Insects of Summer 2012

The best of the insect photos this summer are in the slide show below. Most are serendipity shots - being in the right place at the right time to photograph: 

• A praying mantis perched on the headlight of my husband’s car
• A butterfly, moth or bee resting for a few seconds   
• A cool enough morning that the dragonflies stayed in one place a little longer than usual
• A cicada killer that kept returned again and again to the same bush to alight before making the flight pattern around the yard again

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 11, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

NASA images reveal massive forest die-off from tiny beetle - Before and after satellite pictures of Colorado

Movement Along Fault Line Threatening Cliff Palace At Mesa Verde National Park

Video Sampler Introduces You To The More Than 20 National Parks In Virginia

Zentangles - Get more out of doodling!

Black Drink: Evidence of Ritual Use of Caffeinated Brew at Cahokia - made from a holly tree that grew hundreds of miles away

10 Green Ways to Improve Our Cities

Sky-High Design: How To Make A Bird-Friendly Building - tweaks to make modern architecture better for birds

How Olympic athletes' bodies have changed over the last century - an infographic from NPR

The Bison: A National Symbol for All Americans - From National Geographic…the first post in a series about the American Bison

Chart: the world's endangered mammals - From the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The primates are faring the worst with 49% of the species being ‘threatened’ - which means that they are threatened with extinction. Overall - 21% of mammal species are in ‘threatened’ status.

Pictures: Surprising Effects of the U.S. Drought - From National Geographic

Serendipity at the Grocery Store - A Sunflower

My grocery store seems to have a new display of plants just outside the door almost every week. This week it was pots of sunflowers and I couldn’t resist.

There is one bloom on the plan - and a lot of potential with at least 3 buds. I’ll plant it out in the garden after a few weeks and hope it produces seed that will sprout next year so I’ll have many sunflowers next year. The goldfinches may visit the garden to enjoy the seeds as well.

Now that I have it home it is still a day brightener - just the thing for a humid August day in Maryland. Enjoy the slideshow below!

Preserving Herbs

August is the time to start preserving the bounty of the herb garden. I have basil, parsley, mint and stevia this year.

I prefer drying rather than freezing because it is ‘greener’ (uses less energy). Here’s the basic process (shown with basil but will work with most other herbs as well):

Gather herbs. I use kitchen scissors and the basket I use over the sink to rinse them so they are immediately ready for the next step. I leave a few plants to continue to use fresh and may harvest again for drying if enough grows back before the frost comes.

Rinse the herbs. You don’t want bugs, spider webs or insect eggs along with your herbs.

Chop them up. If you want small pieces, use a food processor. This time, I plan to use the herb in stir fry and soups so cutting with scissors was good enough.

Place in a breathable bag and hang where the herb can dry thoroughly. I chose to use a washable veggie bag this time. The drying can take several days or longer depending on the humidity in the air. Shake the bag or otherwise move the herb around in the bag to make sure it is drying evenly.

When thoroughly dry, place in an airtight container….and enjoy your herbs in the months to come.

Recipe of the Week: Brisket

Brisket is something to enjoy for several meals or to feed a crowd. I always buy a cut that just fits in my crock pot and cook it for the whole day. Start in the morning to cook: 

• Line the crockpot with a slow cooker liner
• Place the brisket in the slow cooker.
• Sprinkle with cracked pepper and onion flakes.
• Cook on high for an hour or two and then on low for the rest of the day.
• Serve with salad/vegetables. My favorites are baked sweet potatoes and Caesar salad. 

For any leftover meat - cut off fat and discard. Cut meat into bite size piece. Strain juice over meat. Store in refrigerator. 

There are many ways to enjoy the left overs. For all of them, remove any white fat that has accumulated on top of the juice and discard. My two favorite meals with leftover brisket are: 

• Reheat and eat as straight from the crockpot.
• Make barbeque. Put meat and juice in a sauce pan. Add bottled barbeque sauce and enough water to cook down in about 30 minutes (this gives the barbeque sauce spices enough time to penetrate the meat). Eat on a bun, over noodles/quinoa, or alone. Note: Bottled barbeque sauce sometimes has a lot of sugar. I tend to choose the ones that have the lowest carbohydrate amount (i.e. less sugar). 

If you cannot eat all the brisket within about a week after you cook it, freeze and save it for later. 

Morning Walk in Colorado

Before I adjusted from Eastern to Mountain time on a recent trip to Breckenridge, Colorado - I took an early morning walk  and took pictures of flowers growing around the resort - some with water droplets left over from the shower the night before. Hope you enjoy the slideshow below!

Around our (Maryland) Yard in August 2012

I waited until I thought the dew would be dry from the grass - but misjudged it. At 9 AM, the grass was still very wet and I had to take my flip flops off to make it back up the slight incline of our back yard!

August is a month to start thinking about drying mint and basil. Both are blooming and growing profusely right now. Maybe I can get several harvests from the plants this month. I’ll do a later post on my technique for drying herbs.

Dahlias are the showy flowers in my flower beds this month. Other things are blooming too but somehow the dahlias always stand out above everything else.

I planted a sweet potato under the dahlias (I had one that sprouted before I could bake it) but the deer found it….it’s recovering but may not have enough time to actually grow sweet potatoes.

There are at least three different kinds of fungi in the back yard. The big bulky ones at the top of the picture collection below are the same ones growing on an oak stump from the ‘yard’ posting last month (and I posted about them at mid-month as well) - they’ve weathered from white curves to structures with rings and almost a clay like color. Two puff balls are a little further down on the mulch from where the oak stump is rotting. Then there are the very delicate mushrooms that come up in the grass. There always seem to be one or two in the back yard.

Previous Months: July 2012, June 2012, May 2012, April 2012, March 2012, January 2012 

Photography experiments

Today’s blog posting shares some results from some recent photography experiments.

The first one is quite simple - some hydrangea leaves photographed on a white kitchen counter top with shadows from natural light from the window on the left. The way the shadows accentuate the shapes of the leaves and the intersection of the shadows of the middle and right leaf intrigue me the most about the image.

The next photograph is of a hydrangea flower - taken with natural light using an old television stand for the black background. It turned out that it provided a very flat black even if it did make for a rather awkward position to be photographing (i.e. essentially lying on the floor). 

I did an earlier post on Blue Tulip Depression Glass. This is a photograph of a salad plate from the set photographed on a drying rack covered in deep red tissue with a small halogen light source shining from below.  

The image to the right is a gladiola photographed lying on a black deskpad using light from a halogen lamp. The flower looked pinker with natural light but I liked the color shift caused by the difference in light.

This is probably my favorite picture of the group. The swirls and puckers are gladiola petals with a background of black felt taken with natural light. To me, it is easy to imagine that they are swirls of fabric - around dancers just off the frame.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 4, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

How to store produce without plastic - a good reference

Museum of Food Anomalies - Some natural…some contrived

Nadya Andreeva: A healthy lifestyle you can stomach - A tummy exercise for everyone

Visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park With Insider Tips From Friends Of The Smokies -  - This is a recent post about Great Smoky Mountains but the site includes posts on all the parks. One for Theodore Roosevelt National Park has just been posted…check it out as you plan a visit to one of them

What’s the Most Important Thing We Can Do To Take Control Of Our Final Days? - A collection of recommendations from healthcare professionals….also A Discussion of How Doctors - and the rest of us - Prepare for the End

Bedtime Math - making math a fun part of kid’s everyday lives

Rym Baouendi: Learning ecodesign from ancient civilizations - TED video

The Ghostly Grandeur Of A Desert Graveyard - El Paso’s Concordia Cemetery

Making Green More Macho - Apply the lessons from the “Don’t Mess with Texas” anti-littering campaign more broadly

Three wonderlands of the American West: Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River…in 1912 - read it - or just look at the pictures online at the Internet Archive (see last week’s gleanings for a graphic on how to use the interface to read online). To view the book in a different format, start with the main entry for the book here.

10 Years Ago – In August 2002

Many years ago I started collecting headlines/news blurbs as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. Reviewing the August 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10.    

1. Overfishing of shark prey in the Atlantic Ocean means sharks are coming closer to shore to find food
2. A quest for oil in the North Sea has turned up an ancient well-preserved impact crater
3. Global warming is causing squid to grow abnormally large and speeding up their breeding cycles,
4. Archaeologists have discovered an Egyptian birth-brick. It would have been one of pair used to support a woman's feet during childbirth.
5. Maryland to poison pond to kill Snakehead fish
6. A dense blanket of pollution, dubbed the "Asian Brown Cloud," is hovering over South Asia
7. Prague prepares for the worst as waters rise
8. 100th birthday celebrations of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl
9. Nearly one million volunteers and soldiers in China's Hunan Province are racing against time to stop what could become the biggest flood in decades
10. An ancient skull found on a London riverbank with a large hole in it shows that brain surgery was performed at least 3,750 years earlier than thought. The skull dated by English Heritage to 1750 B.C. 

As usual - the list is heavily skewed toward science and technology.

July 2012 Doodles

I’ve started experimenting with some different kinds of doodles - ones that go beyond just putting a pen or pencil to paper. This month I’ve been working with slices of cardboard tubes (from paper towels or toilet paper) and stapling them together into a 3-D doodle. I’m still adding to it but will eventually decide it is ‘complete’ and attempt to paint it. The photo at the right is what it looked like at the end of July.

The slideshow below is a selection of pen/pencil and paper doodles from the month.  Enjoy!

Recipe of the Week: Smoothies

Summer is a great time for ice cold smoothies. All they take is a blender that is strong enough to process ice and some creativity with things you probably already have in your refrigerator. The basics are easy: 

• Choose your ice. It can be water ice or a frozen form of one of the ingredients. Frozen bananas are my favorite for fruit smoothies. Frozen cherry tomatoes work well for veggie smoothies.
• Choose your other ‘solid’ ingredients. Most blenders have a ‘fill’ line for non-liquids and it can get messy if you fill beyond that point. Seasonal fruits and veggies are all good choices.
• Choose your ‘liquid’ to enable smooth blending. I almost always use a bit of lemon juice then add water or tea or juice. Again - do not overfill the blender.
• Blend the ingredients first using pulses until the icy part is beginning to break up. Then run the blender on medium and then high. The smoothie should be thoroughly mixed, smooth, and frothy.  
• Enjoy your smoothie. 

Remember serving size and avoid adding ingredients that will add a lot of calories. For this reason - I rarely use fruit juice for the liquid to get to the fill line in my smoothies.

My favorite fruit smoothie right now is a frozen banana, blueberries, a splash of lemon with water. I may add some fresh mint to my next one.

The pictures show my favorite veggie smoothie: frozen tomatoes, green onion, a splash of lemon juice, 4 drops of hot sauce, garlic and herb Mrs. Dash and water. This veggie smoothie is essentially a lunch salad in a glass! Next time I’ll try to remember to add a couple of fresh basil leaves.

August Celebrations

August begins tomorrow. What do you celebrate in August? Here are some ideas:

Watermelon. Locally grown watermelons are ripe in many areas. Check out your farmers market. I’ve always thought that the large and long ones with black seeds had the best flavor but they’re hard to find any more. August is the month to enjoy watermelon in whatever form you choose to buy it.

End of Summer Vacation. August is the time that many people take vacations before the busy fall activities (school and increased work schedules) start. Even if you don’t take off a whole week - plan a mini-vacation/day trip to someplace that helps you glory in the warmth of summer - usually someplace with water like a beach, a lake, a river.

Start of the School Year. Yes - the start of the school is in August for some people and the reason I have it on the celebration list is that some actually do like the beginning of the school year…and the new clothes/supplies that go with it.

Two full moons. This is special to this particular August. It turns out there are two full moons: on the 2nd and 31st of this August. Take your binoculars out if the night is clear and enjoy the summer night. 

Kindle Fire - 8 Months of Experience

I’ve had my Kindle Fire  since last November - long enough to settle into a pattern of the way I will use it. I’ve experimented with application that I still use occasionally but there are three main ones that have made the device worthwhile for me:

Reading. I’ve read over 100 novels - mostly checked out from the public library. Sometimes I use the highlight feature to mark passages. The Kindle makes it easier to read in poor lighting situations although I find having some ambient light other than the Kindle screen reduces eyestrain. The brightness of the screen makes it more comfortable for me to read without my glasses; this aspect actually makes it a better form than physical books for me. Probably over 90% of my Kindle use is for this activity and I’m finding it challenging to work down my pile of physical books! I also find that I can put it on a music stand and read while I bounce on my Swopper Chair  to get a little exercise while I read.

Grocery list. My husband and I have settled on the OurGroceries app since we can use it from all our devices (including the Kindle) and then I can use it when I am in the store to mark off items as I get them. I don’t spend a huge amount of time in the app but I do use it frequently and those little bits of time add up.

Email. I have one of my email accounts directed to my Kindle so that I can send and receive emails any time I have connectivity. I have reduced the paper I carry with me when I travel because I can simply turn on the Kindle and have all the details. I also send recipes via email to this account since I actually prefer using the Kindle for my recipe to a cook book; the Kindle is less bulky and it stays positioned on the stand much better than a bulky book (I use a stand for it to keep it above the spills and splatters of cooking).

There are times I wish

• it was a bit lighter in weight
• the screen did not smudge as easily
• the Marware case was some other color besides black (somehow black tends to blend in with the background making it hard to spot the Kindle on some surfaces)

but most of the time I’m just enjoying the device. It has been worth its $199 price tag.

Brookside Gardens Reflections - July 2012

On a cloudy day at Brookside Gardens - after a rain - there were plenty of summer reflections.

The reflections of the treetop canopy by water filling the depression in a boulder marking a path 

Cattails and thick vegetation along the edge of the pond reflected in the water

And the panorama of the Japanese Teahouse and hill behind reflected in the pond as some Canadian geese swim into view.

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 28, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

Colorful Science Sheds Light On Solar Heating - visualization from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. There is a short video to explain how they do the color coding.

You May Never Need to Clean Your Car Again, Thanks to New Coating Technology - estimated 6-8 years to production. If it works - it will be used on many more things that cars

Radiant creatures and their fluorescent proteins - DayGlo color from living organisms. Also take a look at the slideshow.

Insider Tips From The Grand Teton National Park Foundation - This is a recent post about Grand Teton but the site includes posts on all the parks…check it out as you plan a visit to one of them

Mad About Moths – National Moth Week! - Butterflies tend to capture more attention….but moths are interesting too!

A California jail offers a glimpse of the economic and environmental benefits of locally generated energy - microgrids already are cost effective in some parts of the country particularly for organizations that require very reliable power (hospitals, prisons, data centers, etc.) and their cost is coming down

Chris Helzer - Prairie ecologist and photographer - video that shares photos from the prairie; there’s a lot there to see

The Devil’s Pool - The swimming hole at the top of Victoria Falls (video)

Massive Ice Melt In Greenland - 97% of the Greenland ice sheet has surface melting. Last time it occurred was in 1889 based on ice cores. It went from 40% to 97% in 4 days!

Treatise on Landscape Painting in Water-colours - by David Cox and C. Geoffrey Holme and published in 1922. The images are not in color but they are detailed and still evoke stories of place. The link above is directly to the beginning of the image section in the ‘read online’ double page format that I prefer for books like this; the image below is what that format looks like and the green arrows show how to ‘page forward’ . To view the book in a different format, start with the main entry for the book on the Internet Archive here.

Past, Present, Future - Where are your thoughts?

We all go through cycles where we become skewed temporarily; overwhelmed by something in our past or worrying about something in the future. If we are at a high school reunion or looking through a book of old family photographs our thoughts are probably dominated by the past. If we are checking on our retirement savings or planning a wedding anniversary party for our parents we are thinking of the future.

Normally the present dominates.

Is that true through all of life? That may be counter to the traditional ideas 

• Of the young being more focused on the future - growing up fast and making a place for themselves in the world.
• Of the old thinking more about the past because they have more life that is past than ahead. 

Having past the mid-point in my life (assuming I might be lucky enough be healthy at 100) - I have been thinking about how my thoughts have shifted over the years. I enjoy history in the broad sense but tend to enjoy only brief sojourns into my own. It is true that now there are more pictures of my past and more opportunities for reconnecting with people from years past. But I remember enjoying looking at the baby book my mother had created of my early years even before I was 20 years old. Seeking to savor our personal past is not just for people past mid-life.

I’ve always enjoyed planning which is clearly a future oriented activity. Thinking of things that might happen and developing contingency plans…playing with ‘what if’ scenarios…has always been part of the way I set out to accomplish the goals I set for myself. Earlier in my life my planning was oriented to career and young family goals; now my planning is focused on goals for an older family and the next generation (i.e. grandchildren) when and if they arrive. While all along the way I’ve had an overarching desire to leave the world a better place; now I am thinking more about that more frequently as well.

So - what about today? Between the foundation of the past and the potential of the future - the present is always where the action is.

Magnolia at Brookside Gardens

Earlier this month I posted some photographs of Southern Magnolias from Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee. The photographs in the slide show below are all from one tree in Brookside Gardens in Maryland taken in the early morning of 7/20 after a good soaking rain the night before. The sign at the base of the tree (picture at right) said that is was a Magnolia virginiana var. Pumila or a Dwarf Sweet Bay. This one tree had all stages of the bloom - from bud to the bright red seeds popping out of the pod.   

Enjoy!

Recipe of the Week: Sourdough Adventure: Cornbread Muffins

Continuing the sourdough adventure - cornbread is one of my favorite muffins to have at lunch or dinner although it is a great leftover for breakfast as well. This recipe makes about 24 muffins. 

1 1/2 cups mature whole wheat sourdough starter

1 1/2 cups yellow cornmeal

1 cup milk

2 eggs

2 tablespoons of sugar

1/4 cup melted butter

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Assemble all ingredients and utensils. Allow all ingredients to come to room temperature.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Spray muffin tins with cooking spray.

In a large bowl combine starter, cornmeal and milk.

Beat eggs with sugar. Add to batter and stir. Note: Add warm water if the batter is too thick. Starters vary significantly in thickness.

Combine salt and baking soda into the butter. Fold into the batter.

Fill each tin 2/3 full.

Bake until golden brown on top. Serve hot.

The original sourdough adventure post (click on the green text to go to the post) includes a link to how to initiate your own sourdough starter. That original post also includes a recipe for sourdough pancakes and it is still the recipe I am using the most - almost every week.

Bush Trimming Think Time

Bush trimming is one of those activities that can be done almost on autopilot (as long as you are not using an electric trimmer) and thoughts can go in just about any direction - i.e. bush trimming does not require a lot of brain power. The activity is an opportunity for thinking.

There is a bush growing beside my garage that I call my ‘therapy bush’ because trimming it always ends with the satisfaction of a job done and improved perspective on other aspects of my life. That hour or so of thinking time while trimming the bush always works its magic. Its ‘before trimming’ state from a few days ago is to the left.

Small hand pruners are always my preference. They are quiet (compared to anything with a motor) and I can easily cut with one hand and catch the branches with the other to pile neatly on the side. I’m always surprised that some of the branches grow so much in a relatively short period of time and also notice that the large ones have thorns while the smaller ones do not.

Some of my discoveries about the bush during this trimming: 

• Last time I trimmed the bush - there were at least two other bushes growing with it. I trimmed both of them as close to the soil as I could and this time discovered one had not come back but the other one had…and it was the one that may have caused some skin irritation last time (the plant didn’t look like poison ivy but my skin certainly reacted like it was a close kin). Hopefully I was more successful in keeping it from my skin this time.
• A pleasant find under the bush - wild strawberry plants. One had a red berry. They are too small to be edible but the red color against the carpet of green leaves was pleasant. It’s made a nice ground cover under the bush.
• There was a white spider that was hanging on an invisible silk from one of the branches. I waited until he regained the branch and then trimmed the other side of the bush.
• Trimming the bush when it still had droplets on it from a rain or heavy dew is a plus on a hot day. Getting a little wet is a good thing. 

While I was trimming I thought about the little things that happen that are unplanned triggers for memories - good or bad, about losing respect for people (mostly politicians) that I’d rather be able to respect, and about how it seemed to take longer to trim the bush last time.

And the ‘after trimming’ state of the bush is to the right. The pile on the ground does not seem as big as it did when it was on the bush. I hauled the clippings off to the woods behind our house. The task was done and it only took about 1,000 steps (based on what my Fitbit counted)!