Just before breakfast today we looked out to the front yard and watched a Red-shouldered hawk taking a small rodent for its breakfast. It took a couple of minutes. Leaving the leaves: good idea. That’s the street in the background. Due to last fall’s landscaping, the front yard is crowned, hiding the sidewalk and the parking strip.
Typically, or typical for the previous few years, our star magnolia blossoms sometime between the first week of February and around Valentine’s Day. Yesterday (February 27th), I looked out as I opened the blinds and saw many swollen, fuzzy buds, but no blossoms. Just after 10:30 I looked again and saw several had said, “Sun! Hooray!” and opened up to greet it. Spring, as defined by me, starts when some of the days peak at 60-70 degrees (or higher here in North Carolina) with the additional stipulation of the early bloomers: daffodils, magnolias, the camellia, and a few others. This occurs in the first half of February usually, although cold and sometimes snow have occurred too in those weeks. Put a gun to my head and I would admit we can’t count on these blossoms until about the end of February. Our winters have been warm for a handful of years. A return to a more normal range of temperatures in February (complete with a windy, cold snow-and-ice storm on the 19th) perhaps signals a return to normalcy.
… I like turtles?
… I would serve a dish of duxelles, a French term referring to a mince of mushrooms, onions, herbs and black pepper which is then reduced to a paste. I’d add cream and a dash of madeira. I would serve this as a two- to three-inch smear over sliced breast of duck. I’d call it …
Dux’ and Quackers
[Patrons will kindly stop throwing bottles at the stage.]
Western Catholics have lost touch with the historical End of Christmas. Today, February 2nd, is that day, the 40th Day of Christmas (counting Christmas day as “1”). Christmastide, i.e., The Twelve Days of Christmas culminates at Epiphany; the period of time between Epiphany Sunday and the Presentation of the Lord (at the Temple) culminates at Candlemas (in the Western church). Traditionally some cultures leave Christmas decorations up through this day. As I may have stated previously, leaving Christmas decorations up past this day carries very bad luck so let’s not tempt that, okay?
I lean into this gradual easing into Ordinary Time. Though we’ve marked the 2nd and 3rd Sundays of Ordinary Time–we forget that usually this day falls midweek and doesn’t take precedence over a Sunday–we also tarry with the Christmas spirit through this date. I like that Jesus at 12 years of age stands at the threshold of adulthood. Time to put away the pleasantries of our Christmas-childhood and enter the reality of our calling.
Prior to moving to North Carolina, my definition of winter used the words “cold” and “icy” and “snow”. I’ve had to redefine that, but in unexpected ways. Those words still pertain but in lesser roles. In fact, snow only made cameo appearances the past two years. (I acknowledge I’ve now jinxed us for a multiple-inch snowstorm before February ends.) The photo above documents the approximately one-inch snowfall we received a week ago today. Prior to that no measurable amount had been recorded here since January 2022. (“Measurable” as defined by the National Weather Service records. I only examined records for Dec-Feb backwards until I found some because I don’t think we’ve ever had snow in November or March this century.) After a trace fell on the 16th and 17th of January that year, we received two inches on the 21st and 22nd. On the 23rd another inch fell.
All of this seems manageable to the historical Me living inside my head, but we’ve succumbed to a combination of the contagious fear of the locally-raised and Old Folk Fartism. We generally just stay home when any measurable amount of snow falls. During the eight winters we’ve lived in our current house, only one has recorded a “real” snowfall, defined completely subjectively as “about four inches or more”. It fell December 9th, 2018:
Although Raleigh has experienced significant snowfalls in the past quarter century, the real snowstorm fell in February 2014. This local TV news account tells it better than I could. It dropped less than four inches of snow, but just imagine a nice topping of sleet and a city of nearly 200,000 people, none of whom have put snow tires on their cars. Raleigh has hills: not steep hills, but steep enough that folks just abandoned their cars when they got stuck. Click through to the article–if you live in the northern half of the US, you won’t believe it.
There have been others–in 2000 nearly two feet of snow fell, and nine to ten inches fell at Christmas in 2010–but the salient feature of winters here is that at some point between December 1st and the end of February you will get at least one day at 70 degrees or above. Thus, winter here compares to a streaming series with six to nine episodes; winter in the north compares to a traditional network series of twenty or more. You still get the drama, but it’s over soon. Last week’s one-inch snowfall started with freezing rain. Low temperatures and shaded streets made it a bit slick for days, but today marks the beginning of highs in the 50’s and 60’s. And yes, one forecast (Foreca and the European model ECMWF) says we’ll hit 71 on Friday.
I rest my case.
At the beginning of this sporadic accounting of our Hawaiian vacation last fall, I mused on 100 Days of Hawai’i, and I threatened to go all “grandpa” on y’all. As this parade of entries has wound down, I think the ol’ grandpa genes kicked in more. Therefore I’ll keep this short, sweet, and hopefully mildly entertaining.
After the visit with my cousin our first full day on Maui, we loitered for three days as described recently. Two serendipitous events occurred to ensure an encore visit with my cousin and her husband. First, I left my camera and that package of very expensive Kona coffee in their car after our first visit. And second, I realized there was no way we wanted to get to the Kahului airport by 7 a.m. if that meant a one-hour drive and dropping a rental car. It would have seriously impacted the lazy vibe we were working on! I rebooked the flight for the next day, booked a hotel near the airport, and told my cousin so we could meet again for another visit since they lived near the hotel and the airport. This gave us a day to leave the Kapalua condo leisurely, stop at various viewpoints on the southern coast, and spend a lot of time at the Maui Aquarium.
Even in the populated middle of Maui where things are fairly dry (see above), the mountains showed how they catch the clouds and their rain.
Except for a few photos I couldn’t resist posting while on the vacation, I opened this lengthy travelogue with aerial shots of Oahu and Hawai’i. It seems only fitting we say goodbye to Maui and the Hawaiian Islands the same way.
Looking back near four months now I cannot recall what we did of note for the three days after we connected with my cousin during our first full day on Maui. Only two salient things leap to mind: hanging at the nearest pool on the second day and driving the north coast a bit on the fourth. It seems as if we must have done something else…didn’t we? Our fourth day also represented our final full day on the western end of Maui. We had been told the natives didn’t really like tourists going up along the north shore, but we took a ‘chance’ and except for a bit of display for what I think represented a Hawai’i Separatist Movement we experienced no animosity. We certainly saw spectacular scenery as the road dove to near sea-level and then ascended to the tops of cliffs.
By my estimation I took around 100 photos of the coast and/or sunrises/sunsets while we lingered on Kapalua Bay. Dawn would start with the low-contrast promise of sun:
And sometimes not so low-contrast…
I guess most of the time we stared at sunrises in the morning, sunsets in the evening and in between we ate and stared at stuff like this…
Our second morning at our Kapalua condo we decided the odd mix of “general store” and “deli counter” at the Honolua Store #89 which we had seen our first night going to dinner bore further scrutiny. For one, eating muffins two consecutive days for breakfast held no appeal. Two, I needed that coffee as explained in my Kona coffee post. Three, eating purple pancakes had “yes, you have to do this” written all over it. They’re purple because of ube, a species of yam––I can’t remember why the syrup is purple:
While waiting for my purple pancakes I saw a display card for something I didn’t want to have:
After breakfast we purchased numerous supplies such as chocolates, coffee, more beer, and other fixin’s and such to encourage us to mostly just stay in place and stare at the ocean.
Dawn on our second morning at Kapalua Bay struck clouds delivering a rain shower between us and Molokai, creating a brilliant rainbow. This may be common: I’ll post another instance later in this series.
all the voices in my head 