Hurricane Sandy in Central Maryland

When I came into my office this morning (Wednesday) - the moon was shining through the window. That was a very good sign since we’ve been under heavy cloud cover since Sunday. Even though it was just a break in the clouds, it was more sky that we’d seen this week and it started my morning out on a positive track.

The next positive to the day is that we regained electrical service yesterday so I could turn on lights and fire up my computer this morning. Our power was out for 19 hours. Kudos to the people at the utility company; they prepared well for this one and then got to work as soon as the winds died down! We had planned for a longer outage after our experience with a 5 day outage last summer when a derecho came through our area so getting power back quickly was a very pleasant surprise.

Aside from length, this outage was different in other ways. First - the time of year meant that we were in darkness more. Even during the day the clouds were so thick that there was barely enough light to read. I was glad my Kindle was fully charged when the power went out. Second - it was cool rather than hot like it was in July. Our house got down to about 60 degrees - not bad with layers of clothes but not pleasant for showering. Third - we slept in the basement on Monday - not like in July because it was cooler - because the wind was howling outside and we figured if a tree blew over into the house, we would be safest in the basement.

When we got up Tuesday morning, more leaves had fallen and the dahlias had been blown over. The turtle sandbox that I have mint and parsley growing in had been scooted across the deck - stopped by the railing. Our oak tree had a few small limbs around it. We had lived through Hurricane Sandy! I cut the dahlias to brighten our indoor celebration while a light rain continued for the rest of the day.

Brookside Gardens in October 2012

October at Brookside Gardens - fall and the always lush conservatory plantings. This post is a quick sweep of plants from the conservatory and fall foliage in the rest of the garden. I’ll do some themed posts over the course of the next week on roses, gourds/squashes/pumpkins and mums.

The collage above shows plants in the conservatory. The bird of paradise always seems to be blooming. There were several grasses with large seed heads; the one in the lower right of the collage has a lot more color than some of the others. The shape of the uncurling leaf to the right is what caught my attention….and the lighting heightens the effect of the curves and color. The images in the collage below are all from the outdoor gardens. One of the few bushes blooming in the outdoor gardens was a fall camellia; otherwise the color is from fall leaves. The shelf fungus at the bottom right is on a stump I always check. The colors are more subtle than the fall leaves; the shelf fungus will stand out more in winter when all the fall color has faded away.

The collage below has two of my favorite trees - the sweet gum against the sky and the gingko in the lower left. The tea house with the colorful maples and the still-mostly-green papyrus in the pool complete this collage.

Windshield Ice Crystals

On our fall foliage trip a few weeks ago - it was 20 degrees as we got ready to set out on the last morning. Ice crystals had formed on the windshield and windows of the car parked in the hotel parking lot in Owego, New York. I took a few pictures. The original were gray scale; the pictures you se in this post have color added by Microsoft PowerPoint.

Even knowing they are ice crystals - I imagine other things -

• Bundles of grass with thick seed heads
• A lone cattail - dried and crackling in the wind with birds soaring over the deeper water of a lake
• A river delta seen from the air
• A bouquet of wild flowers

What do you see in the ice crystal images?

Glorious Sunlight - October 2012

Sometimes sunlight - or sun and shadow - is what makes an image special. There are three that are like that for me in this post. 

The first is from near Ithaca, New York. It is at the very top of Taughannock Falls from the overlook across the gorge. The light at the edge becomes deep shade so quickly in the grotto behind the cliff edge with the plants growing wherever little bits of soil can accumulate in the rocky ledges.

The second is oak leaves. Have you ever noticed that oak leaves need direct sun to look deep red or yellow in the fall? If they are in shade they simply look green and brown. 

And finally - the third are pine needles. They almost glow in the fall sunlight.

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 27, 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:

'Time-Capsule' Japanese Lake Sediment Advances Radiocarbon Dating for Older Objects - provides a much more precise way to examine radiocarbon ages of organic material that is 11,000-53,000 years old

Poetry in Motion: Gemini Observatory Releases Image of Rare Polar Ring Galaxy - two galaxies interacting

Shuttle Endeavour’s Complete LA Journey - less than 3 minute time lapse video of Endeavor’s trek through LA streets from National Geographic

Space Oddity - comments from Richard Watson about the famous picture of the earth seen from the moon

Roasted Sweet and Spicy Butternut Squash - my grocery story has bins of the squash already cut up…making this recipe very simple. I’m going to try it.

Antibiotic Contamination a Threat to Humans and the Environment - a study from Greenland

New Way to Mimic the Color and Texture of Butterfly Wings - a way to create colorful surfaces that won’t fade like conventional pigmentation

Archaeologists to Mount New Expedition to Troy - less than 20% of the site has been scientifically excavated. Without about 4,500 years of nearly uninterrupted settlement at a crossroads between Europe and Asia…there is a lot to learn

'Large and Dirty' Companies Adopting Greener Strategies to Earn More Green - more companies are seeing environmental safeguards as a business opportunity to embed innovations that save production costs in the long term and that also improve their standing as good corporate citizens in the public mind.

A Long and Winding Road: Cassini Celebrates 15 Years - It’s already sent back some 444 gigbytes of data and more than 300,000 images. There is a still a lot in the plan for it too - before it enters Saturn’s atmosphere on September 15, 2017.

OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer - a zoom in and out visualization of the mammal ‘tree’ from Imperial College London; the project’s goal to eventually include all life on Earth

12 Expert Tips for Fall Fitness - from Marlo Thomas. Anything on this list you should turn into a personal habit?

Ada Lovelace Day Celebrates Women in Science - it was 10/16…and I didn’t see the story until too late. I’m celebrating away. And - becoming more of an activist for the idea that we need more women in the sciences. When I was in college in the 70s, I thought the increased availability of education would lead to increased women in the sciences but the numbers didn’t increase the way so many of us thought they would by now.

The Conversation Project - a starter kit with tools and tips to have the conversation about ‘when it comes to the end of life, I want mine to be…..’

Design for the Public Good (infographic overview of an exhibit at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco)

Pennsylvania Canyon

The Pennsylvania Grand Canyon was one of our destinations on our fall foliage trip this year. It’s located in north central Pennsylvania just west of Wellboro.

Unfortunately we were at least a week too late for fall foliage. The leaves were on the ground and their color fading. Colton Point State Park is on the western side of the canyon and has primitive facilities compared to the state park on the other side - Leonard Harrison State Park. There are a visitor facilities and overlook into the canyon from that eastern side of the canyon. Both also have hiking trails which we did not investigate on this trip.

The temperature had been in the 20s when we set out from Owego, New York earlier in the morning and was still cold. We enjoyed a short and quick hike along the rim in Colton State Park. A fall foliage trip is probably not complete without some wading through leaves and this was the place to do it.

We had warmed up in the car on the short drive over to Leonard Harrison State Park. The temperature had gotten a little warmer and there was a Boy Scout troop cooking hamburgers and hot dogs for the crowd; they were getting some customers even though it was only about 10:30. The oak trees that hold on to their leaves a little longer and the pines are certainly to be appreciated when the fall itself has come and gone!

Ten Days of Little Celebrations - October 2012

Back in mid-August I posted about finding things to celebrate each day. It’s an easy thing for me to do and getting into the habit of writing it down each day reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. Here are some ‘little celebrations’ I’ve noted this month:

Sleeping late. The night had gotten cold and we didn’t have the heat coming on yet. It was so wonderful to stay under the warm blankets just a little longer than usual.

A rainy day. I like to work when it is raining. There is no temptation to get outdoors and the little bit of noise from the rain on the roof provides the white noise to keep my focus on whatever I am doing. It’s a day to where concentration comes easily.

Pink mushrooms in the grass. Mushrooms seem to come up very quickly after a rain. These were almost hidden in the grass. At first I thought they were scraps of fall leaves. But from the side or underneath ---- they were this wonder color.

Watkins Glen. A beautiful place any time but I enjoyed it in the fall.

Corning Museum of Glass.  I like glass in just about all its forms. Every time I go to this museum I find some other beautiful piece that I’d failed to notice before.

Home again. I always celebrate the first day back home even if I was only gone a relatively short time.

Writing 3,000 words to start a short story. I’ve signed up to participate in the National Novel Writing Month in November. So - I am busily practicing writing something every day and preparing a chapter by chapter outline to be ready to get 50,000 words written in November. Writing a 3,000 word chunk of a short story in a day was one of my practices that was successful! Hurray!

Sweet potato harvest. The weather dictated that it was time. It’s a lot like unwrapping a present although, in this case, you know there will be sweet potatoes. The surprise is how many there might be and how big are they.

Magnificent maple seen on the drive to the grocery store. Sometimes a path we take frequently has something of temporarily extraordinary beauty: in this case - a tree that has a glorious week every year in the fall….and somehow I always notice it.

Bean soup. Humble fare that was exactly what I wanted on a cool fall day.

Fall at Centennial Park

This past weekend was probably the peak for fall foliage at Centennial Park in Howard County, Maryland. We stopped at the boat launch area first - and a Great Blue Heron flew up and stood for some moments on a pile of rocks! After that start to the hike, we began the 2+ mile loop around the lake. Enjoy the fall scenes in the slide show below: red dogwood leaves, the reflections of trees in the water, water droplets on a grass seed head, a boat on the water, cattails, Canadian geese taking of, lady fingers, faded lily pads distorting the reflection of lots of yellow trees, a frost damaged poke weed, and the lake through an oak curtain…..the scenes of fall at Centennial Park.

Fall near Ithaca, New York

Ithaca, New York is well known for its gorges. We visited two state parks as part of our fall foliage trip. The first was Robert H. Treman State Park where we did the Gorge Trail. There are similarities to Watkins Glen (well-maintained trail, beautiful stone bridges and retaining walls) and contrasts (wider gorge with more sunlight, fewer pot hole pools, no ‘behind the falls’).

There was lots of fall foliage just about everywhere we looked both at Treman State Park and Taughannock Falls State Park.

We viewed Taughannock Falls from the rim this time. There was a thin ribbon of water shown in the middle picture below. The picture in the upper left is from the base of the falls in the winter of 2009 and the one on the right is from the winter of 2010. It won't be long before winter comes to the park again. The walk to the base of the falls is open in the winter because it is relatively flat (i.e. no stairs or inclines that become hazardous in ice and snow).

Finally - we took a drive through Ithaca and I took a few ‘street art’ photos as we stopped in traffic.

3 Free eBooks - October 2012

The Internet is chock full of good reads…and many of them are free. I’m going to start a monthly post highlighting three book length items. In some ways the post is similar to the weekly ‘Gleanings’ in that the items are found as part of my normal continuous learning habits; the items are different because they are longer, have more depth, and sometimes were published as books previously (sometimes long enough ago that they must be read with their vintage in mind). 

• Hibberd, Shirley; Hulme, F. Edward. Familiar Garden Flowers. London: Cassell; 1879. Available from: http://archive.org/details/cu31924051745945 - Note the date. Just as in the Egyptian Birds book, the color prints are the draw for this book. How many of the flowers do you recognize? It is surprising how many are still ‘familiar’ to us. I found that I spent more time on the ones I didn’t recognize - trying to figure out why they had fallen out of popularity (or maybe just never became ‘familiar’ in North America). Looking the puzzling ones in Wikipedia sometimes provides an explanation.
• Irwig L, Irwig J, Trevena L, et al. Smart Health Choices: Making Sense of Health Advice. London: Hammersmith Press; 2008. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK63638/ - This book provides a strategy to enable meaningful conversations with your healthcare providers. Chapter 5 is the keystone of the book (entitled Smart Health Choice Essentials). The “Useful sources of health advice” section right before the glossary points to databases and websites that provide current information about treatments as well.
• Whimper, Charles. Egyptian birds for the most part seen in the Nile Valley. London: A. and C. Black; 1909. Available from: http://archive.org/details/egyptianbirdsfor00whym - Note the date - well before a lot of excavation and the dam at Aswan. The colored pictures are what make this book worth the look. They are well labeled on the opposite page and include the surroundings. I particularly liked when the author included the hieroglyph or the bird as depicted in ancient Egyptian art. 

Sweet Potato Harvest

Last spring I planted the sprouted end of a sweet potato before I cooked the rest of it. It wasn’t long before the large pot on the deck contained a fast growing and very green vine. A light frost last weekend damaged the leaves (on the left in the picture below taken about a month ago) - prompting me to harvest the crop. There were vines draped over the rosemary and basil pots and across the deck. They were sending their photosynthetic energy to that one pot so I anticipated that there were at least a few sweet potatoes.

The crop was one large sweet potato and then a handful that were shaped like large carrots. I’ll be making sweet potato soup with them later this week! Sweet potatoes are one of my favorite deck plants because they are easy to care for, they look pretty all summer long and they produce something edible too!

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 20, 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:

5 Remarkable Recycled Homes - creative use of a grain silo, shipping container, an old church, bottles, etc.

Demystifying the ENERGY STAR Rating

A false colored scanning electron micrograph of caffeine crystals

Technology Trends - a list from a tech trends debate reported by Richard Watson. The panelists were challenged to come up with trends that were not obvious today and would create explosive growth in about 5 years time.

Mammogram humor from Marlo Thomas

Gabon Expedition: Oil Rigs Are a Haven for Marine Life - a win-win for conservation

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #24 - Which one is your favorite? Mine is the first - the rainbow lorikeet

The Best of the 2012 Labbies - The Scientist’s annual multimedia awards. I like the luna moth antennae taken by a high school teacher from Rochester, New York

Good Milk/Bad Milk - a video about why milk is popular and healthy for some people…and makes others sick. This was one of the Honorable Mention Labbies.

Super-cheap health tests, a blood test made of paper - And why are we not seeing these being rolled out in the US and not just targeted to poor countries of the world?

Watkins Glen in the Fall

Watkins Glen State Park was the first destination of our fall foliage trip last week. The views in the gorge (the slide show below) were full of water exposed layers of rock, colorful leaves, and water flowing over rock ledges. The sounds of falling water were ever present and, when the wind blew, leaves swirled. As usual, some parts of the path were wet (the price one pays for having a path behind a falls!). It’s a path to take slowly and savor the richness of the natural world of Watkins Glen.

In addition to the gorge and broad views of fall foliage - I enjoyed some closer looks at fall plants - and the tile on the outside of the park building.

Rest Stop Plants

The rest stops along the interstates are the quickest ‘stop’ along the way and definitely add to the comfort of road trips. The rest stops have improved over the years. They are clean (usually cleaner than fast food restaurants or truck stops) and designed for smooth traffic flow - often separating cars from the truck traffic.

This year I’ve appreciated the plantings. On our fall foliage trip, the rest stop in Pennsylvania featured angel’s trumpets and sunflowers.

So - thank you to the people that make the decision to keep keeping those rest stops opened and in good working order…and making them beautiful too.

Favorite Smells of Fall

What are your favorite smells of fall?

The smells I most strongly associate with fall are:

Leaf tea. The smell of wet leaves and pine needles on walks through the neighborhood or hikes through a forest are earthy and often very much like black tea and herbal teas. They remind me of how much I like hot tea as the weather turns colder.

Harvested herbs like basil and mint. I let them dry on a tray in the kitchen before storing them away for use all during the winter.

Pumpkin pie baking. The wafts of cinnamon, cloves, and ginger are so appealing whether they are the real thing or in candle form.

Roses. Roses tend to burst into bloom when the summer heat wanes. They have a wonderful last hurray in fall before the frost takes them.

What are your favorite smells of fall?

Corning Museum of Glass

The only indoor part of our fall foliage trip was in the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. We timed it perfectly - for the few hours of rain during our 3 day trek. The museum allows photography so I enjoyed trying to capture images without too much glare. My favorite item this time was the broken pitcher with the green markings in the upper left of the montage above. Just think what it would have been like originally - glowing white with the bright green markings!

The vase with red carnations and a bird….the stained glass…the cut glass. Glass is certainly a versatile and appealing medium. I also enjoyed seeing another Karen LaMonte glass dress similar to the one I saw in the Tennessee last summer.

The museum also had several Chihuly pieces similar to ones I saw last summer in Dallas. There were also very different pieces - large chunks of colored glass, ribbed bowls, a giant peony of frosted glass. Enjoy the slide show below.

Fall Closet Cleanout

The change in seasons is an opportune time to clean out your clothes closet. While I get out a few warmer clothes that are good to layer for cool fall mornings, I take a look at every single garment that has been in the closet all summer and make a pile that will, one way another, leave the house. The key question

Will I ever wear this again?

Should be easy to answer.

If the answer is no - then it goes in the pile. Most of my pile goes into a bag to donate to charity. The key is to not store it away for another time. Once you have made the decision that it is not something you will wear again, follow through so that you won’t have to spend any more time revisiting the decision.

If the answer is yes - then make sure the garment is in good repair (no missing buttons, clean) and make the decision to keep it in the closet of the upcoming season or store it somewhere else so that it can be easily retrieved next spring.

Hopefully, by the time this process is finished, you’ll have plenty of room to get all your winter clothes into the closet!

Fallen Leaves - October 2012

We made our annual fall foliage trek this week. This year we made our way from Maryland up through Pennsylvannia and the Watkins Glen/Corning/Ithaca area of New York. I'll post some pictures of the specific areas over the course of the next week.

Today the slide show features leaves already on the ground. They were newly fallen so their colors were still vibrant. Some were wet and that made the colors even more intense. How many trees can you identify in this mix? Maples...poplars...sycamores...beech...sweet gum...and more! Celebrate fall today!

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 13, 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:

IGNITE - Inspiring Girls Now In Technology Evolution - the program in Seattle schools that is a best practice for educating young women about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers, well documented and is spreading to other school systems. There is a toolkit available.

Prairie seeds - a collection of seed pile pictures - guess what they are! The answers are at the bottom of the post. The rose hips are the only truly easy one!

Fall prairie pictures - from the Prairie Ecologist

Evolution of Milkweed Eating Insects - I actually propagated milkweed at the woods edge in my yard….for the monarch caterpillars!

Doctors Speak out About Unnecessary Care as Cost Put at $800 Billion a Year - As a patient….how does one distinguish the unnecessary care? How many times has a side effect from unnecessary medical treatment created another problem? This is not only expensive…it is also dangerous to health.

Nora Denzel Keynote Speech at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2012 - youtube video

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2012 wiki - links to information about each talk

Coursera - take the world’s best courses, online, for free

Extreme Weather Photo Contest Winners - From NASA. Shelf clouds, thunderstorm, walls of dust, lightning

Is reading in the dark bad for your eyesight? - It depends. Take a look at a summary of research on the topic.

More LED Water Light Photographs

I’ve been doing some other experiments with the LED Water light. I posted pictures of a dahlia with the light last month and decided to try some different items. The theme of the October session is jewelry…..and I couldn’t resist another sprinkling of flower petals. Enjoy the slide show!