Pushing Around Leaves

The cottonwood trees in the back have been acting as personal trainers, giving me a certain number of new leaves each day to sweep up off the deck.  I think they used up their supply finally.

In front the mountain ash leaves have been dancing with the wind into different patterns on the driveway.

Looks a little like a map.

They tend to crowd together against steps and in corners.

And this October has allowed me time to procrastinate gathering up enough leaves to cover the various flower beds.  Yesterday was a record 54˚F in Anchorage, today was balmy again.  The low temperatures have been regularly higher than the normal lows.  You could say, well, it's just a blip, except we've had the 'warmest month ever' regularly this year.  

Cottonwood leaves covering the back yard.  I just need to rake up enough to get the flower beds covered.  There are some decaying amur maple leaves in the mix too.  

 And here's a small bed that I just used mountain ash leaves to mulch.

It's so wondrous that the trees give us this free mulch to protect the wintering plants from the cold and then this all goes into the compost heap where it becomes compost to fertilize everything next year.  

After all, that's what happens in untended forests every year.  Somehow they manage to maintain exquisite gardens without humans to take care of them.  

Bread Print, No blue, Remaining Ice [UPDATED]

My bread recipe calls for parchment paper under the loaf.  Here's the bread print on the parchment.







And the bread itself.  (I know, they don't look like they match.  I think if I had turned the bread around it would fit better.)


I've been doing chores inside and outside.  There's one tulip bud and lots of other things are poking up out of the ground.  The irises, some lilies, and other things were exposed as I started raking the mulch off the flower beds and moving it up the compost pile.





Also had some printer problems.  It stopped printing blue.  I checked at Office Depot where we bought it about five years ago and they sent me to Lewis and Lewis on Fireweed where I could buy a new printhead for $65 with no guarantee that it would fix the problem.  And even if it did, the machine was old

by their standards and something else could go wrong.  And new ones that did all the stuff my old one can do - wifi, copy, scan, fax, color, etc. - are now available for a little more than the $65 printhead.

It's the magenta and cyan printhead on the right in the picture there.

He did suggest pulling out the printhead and cleaning it, but that didn't work.

So at Costco today I checked what they had.  The HP's started at $59!  (A whole printer for less than the printhead.  Something about our system seems pretty cockeyed.)  I ended up with one for $119.

It took less than 30 minutes to get it out of the box, plugged in, connected to the wifi and to download the appropriate software for my laptop and print.  I haven't tried anything with blue yet.  So there's now a five year old printer looking for a new home.  The blue doesn't work and other things could start to go wrong any time.  But surely someone can use it.

[UPDATE April 28, 2017:  I tried color on the new printer - picture letters to my grandkids.  It worked.  Then I made an envelope.  But the computer chose the old computer and printed the envelope on a page.  With BLUE.  So, it appears, eventually, the blue got back into the system.]

And yesterday I checked out the bike trail along Campbell Creek, east of Lake Otis.  It's all clear of snow now.  But there is still ice on the creek itself.

Mushrooms And Other Signs Of Rain

While July was the warmest month on record in Anchorage, ever, August, while not cold, has seen its fair share of rain.



The most easily identified Anchorage mushroom is this Amanita - Fly Agaric.  It opens up and looks like a small pizza (up to about 10 inches across).  Books say it's poisonous, but I've come to learn for Alaska mushrooms that tends to mean hallucinogenic.  I included some of that discussion in this 2007 post.

These are up to about six or seven inches across.  Wasn't quite sure what they were after a quick look through my field guide to mushrooms.

Some lichens and mosses growing on the deck.

This appears to be a polypore.  It was growing out of the ground, not on a tree.  It's about five inches across.

 Some raindrops on a nasturtium leave.

Reflections in a little puddle in a garbage can lid.

What I belief is a rosy russula.  The stem is also slightly pink.

The top and underneath of what I think is a tacky green russula.  It says they're good eating.

And the worms in the compost pile are doing their job.  As I turned things over with a shovel, I could feel the heat as nature turns our kitchen waste and leaves to compost.


Some posts that haven't gotten linked to the blogrolls that you might find interesting:

Walkable Cities Circa 1669
If Women Relate Their Own Gender Battles To Clinton's, She Wins Big
Man Goes
Who Invented Inflatable Tube Guys?

What happens to your trash?

I was getting ready to go to bed but first I had to take out the trash that's collected tomorrow. But then there was the NY Times in my email. You know how going to bed at ten ends up going to bed at 2am.

According to the NY Times:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday.

The MIT site tells us:

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust - networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

I couldn't find where online the garbage is being tracked. At least I can track most of our summer, raw, kitchen vegetable scraps. They go about 50 feet to the compost heap and then get scattered onto our various flower beds after the worms and other bugs take care of them and the leaves and our neighbor's grass clippings.

But it would be interesting to find out where some of the other stuff goes. I hope not out to the trash island floating in the North Pacific.

The Seattle Public Library, which is one of the partners in this, will have an event Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.:



But I have to take the trash out now.

It's Fall Already - Yellow Leaves, Termination Dust, and Rich Compost

Two weeks of trial
Didn't notice green go gold
Some leaves fall to ground










Thursday dinner done
Walking out of Thai Kitchen,
more snow on Chugach.















May

Winter mulch gathered
into summer compost piles
letting nature play

End of September

Grass, veg kitchen scraps,
Join leaves, water, in the piles
Turned sometimes for air















Natural heat first,
Then compost workers appear
Rich black soil results














Once again we say
good bye Alaska summer
Equinox less light