a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
It was a lovely day (56 °F/ 13 °C), and I chased myself out of the house this afternoon, to go look at the tree blossoms & spring flowers outside.
Tomorrow will be stormy and rainy.
Top to bottom: cherry tree blossoms, wild primrose, asters, magnolia tree blossoms. I hope I have it right! I’m not a flower expert.
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.
co·ro·na
/kəˈrōnə/
From the Latin word corona, mid-16th century, meaning ‘wreath, crown’.
Architecture: a circular chandelier in a church, or a part of a cornice having a broad vertical face.
Astronomy: the rarefied gaseous envelope of the sun and other stars.
Biology: the cup-shaped or trumpet-shaped outgrowth at the center of a daffodil or narcissus flower.
Medical: coronavirus is any of a family (Coronaviridae) of large single-stranded RNA viruses that have a lipid envelope studded with club-shaped spike proteins.
Physics: the glow around a conductor at high potential.
Smoking: a long, straight-sided cigar.
It was only 45 °F (7 °C) for my late-afternoon stroll around the block today, but hey, now there is an hour more of sunshine.
We had sunny afternoons all week and the high touched 60 (15.5 °C) today.
Daylight Saving Time starts tonight in the United States. (‘Saving’ means shifting the day’s hour markers forward, so that the sun ‘rises’ an hour later, and ‘sets’ an hour later).
Pacific Daylight Time = Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) minus 7 hrs.
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.
One of the latest animal figures I had ordered from Schleich happens to be a poodle. I am naming the white pooch ‘Snowflake’ .. and no, not because of the recent snow here in Seattle.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz took his family to sunny Cancun in Mexico on Wednesday night (to the Ritz Carlton Hotel, no less), leaving behind millions of his constituents in freezing homes with no electricity and no water.
That was bad enough, and Cruz returned the very next morning after a media firestorm erupted. It got even worse. It turned out that their family poodle, named Snowflake, was left behind in the freezing house.
There was a little sun this morning, before a blanket of clouds moved in. (There is going to be snow in the city on Thursday night and into Saturday, say the weather forecasters).
By now the hummingbirds have ‘consumed’ most of the little bell flowers on my mahonia, but there are still a few left.
There was a break in the rainy weather today, with blue skies and fluffy white clouds. For the first time in a long while, I saw robins and jays around my house.
The Washington Dept. of Fish & Wildlife is advising homeowners to take down their bird feeders, though. Outbreaks of salmonellosis (infection of the bacterium salmonella) are going around in the local bird populations. There is enough natural food for them, and birds that crowd around feeders can infect one another.
So now our feathered friends need to keep their social distance for awhile as well? Oy vey.
I’ve been following tropical storm Eloise for a few days now. There has not been large loss of life (official death toll in Mozambique: 12), but some 5,000 homes in Mozambique were destroyed or badly flooded.
I believe the Kruger National Park, the national parks in Zimbabwe, and the Moremi Game Reserve on the eastern side of Botswana’s Okavango Delta* will be OK. Some areas are getting soaked with 5 or 6 inches of rain, and this summer’s corn harvest is going to be damaged badly.
*This is the time of year that the enormous and very shallow bowl of the Okavango Delta fills up with about 2.6 cubic miles (11 cubic km) of water, spread over as much as 5,800 square miles (15,000 km2).
We had a lot of sun today.
It’s January, though – the doldrums of winter – and the day’s highs only made it to 45 °F (7 °C).
These pictures are from Monday.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting ..
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from his poem ‘A Psalm of Life’ (1839)
I know that our Gregorian calendar and Arabic numerals, used for date & time notation, is a completely man-made construct.
Even so: the clock here on the Pacific coast is about to run into a cascade of 21s, the way it has all over the world today.
At 9.21:21 pm tonight it will be the ..
21st second into the
21st minute into the
21st hour into the
21st day into the
21st year into the
21st century.
We had a few hours of blue sky & sun this morning (50 °F/ 10 °C).
Look at Mister Squirrel, catching a few rays from the ridge of my garage roof.
My shipment from Amazon Japan* has arrived: a chess set, which I will show later, and three animal figures to add to my collection.
*German international courier DHL picked the package up in Tokyo, flew it to their hub in Cincinnati, and then on to Seattle where it was put on the delivery truck. Yes, I know, I am a bad person. I should not burn fossil fuels to buy a product that is made from fossil fuels (plastic). Sorry.
I felt like a change of scenery today for my walk, and went down to the Gas Works Park area on Lake Union.
It’s Caturday, as ailurophiles (cat lovers) like to say.
I took these pictures on Thursday, when there was a break in the rain.
These are Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna), medium-sized as hummingbirds go.
After they were done with the mahonia’s flowers, the little birds sat on the power cables that run into my house for a long time.
Their feathers are mostly green and gray. The male’s head and throat have feathers that light up in a stunning iridescent reddish-pink when the light strikes it at just the right angle.
It’s winter here in the North, officially.
The city has had plenty of rainy, windy weather yesterday and today (1.58 in. measured in 48 hrs at Seatac Airport’s gauge).
.. and hey! the snowflakes coming down in the mix tonight, formed a thin layer on my back deck.
I did have a few of the large fly agaric mushrooms in my backyard in October (red with white spots), but they were not as big as last year’s.
I have not seen these golden ones before in my backyard, though. Looks like they are golden Pholiota (Pholiota aurivella). They are supposedly edible; some people report that they taste like marshmallows without the sugar.
(That does not sound tempting .. and as I’ve said before, the only mushrooms I eat are ones from the grocery store!).
