on which the aphid overwinters, finally some aphids develop into males as well as females. Sexual reproduction then takes place and when the mated females return to the winter plant-host they lay fertilized eggs. Then next spring the females hatch from the eggs and the cycle begins again, with no males in sight.
Last year I didn't clean these guys off frequently enough and they seriously stunted the growth of the Thalictrum and its flowers. So I just keep wiping or hosing them off.
Our house sitters left a very neat and clean house for us, plus this basket of fruit. Thanks! Our street is almost clear of snow, and the 1˚C weather didn't feel bad at all.
We've had more snow since I cleared the driveway Wednesday.Yesterday the snow plows cleared the street and I had to do a little more shoveling - not a good idea - to get the van off the street and into the driveway. Since then we've gotten a few more inches. Here's the deck - then and now - and the trees in the back yard. There are still a few stubborn leaves.
One of the blessings of living in Alaska is incredibly fresh, wild salmon. I just don't eat salmon elsewhere because I'm always disappointed. J brought this home from the market. I have to say this was as good as anything I've ever barbecued. And a salute to those who died in war.
Spent a little time each day looking for places to stay. Here's a glimpse of things I saw - first day in a car, second day walking to work and on the back of a motorcycle. There are houses and some turned out to be more like private dorms for students. Apartment houses. But finally someone in the office brought in a brochure that turned out to be the perfect place. Well, pretty good. It's in a quiet pocket, but a few minute walk to a main road. It's also about a 20-30 minute walk to my office. As you can see, I found my card reader to download the pictures.
Here's the place I liked, I've described it to Joan and she says to take it. So I'll go by today again. They are decent sized rooms, great windows, lots of trees around and view of Doi Suthep, the mountain next to Chiengmai.
They don't expect people to cook.
It's on the 4th floor, so we won't have to go to the gym, just up and down the stairs. It includes tv, internet. Electricity and water are extra. That makes sense since I'm sure farang (foreigners - actually I've heard people say "people from other countries" mostly rather than 'farang" this trip)tend to use a lot of water and electricity. Altogether it should be around $325 per month I'm guessing.
LA may have looked so ungreen when I flew in because it is ...January and lots of the trees are pretty naked. One forgets that about LA because there are so many other trees and bushes that don't lose their leaves. here's a sample or what's blooming in my mother's yard right now
I sometimes get stuck on how I have to do something. Like washing the car. Either I take it to one of the places where you put the quarters in and you can blast it with hot soapy water, or I use the carwash attachment I bought for the hose and wash it in the driveway. But I don't do that in the winter when the hose is safely in the garage.
Yesterday it was hovering around 0° F outside. My wife, after months of driving a typical Alaskan car around - see first picture - suddenly decided she needed a clean car to take some friends to the airport. I didn't relish driving to a car wash place and then taking the wet car out of the washing bay into 0° weather.
So I got two buckets of warm water and some old dishtowels and in 20 minutes we had the worst of the dirt gone just by hand washing in our own garage. It still looks pretty streaky, but at least you won't get all dirty if you lean against it. When it warms up I'll take it in for a soapy soak spray job.
I just needed to think differently about how to solve the problem. Faster, cheaper, and good enough for now.
Every time I look at this bird I can't help wondering why we are doing this. Generally we are vegetarian. This started more for health reasons, but was also influenced by a student film I saw long ago on slaughtering cattle. My time living in a Buddhist country also had influences I'm sure, though most Thai people do eat meat. I tried to think about this in positive terms. This picture is the herbal massage of the bird. Next it will go in the sauna. But that's just the sort of imagery that enables us to ignore what happens to the bird before it gets into our refrigerator. We did buy a free range organic turkey so that is some solace. But I suspect the video below is more typical than not. Turkeys, chickens, pigs, cows are all treated as manufactured products, not as living things whose lives are taken with reverence and thanks. And having taken the life of a living creature, do we use all its parts, so as not to waste the life we have taken?
I was always amazed when Americans during the Vietnam war disparaged the enemy for not respecting life. Buddhists are human beings as our Christians and Jews and Muslims. Few live the values of their religion all the time, many try, some only give it lip service. But Buddhists very explicitly hold all life as sacred. Not just human life. Killing a mosquito destroys karma. It isn't equal to killing a dog which is not equal to killing a human. People I knew would help flies and mosquitoes out the window rather than kill them. Whereas Americans think nothing of killing non-human life.
I think respect for animal life disappears when people are separated from the raising of the animal and the eating of the animal. If you raise the chicken or lamb, you know how much work has gone into it. You know the miracle of an animal growing from nothing into a living sentient creature and so when you kill it for food, you understand exactly what you are killing. And you do it with mixed emotions. You don't have that understanding when you buy it wrapped in plastic in the supermarket. Maybe that's why Amerians cannot imagine eating dog meat. But we can't understand that Hindus feel the same about beef. The video shows us what happens when modern efficiency rather than humanity rules how meat is produced. Of course I don't know how typical this is or even who this guy is. But it is consistent with other reports on the food industry I've read and watched, starting with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
I haven't been tending the garden nearly as well as I intended this summer, nor have I kept up with the pictures. Here are a few things that are blooming now.
Ligularia
Lily
Not sure the exact name, but this is a great dwarf delphinium.
This fox glove came from deep in the woods, maybe ten years ago and is thriving.
The raspberries, always prolific, this year just have a pitiful crop. Not sure what happened but there are only a few stalks from last year that seemed to have survived. I'm hoping this year's new shoots will do better.
And a closeup of a naster[t]ium. [Someone googled 'nasterium' and got here. If I had spelled it right, the person wouldn't have gotten here. But it is 'nastertium."] This close up shot makes it hard to reconize the Veronica.
Here's the pole he was drilling in the section between my mom's house and the neighbors.
The picture on top goes to the left of the picture below. The old fence is leaning there against the house and will go up on the hill where Brian's working above. There's new fencing for fence and gate in the picture below.
You can see the earlier pictures here. It's amazing how you get used to a space and don't think about how it could look if you made a few changes. Just opening up the fence changed the look a lot. This evening I thought, gee, we could take out some of the hill and put a little table for breakfast in there. Nothing 'is' permanently and often problems force us to something better than we would have done. In this case the bad gate is offering new opportunities.
