TECO power plant exhaust stacks reflect on the manatee-filled waters near Apollo Beach near Tampa. March 2024.
Near Tampa, the Tampa Electric Company (TECO) has what appears to be a waste-to-energy power plant near Apollo Beach. It discharges warm water into a man-made cut connecting to Tampa Bay. During the cooler winter months, manatees crowd into this cut to stay warm. TECO has built and supports a manatee-viewing area of boardwalks and elevated viewing platforms. It’s easy to get to, easy to walk around, and well-developed (not just a platform but hundreds of feet of boardwalk). While there one also can see shorebirds and many kinds of fish.
Manatees with shark. TECO Manatee Viewing Center. March 2024.Immature White Ibis at TECO Manatee Viewing Center. March 2024.I thought these were tarpon, but I’m feeling insecure about that. The distortion of the water is making it difficult to tell. These particular fish were about three feet long. There were bigger ones. TECO Manatee Viewing Center. March 2024.The stars of the area are the manatees, of course. TECO Manatee Viewing Center. March 2024.
Among my pantheon of pet peeves I count the astronomical definition of the seasons. People look around on March 21st–or 22nd, because They Say So–expecting some radical change. You can almost hear the globe laughing. Let’s leave astronomy to matters of astrophysics: rotations, revolutions, light years, and such. Let’s leave Spring to what our eyes see, our noses smell, our ears hear, and what our skin feels as it collides with our sun’s radiant energy and the increased load of humidity it can carry. Here in central North Carolina, it’s definitely the beginning of Spring. For over two weeks I’ve posted photos of such, and this past week left no room for doubters:
The star magnolia has hit full bloom…
Star magnolia. February 29, 2024.
The camellia has busted out its peppermint blossoms, and in its exuberance, an aberrant deep pink one:
Normal camellia blossom. February 2024.Abnormal camellia blossom. February 2024.
…and daffodils (or relatives thereof) are blooming everywhere:
Ready for their close-up: daffodils. Leap Day 2024.
A screeching blush of robins stopped by a week ago, but I had no time to properly photograph them. Just arrived from further south to torment those who stuck it out? Or just a gathering to kick off the aggressive mating season? One of them has been attacking his own reflection on my side storm door for ten days now. The bird feeder needs filling about five times more than usual. Yes, it’s good. Soon I’ll note that first sheen of green as I look through the tops of the until-now bare trees, a sheen foreshadowing the imminent burst of leaves as we launch into the heightened glory of full Spring.
Growing up, my parents’ chairs interested me little. They still don’t. I consider them in my mind: the bulbous thing they reupholstered from a shocking golden mélange of 50’s colors, vaguely like a tweed, to a deep blue-green as hideous as you likely just pictured. Another horrible chair, this one chalky gray underlaid with a chocolate brown, thankfully disappeared from our lives as my parents focused ever more on Danish modern. Two deep mustard gold chairs sculpted from a cube joined the blue-green thing. I took Danish modern for granted then, hate it in retrospect. For reasons never given, our sofa matched nothing else in the room, either in style or color. Its creamy colored soft contours with the ever-present throw pillows would scream Rooms-To-Go today. Back then it just said, “I came from the middle aisle of our local furniture store.”
Chairs only rarely occupy our minds beyond whether we can find one to sit in. We take them for granted, I suppose because those of our upbringing formed part of the Always-There background. We sat on hard wooden chairs in school, replaced later by hard plastic seats, replaced in turn by a hard substance which defies any characterization other than “smooth”. College offered the same but with more variety unless you attended something exclusive in which case the chairs weren’t any more comfortable but they looked a lot older, more distinguished. When newly graduate, one’s interior decorating attitude toward chairs usually is something like, “is there one” and “is there room for one or two?” Perhaps I should add, “Can I get them from Mom and Dad?” because that’s their provenance for the most part.
“For the most part.” I moved from my dorm to my first apartment towing the usual hand-me-down furnishings including a deep brown and deeply ugly sofa. Along the way, however, I stopped at my grandparents’ house to pick up a chair from their basement which meant a lot to me. Now in their 80s, they were moving to a senior-living apartment. At the time this chair represented a place where I had sat a lot, a place I found both comfortable and comforting. Over time my bones became more brittle, my muscle turned to fat, and I found the chair less comfortable. At the same time, the comfort of seeing a chair with deep green shiny silk-like ribbons running vertically on a cream background, with dark-stained wooden arms and legs, sustained me emotionally. In 1992 I looked at the chair in my new Pennsylvania apartment where I had fled my divorce and my teaching career, seeing the chair as an anchor to my past and to my family. As a child I sat on the floor of my grandparents’ basement when Grandpa read Mr. Murphy the Irish Potato. (It’s horribly inappropriate, but times were different then.) A little older, I sat in that chair when my brother and I would hide out from the adults upstairs. In college, I ducked over for dinner every few weeks with my grandparents and spent a couple weeks there my final college summer as I waited for summer quarter to become fall quarter. I’m sure I sat in that chair then, also. Fifteen years after graduation I could reflect on that in Pennsylvania. My one regret with regard to it? We reupholstered it 20 years after I took it from my grandparents’ house. We chose fabric practically instead with our hearts, and the upholsterer somehow made a hard seat even harder. Today it’s usually covered in blankets and our cat sleeps there.
My hands have contributed to the wear on those arms. February 2024.
Other chairs came later, mostly as my grandparents died. The shield chair from those same grandparents, still sporting the upholstery I know from childhood, sixty years ago:
That red looked a lot more crimson about 60 years ago! February 2024.
My parents claimed one chair from my mother’s parents and kept it until they both had died by 2020. True to form, they immediately reupholstered it to a completely inappropriate modernist pattern, cream with trailing colors of brown, muted oranges, and dusky rose. Later, perhaps recognizing the error of their ways, they chose a formal but slightly modern pattern in rose, and that is what sits in my library today (and yes, I posted this chair once before):
The rose Queen Anne chair in the corner has become my library reading chair. For more than a decade, the heart-shaped table beside it has played a supporting role. The footstool might have been needle-pointed by my grandmother, and certainly has been around for more than 60 years. The torchiere lamp graced my father’s parents’ house. An oil painting of my grandmother, the one who purchased these chairs, painted from a very old black-and-white photograph, adorns the wall. February 2024.
Some chairs entered my life at times indeterminate. I can tell you where they’re from, but not when and how they came to me, or at best guess at it. The cherrywood rocker which my mother’s mother sat in the corner of her bedroom to match the shockingly gorgeous cherry bedroom set. Every morning I too sit on this to dress, just as my grandmother did about 100 years ago.
A truly beautiful piece of functional furniture. February 2024.
Then again there’s the wooden rocker with a caned seat which I used to sit on to dress myself until the caning gave way one day, and I thought I would go through it to the floor. My father’s father sat in this chair in his study while taking a break from his duties as a Baptist minister. I remember the beautiful rolltop oak desk he would work at. Sometimes he needed a break. He would move to this rocker, sitting in an opposite corner near the window of his study which looked out to the next-door church. I can see him rub then rest his eyes from all the reading he had done.
So beautiful. Now it sits beside my wife’s side of the bed, perpetually encumbered by clothes. But I know it’s there. February 2024.
When my father’s father died, and his mother entered a nursing home, I inherited another rocker and its matching straight-legged chair, a captain’s chair style. I wish I could remember their position in their household. These two must have had either sentimental or practical value for my grandparents to have moved them from a large Victorian three-bedroom house to a small two-bedroom home in a retirement community. The rocker is missing one of the dowels between the seat and the arms. My father’s brother got his leg stuck between two dowels and my panicking grandmother insisted to her husband that they break out one dowel to free him.
The true Captain’s chair. February 2024.The matching chair. Note how all of these old chairs have lost the finish on the arms, due to loving wear. February 2024.
Despite my love for this older furniture, it has only graced our main rooms by necessity. Early in our marriage (the second, lasting one) we purchased a Broyhill recliner which echoed the wing-backed design of these older chairs complete with a brocade upholstery. It also complemented our older, inherited chairs. Unfortunately, only a few years after we did, we invited a streetwise cat into our house whose scratching habits proceeded to turn it into a tasseled mockery of itself. It sits in the rec room now, with the other rejects who form the viewing area for our ‘home theater’. (It’s not really a home theater; it’s two chairs and a love seat, all of which recline and are positioned as optimally as possible to a large TV with a surround speaker system. We invited the other chair in the ensemble into our living room in 2009, and sent it to the basement in 2017.) I’m thinking we should reupholster it and return it to its rightful place in our living room.
Early relegation to our basement (or worse) seems to be the norm for modern furniture. I would tell you of the two loveseats which have been purchased and abandoned in that time, falling out of favor and usefulness just as the one now in our basement, and I could detail the two sofas we purchased in 2006 and 2013, the former being replaced by the latter, the latter going “to a deserving home” in 2020. But we’re talking of chairs. We started 2020 with a fixation on chairs. We purchased four chairs which looked decent, solid, and worthy of the prices we paid. Two of them replaced two of the inherited chairs detailed above. Two motorized recliners replaced the sofa. Now, barely more than four years old, the two recliners have entered middle age, declaring themselves for the James Dean life with the exception they’ve never lived fast nor will they leave a beautiful corpse. They’ve become more uncomfortable to me as I deal with lower back issues. Luckily the two side chairs have been making their case for sticking around more than a few years. They simplistically mimic the older inherited chairs, causing me to wonder: why I don’t seek out chairs like that?
Before ending this, office chairs should be mentioned. Though often unremarkable, they offer a unique feature: they almost always have wheels. On top of industrial-grade, quarter-inch-thick carpet, these babies provide transportation to those unwilling to stand simply to walk 10-20 feet to a neighbor’s cubicle. (And that one time my four-person team found ourselves housed in a former microbiological incubation room with hard, sealed floors? One of eight such rooms on a hallway with the same flooring? Do you know how far you can push a well-lubricated chair on such floors? Not if you haven’t tried it!) Once, though, I purchased an old office chair my employer had slated for disposal. Although the calendar said 1997, this chair hailed from the 1950’s. Completely upholstered with wood accent on the arms, this chair would swivel and tilt just like modern chairs–but with no ability to make adjustments. Yes, it had wheels. And from that year until 2006 (I think) it served me well as my computer desk chair.
Ultimately we think of office furniture similarly to most of our then co-workers: there have been many but we remember only a few. Not so our heirloom chairs. Not so the chairs of our childhood, from the plastic-sheathed kitchen chairs to the kitchen stools to the weird plastic furniture used on our parents’ patios. Not so the chairs which graced our first apartments, entering the doorway by whatever means necessary, whether begging, stealing, inheriting, or in our last-ditch efforts, purchasing. Not so where we sat when visiting our grandparents, our uncles/aunts/cousins, or even our friends in college when a Naugahyde sack full of styrofoam could be called “a bean-bag chair”.
When I look at this cycle, I see that my parents’ chairs came and went, my chairs in school could at best be called functional, my chairs in early adulthood had value only because they were there, my chairs throughout my life have primarily existed only until I could replace them–but the chairs I inherited from my grandparents, the ones constructed in the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1940’s, have outlasted all of the others and, like the British monarchy, say, “yet, I’m still here!”
Imagine I’m drinking this–because I am. February 2024.
American football has ended its seeming stranglehold on the domestic sports scene. A surprisingly close game last night between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs kept me up to the end. That’s pretty unusual. I quit watching football decades ago. My interest diminished with the demise of an old version of the Seattle Seahawks, the one with Jim Zorn and Steve Largent. Or perhaps it diminished with my renewed interest in baseball. Whatever.
For a baseball fan, football feels about as welcome as your ex showing up at your next wedding. Baseball has just introduced itself at the beginning of April when the National Football League holds it’s draft. When the season gets going and the annual draft of new baseball talent occurs in early June, the NFL starts rattling its sabers about pre-camp workouts. Baseball gets some clarity as good teams rise to the top, bad teams falter, and the 2024 trade deadline approaches–and the NFL opens its training camps! All of these boorish events pale to this: baseball heads into its final month to determine the postseason, a five-week celebration of near-daily baseball games ending in the World Championship, and the NFL opens its season. In a pragmatic but depressing capitulation to reality, MLB mostly avoids holding postseason games on Sundays when most NFL games occur.
(And why do we call it football? Players’ feet only intentionally touch the ball to punt the ball away or kick the ball through the goalposts. This likely reflects my ignorance, but go with me here: players hand off, run, pass, and catch the ball. Now that European née global sport has appropriately called itself football!)
Ah, but for a few glorious weeks baseball reigns supreme. Football retires from the stage and lets the sport-formerly-known-as-America’s-sport, baseball, back into into the leading role it once occupied. Collegiate basketball intrudes, true, during March Madness, but it displays the genteel manners one would expect from amateur athletics. Baseball spring training games occur in the afternoon; NCAA games occur primarily in the evening. It crowns a champion during the first week of the baseball season, turning in that assignment a week late just as college students will, and bows itself from the stage. And the professionals in the NBA? Who cares? Their interminable playoff schedule will just be starting in mid-April, a two-month slog that ends in the middle of June.
Baseball and football play nice once each year. Football crowns a champ just prior to the start of baseball’s spring training. For six weeks all baseball fans think one of two things:
My team could win the World Series this year!
My team might not be as bad as it looks!
Hope springs, regardless. Thank you, Super Bowl; thank you, Spring.
First of the year: 11FEB2024
I know more cold weather remains a very real possibility. By the weekend we will see temperatures at or below freezing. Yet the ephemeral forecasts from various sources promise me I’ll see more early spring temps than I will not, and that’s something. Very soon the star magnolia will bloom, daring the other trees to follow suit. Judging by last year, we’re running a bit late. Here’s a photo from February 10th last year:
Star magnolia blossom. February 2023.
Perhaps you can tell from the photo that the star magnolia (all magnolias?) blossoms prior to putting out leaves. Our purple magnolia does this too. Those little buds appear in the fall, winter like a butterfly’s chrysalis, and then get a bit fuzzier and bigger as their imminent bursting approaches. Most pop out together, but some appear late. March sees only a few:
Hence…Star Magnolia. March 2018.
Like the Star of Bethlehem in Christian scripture, the star magnolia signals the rebirth of our plant world around the small plot of land we manage.
Tomorrow goes by Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday and some German name which I can’t pronounce or spell and which means Doughnut Day. All of them imply, “hey, we need to party and indulge, because tomorrow begins Lent.” Unfortunately (kind of) Ash Wednesday coincides with Valentine’s Day. We’ve decided our party tomorrow will stand in for Valentine’s Day. While we nibble on a few berries, nuts, maybe a piece or two of cheese, I will prepare calas or rice beignets using this recipe. I’m looking forward to it. I love involved, authentic-in-spirit recipes, and this Anson Mills recipe promises all of that. I’ve not purchased their rice or pastry flour; we’ll hope the expensive Carolina rice I did purchase will suffice. Dinner, which we’ll start working on after our late morning calas in at least a desultory way, will be Anson Mills’ Roasted Stuffed Quail for Two with Madeira Sauce. We did not spring for the mail-order quail when we first planned this as a New Year’s Eve meal. Our local grocer carried them. Nor do we have madeira, let alone a 5-year one, and I’m not buying one for 3 tablespoons of recipe use! Some marsala and sherry will suffice. We’ll set some simply prepared asparagus next to the quail and toast our near-30-year relationship.
As lovely as that may (or may not) sound, it’s Lent which occupies my mind today and for the past few. One needs to prepare for Lent. Arriving to Ash Wednesday, opening one’s bleary, I-partied-too-much eyes, and arbitrarily picking something to give up for Lent represents a knee-jerk response to the liturgical meaning of Lent which undercuts it. Sure, you can give up caffeine or alcohol or that favorite candy or whatever because, “that’s what I always do”–and Lent will mean about as much as the thought you put into it. One’s spiritual life basically runs on cruise control (at whatever speed you’ve set) if this represents your approach.
Alternatively, a person in touch with one’s relationship to the Presence which animated this Universe–which created life (a scientifically provable proposition which I will address in a future post), which appears to have imbued all of us with a portion of Its spirit, and which in a way not describable to me, appears to care about us–seeks with initiative and purpose to pledge oneself to one or more practices during Lent, then that person approaches the mystery of Easter with (hopefully) a clearer insight to understanding that mystery. If nothing else, they approach in a better ‘spiritual plane’ which even the non-religious believe to be a good thing.
I have for more than a decade attempted to set one practice each for the physical, the mental, and the spiritual/emotional. (I know, I know. Let’s debate the conflation of “spiritual/emotional” some other time.) This year my practices do not need to be hidden, as they sometimes do to be authentic. I plan to…
Go to the gym thrice weekly as we originally intentioned a year ago. We’ve attempted to restart the gym practice since a falling off in the holidays to limited success. I also have a more private concern here which isn’t so much a practice as a focus on what I’m already doing.
I’m going to begin reading the Bible with an emphasis on two things: the Pentateuch (the first five books) and the four gospels. I’m not sure of the juxtaposition. About seven to ten years ago I used a guide to a first-time reading of the Bible in which one read Genesis, Mark, a few other books–it gave a representation of the Bible overall, including a book from the prophets, a couple apostolic books, etc. I liked it, but I’m ready for a bit more.
Emotionally/spiritually? I’m still not sure on this one. I think my fledging effort to be more social will come into play. Of the varieties of introversion, I’m the one who avoids social gatherings among other things. This will be ….interesting.
Lent means more than Advent to me. Perhaps the focus on penance/introspection? I can definitively say there are days which anchor me to my spiritual pursuits. Ash Wednesday and its implication of Lent is one.
Our spiritual life, and therefore our inspirations, remains in this world. A focus on Jesus, Buddha, or whomever, to the exclusion of the physical world insulates us from our reality. The light poles and cell towers of our world inhabit the day-to-day milieu where we must perfect ourselves as humans. Like this photo, we must see the beauty in the context of the mundane. Ash Wednesday 2023.
After living my first 51 years above 40 degrees latitude in the northern hemisphere, my wife and I moved to North Carolina. We entered the state on January 27, 2006. It was 72 degrees Fahrenheit. We didn’t realize at the time this would occur annually but would not occur daily throughout “winter”. Every year December, January, and February will grace us with a day, maybe two of spring-like temps. Today is one of those days. A dozen days ago as we woke to a winter-typical 32 degrees, a fire seemed the way to go. Today I found it too warm to wear a sweatshirt while working in the yard. A week from now our lows will be in the 30s, our highs in the 40s. This kind of winter I can live with. Tampa where my sister-in-law just moved? No. Their “warm spell” is 80-82 degrees for a few days before dipping to 65 and settling into the high 70s. I like a cooler reset–I just don’t need weeks and weeks hovering near freezing with snow, ice, sleet, and all the treacherous driving it brings. I don’t need the bone-chilling cold of the Puget Sound where the high will be 38, the low 33, and fog will be punctuated by rain. If you can, imagine the opposite of a steam bath–lots of humid atmosphere driving the coldness deep into your joints. I don’t need the snow to fall on November 5th and stay on the ground to mid-March as it did in Spokane from late 2000 to early 2001.
No, I’ll stay here: inland from the storm surge of hurricanes, protected from most of the tornadoes spinning up from Gulf air collisions, humid enough to have only sporadic forest fires, and situated on tectonic plates content to move seldom if at all. And winter warm-ish. Nothing more.
A plant’s leaf. In North Carolina. At Biltmore. May 2007.
Today’s photograph has about nothing to do with today’s topic, but I’ll try: some folks think (or rather don’t think) about how some things don’t belong together in all cases. Red and green for instance. On this plant it’s a natural thing. At Christmas it evokes the symbolism of holly and green leaves and all that. In July it says, “Who’s this freak that thinks it’s Christmas?” Today we’re going to talk about people putting words together which don’t belong together.
For newcomers to this blog: Once upon a time I taught English to 8th graders. Once upon a time I took a graduate-level course in grammar, most of which consisted of diagramming sentences. I killed that class–most of my fellow students were returning teachers who clustered around me after the final to learn how I had diagrammed the sentences on the test, even though these were sentences which we’d already diagrammed in homework assignments. I’m not bragging, merely establishing my credentials for the next paragraph.
There’s a grammatical distance between “on to” and “onto”. The latter one is a preposition. The first one, however, is an adverb followed by a preposition. Or some would say it’s a compound preposition. I disagree, but it’s debatable. What’s not debatable is when you put them together as if they’re one word but they shouldn’t be. Here:
Ken wants to turn his audience on to prepositions.
The turtle hauled himself onto the log.
“Onto” indicates position. In the first sentence you can see I am not trying to physically turn my audience and put them “onto” a preposition. Children, pets, and occasionally a frisky adult will get onto the furniture. A lace hem might be sewn onto a dress.
Prepositional phrases usually come in a three-word format of preposition-article-object/noun, and they’re often strung together one after the other. Here’s one: Susan got out of the bed, put her pajamas in the clothes hamper, and made her way to the shower. I boldfaced the prepositions. (If you’re really into the stuff, that’s a compound predicate where the subject “Susan” has three verbs to go with it, “got”, “put”, and “made”. It has direct objects, “pajamas” for the first verb phrase and “way” for the third. This looks really cool when you diagram it, but let’s hold that thought for now.)
Why am I doing this? Who gives a rodent’s rear? Here’s the deal: I see at least one writer who doesn’t know how to use prepositions, homophones, or those tricky complement/compliment words every morning when I read my news. I read (in this sequence) MLB.com to see if there are Phillies stories; The Athletic for Phillies stories and general baseball news; the Washington Post, primarily for the comics, but some headline always snags my attention; and the New York Times. All of these sites command highly respected writers. One assumes there are editors, at least a few. How is it something as basic as this can’t be understood by some of the top writers in the country? To wit:
She turned her father into the police. Perhaps she did, but only in her mind (parents behaving like cops sometimes). Dad never joined the force, though, and she has no magic wand to turn him into the police. She turned him in. To the police. See? Separate words.
Note to grammarians: yeah, I know this isn’t grammar. It’s not even usage. It’s mechanics and those are a slippery thing. Fifty years from now what I’m saying will be as anachronistic as railing against tomorrow because it’s supposed to be to-morrow indicating the link to its linguistic past, to the morrow. I don’t care. I will hasten e-mail by typing email wherever I can, which I did in the 1990s and 2000s. I will type awhile even when the algorithms in the software says “no-o-o-o!” I’ll even type alright because I think it’s alright. (And I wonder if anyone under 50 or 60 wonders what the heck I’m talking about.)
I will not give in to compound prepositions. (See what I did there?) There is meaning contained in the words the heathen are stringing together, and those meanings change when you join the two into one. I hope you’re turned into frogs. Or is it turned in, to frogs? I hope the latter, and that said frogs will thwwpt! your face with their tongues for eternity.
Look, I’m all about breaking rules. You need to know the rules before you can break them, though. Picasso said that, more or less. If you just ignore the fact rules exist, you’re just a hellion-without-a-clue.
And now for that diagramming I promised. I’m afraid that nearly 42 years later I have not kept every assignment but I kept the quizzes and the final. Below is the last page of the final. It’s a ditto, so the questions are faded quite a bit. (“Ditto”–look it up. They were as much fun to make as it was typing on a manual typewriter: every mistake basically was uncorrectable.) We can discuss this below in the comments. The little blue zero means no mistakes. Grant Smith, the chair of the department and teacher of the course (Eastern Washington University) graded this stuff like golf is scored: mistakes were 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 point mistakes, and the more you got, the lower your grade. Thus, the highest score possible was “0”. (And another day, children, we’ll discuss why I put the period outside of the quotation marks. You may background yourselves by reading William Safire.) By the way, at 28 years of age I already exhibited the anal qualities which now circumscribe my life. Those lines look nice and straight because I used a 6-inch ruler on all of my assignments and on my quizzes and tests.
We’ve had two (or is it three?) cold fronts move through. Friday’s came through late afternoon. The past two mornings have featured wind chills in the single digits. No big deal for a lot of folks, but in North Carolina the weather-folk told us to stay indoors. Apparently they either never lived in the north, or they realize many of us down here never have. Regardless, my fingers are too cold to type, my brain is too cold to think. I can’t blog.
I’m having a crisis with the beer fridge. I want it to chill the beer no colder than 40 degF, preferably 42. It’s giving me 32 on the middle shelf, and I’ve got the thermostat turned up as far as I can without turning it off. (Hmmm, unless it’s backwards–maybe it’s as cold as it can go…) I need to find an external controller. I don’t have time to blog.
My choir director headed to England for a week last Sunday. Texts me at 4:35 a.m. Tuesday to ask me if I’ll introduce the guest organist performing a concert that very night at our cathedral. Of course, it was past 9:30 in London. I said yes. It sucked up half an afternoon (for doing things I would have done near dinnertime), and all of an evening, plus it left me a zombie on Wednesday when I got home late, couldn’t get to sleep, and stayed up to midnight “to relax with a nightcap”. I can’t think, I can’t blog.
Shortly after that Tuesday text, I’m showering and realize, “crap, I’ve got a blood draw this morning!” Just in time to get dressed and go. (Rule: When it’s a fasting blood draw, schedule it early.) I can’t remember my appointments, let alone remember to blog.
Thursday we attended a luncheon meeting about forming a seniors group at our church. If you want to see some visual humor, take a look at the car parking skills for a bunch of 65- to 90-year-olds. I can’t blog. I’m still looking for a parking spot. I’ll blog when I do.
I rose at 4:44 a.m. today to get myself going for a 7 a.m. mass where I was the scheduled cantor. I’m a bass. It normally takes until noon to get my voice warmed enough to hit middle C. I did it today in less than two hours. I think I strained something. I can’t blog.
I finished Roger Daltrey’s autobiography early in the week. Roger revealed that one of my top bands fit the definitions “irresponsible miscreants” and “jackasses”. Removing my admiration left me emotionally untethered. I can’t blog.
Or maybe it’s just that planning some very special vacations to Europe and points beyond, getting my profligate ways under control, dealing with life’s vagaries (bills, groceries, cat vomit, completely unscheduled propane deliveries), and trying to figure out how to exercise, meditate, study scriptural sources, pay bills on a near daily basis, cook, read for pleasure, write (outside of the blog), and still find time to be a husband to my wife–all of that takes more time than the day has granted me. The blog sits too far down the list. (Saint Frances de Sales, patron saint of writers and journalists, pray for me.)
Leaning Tower of Cypress. Raleigh, NC. January 2024.
Storms have ravaged the country this past week. Still do. Four days ago I discovered the easternmost Leyland cypress in a row of them had taken a tumble from the stiff winds we endured Tuesday night. If you’re thinking, “hey, Leyland cypress, that sounds like a cool tree to grow” do yourself a favor and find out about their root system, their gangly nature, and whether they’re meant to be grown in your climate region. The folks we bought the house from (or maybe the folks before them) didn’t. To quote Wikipedia:
…because their roots are relatively shallow, a large leylandii tends to topple over. The shallow root structure also means that it is poorly adapted to areas with hot summers, such as the southern half of the United States.
Wikipedia, “Leyland cypress”
Theoretically they should die within 10-12 years in North Carolina. And hey, are you thinking, “Well, I live in the north so it would be okay?” How about this add-on: “In northern areas where heavy snows occur, this plant is also susceptible to broken branches and uprooting in wet, heavy snow.“
We’ve owned our house for almost seven years. The folks before us, about eight years. Using the timeline feature on Google Maps Street View, I can see that the row of cypress were planted as early as 2011 underneath larger trees which then were removed at a later date. These cypress grow really fast, like one-meter-per-year fast. All I’m saying is…13-15 years and these trees are doomed. I wish the black fence there at the bottom wasn’t holding it up. I could have used a chainsaw to take care of this myself. But for a sense of scale, consider that the branches I would need to limb (so I could cut it down safely) are the ones just up the trunk from the black fence and that’s 5-6 feet above the ground. I would be holding a chainsaw at face level and over my head. Not gonna happen. Instead I’ll pay hundreds of dollars for some professionals to do it.
Did I mention I hate these trees? I do. There’s a whole row of them planted as a property screen by former owners of this house. We parked our car Mr. Lincoln beneath them, and I cursed a lot from all the sap and tannin-juice I had to wash off the top of the car. Percy the Aviator gets parked in the upper part of the driveway where he isn’t underneath them. They’re ugly at eye level. You can see from the photo above the tree has no branches on one side of it, the side which faces its nearest neighbor–yeah they planted them too close together too. Here’s most of the rest of them (four of six):
A row of disasters waiting to happen. Raleigh, NC. January 2024.
You can see my eye-level view here: nothing but bare branches which do nothing to screen me from the neighbor’s house to the south. (That’s it in the background of these photos.) You also can see I’m about to lose another one. That one in the center leaning way in. The only beings who like these trees are the large number of birds who use it as cover from the Cooper’s hawks so they can safely hit my bird feeders just across the driveway, and the squirrels who of course just go where they want to.
In December 2018 I lost my first one. There were two in the backyard. My guess? Whoever bought and planted these had more than they needed for the driveway screen and said to themselves, “well, where should we plant these two?” They wound up, incongruously, between the azaleas in the bottom left of the photo above and my tool shed. In fact, you can see the one which still remains on the left side of that photo there. We caught 9 inches of wet snow in early December that year. I knocked a lot of snow off of the branches, a successful attempt to save them from breaking. (In fact, I think one of the worst hit trees was the one now lying on my fence.) What I couldn’t do was save the Leyland cypress in the backyard which bent down nearly to the ground. Apparently I didn’t take a photo of it.
Friday’s wind dealt far less damage. Those of us on the North American continent know we’re in for a lot of intense storms this winter. Hope y’all ‘weather’ them better than this!
all the voices in my head 