Ready for the Light Show at Brookside Gardens

Brookside Gardens looked close to being ready for the annual Garden of Lights Winter Walk that starts the evening of November 23 and continues through January 6. Last weekend we walked around the gardens during the day to see how the light features are created. Favorite features from previous years were obvious: the hyacinth lights, the sea serpent in an emptied reflecting pool, animal forms (frog and lion pictured below…but there are many more) and flowers of all shapes and sizes. Several new items we noted used recycled plastic bottles as reflectors and diffusers of lights. I’ll post again when I see how they look at night.

Scissors

Scissors are a popular tool. One of my grandmothers always used to emphasize using the right tool for the job - and somehow scissors are often the most appropriate tool.

I have accumulated many pairs of scissors over the years - rarely lose them - and am surprised at how frequently I use them. There are the black handled office scissors that I use for opening packages and envelopes as well as trimming labels and stickers to the perfect size. The red handled sewing scissors left over from long ago when I made quite a few of my clothes. Now I use them infrequently and mostly for just cutting thread and patches rather than yards of fabric. Cuticle scissors have done double duty to tighten the tiny screws in eyeglasses. The sturdy kitchen scissors I use most frequently of all - cutting up herbs, pizza or pieces of chicken; they are the scissors that tend to wear out from use and myriad passes through the high heat of the dishwasher. And lastly - the steel scissors I inherited from my mother-in-law. I don’t know their whole history but they are still quite sharp and I think of her every time I pick them up to cut wrapping paper or curl ribbon or open a package.

Birds from my Office Window

My office looks out over the roof of a covered deck and then trees - a maple on one side of the yard, pines on the other, and a tulip poplar at the fore of the forest that lies beyond. One morning this past week was cloudy and the color from the leaves had already faded. Suddenly there seemed to be a lot of birds. I managed to photograph some through the window. The window glass and the amount of magnification required makes them look like they were taken on a foggy day but it was simply cloudy. I saw

Doves in the maple,

A woodpecker on a neighbor’s roof,

A flicker looking around the base of a pine,

And blue jays - there seemed to be a flock of them - in the leaves.

I saw a cardinal and a chickadee - but they were too fast for me to catch with the camera.

The birds had distracted me from what I should have been doing - but I celebrated seeing them for the rest of the day. 

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 17, 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:

Fresh Cranberry-Orange Relish - Something a bit different to do with cranberries this year. I already blogged about it earlier this week….great recipe

What we die of - data is from the UK…interesting data and way of presenting it

Preschoolers' Counting Abilities Relate to Future Math Performance - counting….not just rote memorization of numbers

Do we only use 10% of our brains? - a medical myth

Face-Washing Tips for Healthier-Looking Skin - from a dermatologist. Sometimes we do too much.

The Bifurcation of Bling - spending shift from ostentatious product to ones less visible to the world as individual/people get richer

Earlier End of Life Care Discussions Are Linked to Less Aggressive Care in Final Days of Life, Study Shows  

In Australia, A Total Solar Eclipse - video from 11/13

Second Most Common Infection in the U.S. Proving Harder to Treat With Current Antibiotics - Urinary tract infections from resistant bacteria increased over 30% between 1999 and 2010….high levels of antibiotic overuse in the southeastern part of the US during the same time period.

Answers to the Fall 2012 eBird/Swarovski Photo Quiz - you can take the quiz or just look at the pictures and read the notes about the clues to identify the bird

3 Free eBooks - November 2012

The Internet has a growing number of online books….and many of them are free. This is the second monthly post highlighting 3 that I have found within the past month.

Cooper-Hewitt. Kata-gami : Japanese stencils. Washington: Smithsonian Institution; 1979. Available at http://archive.org/details/katagamijapanese00coop - Another feast for the eyes. It is hard to pick a favorite but I keep coming back to “Grain Plants on a Lattice” on page 19 (partial image at left).

Mathew, Frank James; Walker, Francis S., illustrator. Ireland. London: A&C Black; 1907. Available at http://archive.org/details/irelandf00math - Look at this one for the illustrations. They are in color and depict Ireland in the early 1900s. 

Clock, Emma Graham. Wild flowers from the mountains, cañons and valleys of California. San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Co; 1915. Available at http://archive.org/details/cu31924001686595 - How many of these do you recognize? The flowers are ‘reproductions from water colors’ - strikingly vivid against black backgrounds (example at right). 

The previous post is here. 

Pine Cones

When I was raking up the blanket of leaves in my backyard, I uncovered pine cones from our neighbors’ pines that had fallen into our yard. It was a welcome discovery…a serendipity find that will give the house a piney scent for the holiday! I kept tossing them into a pile in part of the yard I had already raked. Now they are indoors and piled in a sleigh shaped basket on the hearth awaiting some further decoration when we get out our boxes of Christmas ornaments sometime after Thanksgiving.

So - today I am celebrating the color and shape and smell of pine cones. Enjoy the slideshow!

Celebrating a Sycamore

Sycamores are often awkward looking trees. When they are young their trunks are skinny and their leaves look too big. The young trunks often redeem themselves with their flexibility. The one that came up on my back flowerbed - which I have been cultivating the past few years - survived both the derecho that came through our area last July and Hurricane Sandy more recently.

The leaves keep growing for the whole season and are quite tough. They don’t decompose as easily as many other leaves. When I cleaned out my garden at the beginning of the summer there were some brown leathery sycamore leaves that appeared as intact as the day they fell from the tree.

But this particular tree has made up for is awkwardness by holding onto its leaves a little longer than many of the other trees this year. Their fading of green to yellow to brown - the combination of points and curves - fluttering…they are the holdout of the season right now. It is the last hurrah of summer.

The tree in my garden is not old enough to have the white bark that would make it so easily identifiable in winter. It takes years for a sycamore to become a ghost tree.....perhaps more than I will live in this house. 

Celebrating National Novel Writing Month

In early October, I decided to participate in the National Novel Writing Month - which is November. I started reading items on the web site. I had never written 50,000 words on a single topic before - and certainly doing it in one month sounded daunting. To make it even more of a challenge, I had guests coming for the Thanksgiving week.

I decided that my goal should be 3000 words per day so that I could cross the 50,000 word mark before my guests arrived on the 19th. I created a mind map of chapters that I thought would be about 3000 words each and a spreadsheet of character definitions.

So - how has it worked out? I past the 50,000 work mark yesterday and I still have quite a bit of the story to tell. The green on the mind map to the right is the part that is done. Writing the rest of the story is probably another 20,000-30,000 words.

I’ve already learned a lot from the experience and am more aware of what I need to do better. Things like 

• Realistic dialog
• Enough tension/release
• Narrative flow 

Are all going to be the challenge of the next phase - editing. That is going to be as hard or harder than the writing sprint of November. The novel may never turn into something to publish. Learning experiences have value of their own.

I am celebrating my 50,000 words today - knowing that it is not the finish line but a significant milestone along the way.

Connecting Recipies

It is the time of year to try out some of the luscious recipes that seem to be everywhere you look. This past weekend I started out making Fresh Cranberry-Orange Relish. It tasted even better than I anticipated but it made a very large amount. I decided to use it for part of the fruits in a modified Golden Stollen recipe and also added it to give more spunk to the soup I was making for lunch. And then I made half a pumpkin custard in a grab-it to use up the half can of pumpkin not needed in stollen. So - it was quite a day for cooking experiments...and all a domino effect started by the relish!

As usual - I was not a stickler for following either the ingredients or the directions in the recipes.

For the Cranberry-Orange Relish, I used 2 oranges rather than 1. I cut the ends of the oranges off before I cut them into eights. My food processor was big enough to hold everything so I put all the ingredients in it at the same time and processed until everything was more finely chopped than shown in the picture on the Wegman’s web page. So far I have eaten it by itself (what a treat it was using a spatula to clean up and enjoying ever last bit of the relish left in the bowl!), stirred into soup, and in the golden stollen. And there was still enough to put in the freezer too.

The Golden Stollen was in my last Gleanings and I had commented about attempting to modify it to be gluten free. As a first experiment, I replaced the 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour with teff flour. I used olive oil instead of butter and honey instead of sugar. I decided not to add nuts since the teff flour already has a nutty flavor. Instead I added 1/3 cup of the cranberry-orange relish. For the cup of dried fruit, I cut up dried prunes and apricots along with crystallized ginger. Raisins were used to fill up the cup. It ended up being slightly skewed toward the crystallized ginger. I simple stirred the dough thoroughly then mounded it onto a cast our griddle (picture on the left above). It cracked a bit as it cooked. I brushed butter on it when it came out of the oven but did not add the powdered sugar (picture on right above...after I had cut several sample pieces from one end). I told my husband it was a new pumpkin bread recipe and he tried it - and liked it….a first for my attempts to entice him to enjoy gluten free breads.

Of course - we both enjoyed sharing the small pumpkin custard for our dessert that evening.

Find some great foods of the season to be part of your celebration of the season!

Around our (Maryland) Yard in November 2012

Maryland in November is the time the raking of the leaves peaks. The leaves on our sycamore have stayed on longer than I thought it would since we already had a few of them falling in early October.

The hydrangea blossoms have deepened their color as they’ve dried. I am considering bringing some inside for a dried flower arrangement. 

The seeds for next year’s crop of onions are ready to fall in the garden.

And it’s definitely time to rake the leaves into mounds to they won’t kill the grass. The maples and tulip poplars are the most prevalent in our yard.
 

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 10, 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:

Genetic Roulette - The Gamble of our Lives - 1.5 hour video about GMOs….even if you want to dismiss the issue as unimportant to you, you should understand why many people and countries are not.

Non-GMO Shopping Guide - Even without labels…you can

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #26 - Which one is your favorite? I like the painted sandgrouse this week although the great blue heron is always a favorite too.

Eight National Park Lodges Join Historic Hotels of America - Don’t all of the sound inviting…for themselves and where they are located.

Are Facebook and Internet Addictions Affecting Our Minds? - infographic

Golden stollen - wonder how one could make a gluten-free version of this

9 New Tree-Loving and Endangered Tarantula Species Discovered in Brazil - includes pictures of 6

Five Parks Where Winter Is Anything But Off-Season - Acadia, Biscayne, Channel Islands, Joshua Tree, and Yosemite

The most important education technology in 200 years - What will the surge in free instruction online do to the education business?

9 Varieties of Nutrient-Rich Winter Squash

Sandy Superstorm Development Animation - From University of Delaware using 800 infrared images from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite

Brookside Gardens Pumpkin and Squash Display 2012

In keeping with the Autumn Harvest theme Brookside Gardens has a display of pumpkins and winter squashes. The image at the left is the big picture view of largest display and the slide show below contains close-up views. The colors, shapes and textures are quite diverse. My favorite is the one with cream background and red markings (seen in image 1 and 3 in the slide show). 

 

October 2012 Doodles

I continued my experiments with colored pencils and markers in October plus started on some semi-realistic depictions of flowers and a desert scene. There’s also a celebration of fall leaves in these doodles.

Enjoy the October 2012 doodles below! Doodle posts from previous months are here.

Brookside Gardens Chrysanthemum Display 2012

Brookside Gardens has chrysanthemums in the conservatory and in the outdoor gardens. The ones on forms in the conservatory were just beginning to open when we were there on 10/26.  They’ll last well into November. The slide show below shows the variety of mum types on display and in full bloom when we were there. It’s a celebration of chrysanthemums!

Kudzu

Kudzu is smothering trees in our area of Maryland. It isn’t everywhere but it is pretty obvious that it can overwhelm even large trees if left unchecked. This past weekend I volunteered to help plant trees and clear kudzu in a small area. After digging holes and planting trees (oaks and spice bush), we started clearing Kudzu. I didn’t get a good before and after picture. The one included with this post is a tree that was not quite as overwhelmed as the one we focused on. It’s a lot of work and has to be done again and again since it is virtually impossible to get all the parts of the vine that can regenerate. The best part of the morning, for me, was clearing two smaller mounds of kudzu to uncover two small trees that were bowed from the weight of the veins:  a black walnut tree and a cherry tree. I’ll watch the calls for volunteers again in the spring!

Other pictures are posted at this Facebook page!

Peacock Feathers

I have a vase of peacock feathers in my office behind my monitor. They are about 30 years old; my grandmother raised peacocks and picked up the feathers as they were shed. I got a small box of them for Christmas one year. It’s probably old fashioned to have a vase of them; decorating with them was more popular in the Victorian era. I like them because of the memories they evoke and their beauty. They draw me in because they have an exotic aspect:

• They have ‘eyes’
• Their color changes depending on the light (because the color is structural - like many butterfly wings)
• They are very long

So - today I am celebrating peacock feathers.

10 Years Ago – In November 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 November 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10.  

1. Earthquakes and volcanic activity over the past few days in Indonesia, Ecuador, Pakistan, the United States and Japan are totally unrelated to each other or to the seismic events surrounding Italy's Mount Etna, experts said: the earth is not going to crack.
2. Elderly adults who perform as well as younger adults on certain cognitive tests appear to enlist the otherwise underused left half of the prefrontal cortex of their brain in order to maintain performance. In contrast, elderly people who are not "high performers" on the tests resemble younger adults in showing a preferred usage of the right side of the prefrontal cortex.
3. A severe shortage of people in the United States who know languages used by terrorists and who can decipher intelligence
4. A team of astronomers, routinely monitoring Jupiter's moon Io, have witnessed the largest documented volcanic eruption in history.
5. Last year's Nisqually earthquake caused damage to nearly 300,000 residences or almost one out of every four households in the Puget Sound area
6. About 10,000 years ago, glaciers pushed the range of North American earthworms southward and today the only earthworms found in most of Minnesota are non-native species introduced from Europe. New research suggests that non-native earthworms are radically changing the forest floor in the northern U.S., threatening the goblin fern and other rare plants in the process.
7. Enormous Irish Temple Discovered Underground once surrounded by 300 towering oak posts…each tree was approximately 2.2 yards wide.…dates from 2500 to 2300 B.C.
8. In the 1930s, wild turkeys were near extinct and numbering only about 30,000… the wild turkey population now stands at around 6 million.
9. Nepal - A security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu has been shot dead by unidentified assailants in what police said appears to be a deliberate escalation of violence by Maoist rebels.
10. Open-heart surgery was performed without opening the chest

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 03, 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:

The Diet-Proof Holiday Meal: Seven Ways to Stay On Track This Season - Tips for the holidays…in time for Thanksgiving

10 Predictions about Information Technology - from the Gartner Symposium

11 stats that suggest our world may not be as globalized as we think - Text and video from TED

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #25 - Which one is your favorite? I like the peacock in flight

How to use a paper towel - TED talk

Intercontinental Insect Migration - You’ve probably heard about Monarch butterfly migration but there are other insects that migrate: painted lady butterflies and dragonflies.

How to Stop Winter from Weathering Your Skin: Top Ten Tips for Preventing 'Winter Itch' - Not too early to have you plan for winter!

On Saturn, Cassini Observes Huge Storm, Causing Incredible Temperature Spike - complete with a short video

Self-Medicating Animals - even woolly bear caterpillars fight parasitic flies

How to Make Droplets Levitate on Water - I watched the YouTube version of the video (link in 5th paragraph of article

Celebrating November 2012

How do you celebrate in November? Here are some ideas:

Going off Daylight Savings Time. Maybe this isn’t something everyone celebrates. I do because it means that the time difference between where my daughter is (in Arizona) and where I am (in Maryland) does from 3 hours to 2 hours….and communication gets a little easier.

Veterans Day. Celebrating everyone that has served in the military; more and more of us know someone that has served or is serving. Celebrating from a different perspective - it may be a three day weekend; surely one of them will be a sunny fall day to celebrate outdoors before winter weather comes.

Thanksgiving. A day full of family and food and football. That’s the tradition in my family. The food does not have to be the traditional turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. I tend to make something a little different every year although my family always wants at least one batch of pumpkin custard (nobody seems to miss the crust!)

Gift buying. There are lots of sales in November that work well for those of us that are planning ahead for December. I tend to avoid the Friday after Thanksgiving and do my shopping earlier in the month. When I find the perfect gift for someone....I celebrate….knowing that I’ll celebrate again with them when they open it during the December holidays.

Decorating for the holidays. Rather than shopping the day after Thanksgiving, I decorate my house. It’s an all day celebration of family history as we unload boxes of decorations accumulated over 40 years. 

Brookside Gardens Roses

Roses always love the cooler temperatures of fall - and the ones at Brookside Gardens were no exception when I was there last week. The color in other parts of the gardens was from fall leaves….and the lights the crews were installing in preparation for the Garden of Lights which will be from November 23- January 6.

Enjoy the slide show!