April 19, 2021

Mini Road Trip: Mt Pleasant – April 2021 (2)

April 19, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

Hiking back from the skunk cabbage patch at Howard County Conservancy’s Mt Pleasant, I noticed the tree canopy over the trail. It was a great spring day….cool, sunny with occasional puffy clouds.

I looked at the shelf fungus again – from the top and bottom.

The larger woodpecker holes on a high branch seemed larger than last hike but I still didn’t see or hear the bird.

I was surprised to see a patch of daffodils in the woods. They probably started out as a few bulbs….but had proliferated over the years.

Ranger the Barred Owl was very relaxed. He opened his eyes when I first walked up to his area but then dozed – deciding I was not a threat.

There were bees active at one of the hives.

The redbuds are blooming. I like that they bloom all over - even on the larger branches.

2021 04 IMG_4191 (30).jpg — As I was eating a protein bar for my lunch, I noticed a black feather….maybe crow-sized…

2021 04 IMG_4191 (32).jpg — And some dandelions.

The pear tree in the orchard is blooming. I hope it makes pears this year; the past few years the flowers or small fruit have been ruined by late frosts.

Overall – an enjoyable April hike on a familiar trail.

May 07, 2020

Filling a Day of Social Distancing - 5/6/2020 - Routine

May 07, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

Photographing an iris bud. I decided to do some macro photography of the iris bud that had dried up before it put it in the compost. The materials for the project: clip-on macro lens, jeweler’s loupe, a sharp knife and cutting board, and then the iPad to use as a light table. The sections were cut as thinly as possible (not microtome thin, unfortunately).

The loupe provides 22x magnification, so I started with that. These are cross sections of the desiccated bud.

The cross section of the stem was not desiccated, but obviously not functioning well enough to get water up to the bud.

The sleeve around the bud was almost completely dry although there was still a little reddish color that I photographed a few days ago.

I took one picture with the clip-on lens to show the whole bud cross section in one frame.

Making biscuits. Sometimes I get hungry for breads…but not enough to buy a loaf. Making biscuits from scratch fills the craving. This batch was made with a little more milk and spread into a shallow pan to bake. The sheet was about 1/2 inch, so it was somewhat like bread. I slathered a rectangle with peanut butter in the first round…then had ginger preserves for the second serving (yesterday). I still have enough for at least one more serving!

Browsing McCall’s Magazines from the 1920s. Internet Archive has several McCall’s Magazines from the 1920s available. I’ve been browsing through them the past few days …. realizing that one of my grandmothers would have been 20 in 1927…wondering if she saw these magazines. All of them have a segment about clothes …. with patterns available. It was a time of drop waists (or no waist) … shorter hemlines … shoes that were color matched to dresses for formal occasions.

Watching the compiled hatching moments from Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A 3 minutes video of birds emerging from their eggs: Barred Owl, Osprey, Red-tailed Hawk.

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts here.

And now about the beauty for routine….

I’ve been emphasizing some of the things that are different about each day…things that keep the days at home from settling into a sameness. But the routine is important too.

I get up about the same time every day…go to sleep about the same time every day too. My internal clock is quite strong. These days the birds are already beginning to make their morning song when I am waking up. I enjoy listening to them for a few minutes before I get up.
Breakfast is almost always a smoothie…enough that I consider it the routine. But the ingredients of the smoothie change from day to day…and some days I decide to something completely different. I had left over biscuits and ginger preserves yesterday because my husband was snoozing when I wanted to have breakfast (and I didn’t want to make noise with the Ninja to make the smoothie).
Creating at least one Zentangle tile is something that I do sometime during the day. Sometimes I do more than one but not in one sitting.
One way or another, I get 12,000 steps (counted by my Fitbit) during the day. I try to spread the activity out during the day and get at least 30 minutes of ‘active minutes’ as calculated by the Fitbit.
I browse (occasionally read) 4 eBooks a day. Sometimes I count magazines as books if they are lengthy…or I group several of them together to count as a book. For example, 4-6 of the Life magazines are counted as a book.
The blog post is also part of my routine…it was before the pandemic and has continued to be part of my daily rhythm.
And then there are the notes I keep for myself on whatever I am doing. I find that a learn better when I take notes while I listen…when I read…even just after I talk to people.
Noting at least 4 specific things I am thankful for and ways that I was kind to others and to myself at the end of the day.
20-30 minutes of yoga and Breathing app round out the daily routine.

Now that I am looking at my list, I am realizing that it hasn’t changed very much from what it was before the pandemic. Maybe I am doing a bit more reading and might not be as rushed to complete the whole routine every day.

January 16, 2019

Mt Pleasant in January 2019 – Part 2

January 16, 2019/ Gwen Morrison

Continuing the images from last week’s hike at Howard County Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant….

I noticed a bluebird box with lichen growing on its roof. I wondered how long the houses lasted. This one had a plaque below it saying it had been installed in 2009 so it’s held up for 10 years!

There was some farm equipment near the edge of a field – covered in vines. It must not have been used for at least one season…and maybe longer. Nature is taking over! I didn’t get close enough to determine what kind of vines they might be – mile-a-minute or oriental bittersweet (both invasive) would be a good beginning guess.

With the record amount of rainfall we got in 2018, there was a root ball of a tree that fell – probably last spring. What a dramatic change it must have been for the organisms around the roots before it fell…there would be a complex story to document different organisms came along after the tree feel and the elements alternatively dried out and filled in the hole (with water or soil washed into the hole). Nature is always in motion!

A beech tree had been cut down and the big logs left in place. Maybe the tree had fallen and was cut up to clear the trail or maybe it was a standing dead tree that was cut before it could fall. The center was rotting. The beech bark looks so smooth from a distance but often looks wrinkled upon closer inspection.

Ranger, the barred owl, is back in his quarters near the nature center. He seemed very calm as we hiked by. There aren’t school fieldtrips with lots of students to crowd around his space during the winter; it’s easier for him to be Zen.

It was good to be back at Mt. Pleasant for a hike…maybe I’ll go again sometime with my husband…wear boots that can get muddy and hunt for skunk cabbage peeking through the muck.