Category: Nature

heath
/hēTH/
noun
BRITISH
an area of open uncultivated land, especially in Britain, with characteristic vegetation of heather, gorse, and coarse grasses.

It’s the month of May, so the rhododendron flowers are blooming here on Capitol Hill. These plants belong to Ericaceae, a family of flowering plants, commonly known as the heath or heather family.

There was more rain today, bringing the April total to 0.95 in (24 mm). This is still far below the average for April (2.71 in / 69 mm).

I played a little tennis indoors this morning, mask on. My friend from tennis volunteers at the big vaccination clinic at the Lumen Field football stadium here in the city. He says they give 8,000 people a jab in the arm there every day, but could take it up to 22,000 if they could get more doses of vaccine.

There was light rain outside and cold weather, all day long (49 °F/ 9 °C).

I hesitate to say ‘Happy Earth Day’.
Of course we should celebrate Earth, but earthlings— our governments and corporations, that is— have to enact and execute aggressive policies to reduce green house gas emissions, and plastics production.

At least the Biden-Harris Administration is a force for good.
President Biden recently announced a new US goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 52 percent of 2005 levels, by the year 2035. In a virtual summit with more than three dozen countries, he urged other nations to do the same.
Every little bit will help.

Here’s Mr & Mrs Jay*, dropping by for a bit on my front lawn.
It looks like one of them indulged in a little sunning (bottom picture below, lying on the ground, wings spread out, to catch more of the warming rays of the sun).  It was morning and still not very warm, when I took the picture.

Meanwhile, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has announced that backyard bird feeders can be put back up (the number of reports of sick or dead birds across Washington due to the outbreak of salmonellosis, has dropped).

*Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri); Cyanocitta from the Greek words kuanos (‘dark blue’) and kitta (‘jay’).

My Sunday afternoon started off with a nice game of doubles tennis, but on the way back I was involved a car accident (no injuries, thankfully), that resulted in major damage to my car. Ouch. It might be time to replace my 14-year old Camry, anyway.

The weather people are promising us sun all week, 65 °F (18 °C) by Wednesday, and 75 °F (24 °C) by Saturday.

It’s Saturday/ Caturday. I like cats, especially the big wild ones.
(The term ‘Caturday’ started with the tradition of posting LOLcats to the message board 4chan on Saturdays).

Here’s a busy Mr Robin (or would that be Mrs Robin?), pausing for a moment on my garage roof this morning. There must be a nest under construction, nearby.

It was a treacherous day to scroll through Twitter, with all the April Fool’s Day tweets. Google introduced a ‘self-driving’ bicycle, King County Metro was launching an ‘Infinity Bus*’, the Tracks Suit from Sound Transit, and Prince Charles would soon announce that he would ‘pass’ on becoming King (deferring to Prince William instead).
*It offers arrivals and departures at all times, 24/7/365.

Alright .. enough of this, and time to go for a walk, I thought.

The camellias* are starting to bloom here in the city. The pink one is mine, and the white one from a street nearby.

*Camellias are famous throughout East Asia; they are known as cháhuā (‘tea flower’) in Chinese, tsubaki in Japanese, dongbaek-kkot in Korean, and as hoa trà or hoa chè in Vietnamese. [From Wikipedia]
The tea plant with its little tea leaves, is in fact, a camellia: Camellia sinensis.

Here is this morning’s picture of the Paradise visitor center on the slopes of Mt Rainier.  That’s a lot of snow, that had been cleared from the parking lot!

The center itself is still closed to visitors, so those vehicles must belong to sightseers or merrymakers looking to sled on the low slopes.
The elevation there is 5,400′ (1,646 m), and the Mt Rainier summit is at 14,411′ (4,392 m).

I’m still adding animals to my collection.
These came with the poodle that I posted about on Friday.

The evergreen hellebore in the big pot in my backyard survived the snow, and is flowering nicely.