A nature walk

My darling wife belongs to the local native plant society. I accompanied her on a nature walk last weekend with my new camera. I was moderately interested in the plants, but really I'm interested more in structures and shapes, since all the plants are the same shade of green to me.

These photos were shot in normal color. In future photos, I've turned up the color to "Vivid." They look the same to me. Maybe you will notice the difference?


Denny (with the cane) knows everything. He's a thousand years old. He's forgotten more than most of us would ever learn. He and the guy to the right, with the belt pouch and the dark green pants, got into it a few times, arguing about some plant or other. It's fun to watch old guys play "big dick."


A lightning-blasted tree. Florida is the lightning capital of the world. Ten people are killed every year by lightning, with over 1500 injured. Yet golfers and fishermen insist on walking around in the open with metal rods in their hands. It's amusing to me, in a sick way.


I love dead trees. They have such a twisted, architectural, gothic quality.


A moth caterpillar of some kind. Moth caterpillars are hairy. Butterfly caterpillars are spiky. That's how you can tell the difference.


Another dead tree. Professor Booty was right, in her review of this blog back in May. I must be fascinated with death. Sigh. I rationalize it in two ways: one, it is a gateway to some other form of existence, and I'd like to see what's out there; and two, death of one gives life to another. These trees, for example, are home to dozens of birds and thousands of insects. Even in death, they give life.


These are oak trees with lots of Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) on them. Spanish moss is an air plant, growing without roots. It was a major industry for pillow- and mattress-stuffing, back in the 1800s and early 1900s, before Memory Foam was invented. ;-) Spanish moss is related to bromeliads like we have in our yard.


Spanish moss, close up. It's dry and crinkly, with some flexibility. There are seldom bugs in it, which means it doesn't take much cleaning to make it suitable for a pillow.


Woodpecker holes in a tree. A dead tree. Yes. It's dead. Sigh.


Something alive! A flower of some kind, whose name I forget. I am not the plant person. Dave Coulter would probably know. So would my darling wife.


A typical forest in Florida. Palmettos and pine trees. The palmettos and palms fade out north of Tampa, and the pine trees take over, all the way up into Kentucky. I like it further south, with LOTS of palmettos and palm trees.


A beautiful, tiny bud with little flowers all over it. I was testing the macro setting. This little guy is smaller than the fingernail on your pinkie.


WARNING: MINI-RANT AHEAD: Some nasty rich people somehow got a permit to build some McMansions next to our pristine little wilderness. They're going begging, though, because no one wants to buy them. Perhaps two are finished, for the builder and his accountant. The rest are half-built and rotting in the jungle heat. It serves them right. Go build your McMansions somewhere else, like in Texas or the Carolinas, where it's expected. I'm all for capitalism, but not at the expense of what nature we have left. END OF RANT. ;-)

Weird news

I saved some wacky headlines from this past week or two, so that I can shake my head at them all at once, and get it out of my system.

• I can't believe hospital personnel would just leave someone to die in the waiting room. Even if they ARE a problem patient. At least "dump" them to some other hospital, so they can die there. Not that "dumping" ever occurs in the hospital industry. No sirree.
  
• I think it's interesting that HIV is spiking among "men who have sex with men." WARNING: MINI-RANT AHEAD. To me, you're gay if you're a man who has sex with another man. It's not experimentation - I can't imagine experimenting with another man's cock in my ass. Ick. I can see why many women don't like it, because I certainly wouldn't. But I think it's interesting that the legacy media is bending over backwards (and forwards, lol) to avoid saying "gay" or "homosexual" when describing male-male sex. Instead, it's "men who have sex with men." This is why I refused to become a journalist, because journalism is just "marketing with a specific agenda," like public relations. It's not about telling the truth, it's about telling a story that serves a specific purpose, like doing anything you can to avoid associating HIV and AIDS with being gay. (In the US, the victims are predominantly gay men, although that's not true in Africa.) Even gay activists will admit that in the US, HIV/AIDS victims are usually gay men, and they DID admit it on NPR a few years ago, when they were talking about their effort in the 1980s to steer the media into avoiding associating HIV and AIDS with being gay. Covering up the truth didn't work that time, and it doesn't work now. I resent the media's attempt to resurrect the cover-up.
  Now before you rant back, remember, I have gay friends, I have had gay roommates. They have seen me naked. My quarrel is not with them, it's with the media. END OF RANT. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogpost.
  
• It's so sad, that Vogue model who jumped off the roof in NYC. She's from Kazakhstan, from Almaty. I've worked in Kazakhstan, in Atyrau on the other end of the country. The women there are exotically beautiful. I think Ruslana Korshunova was average-looking, among women from her country.
  
• Women can do shockingly horrible things, like cut babies from the womb of another woman. I've worked in Kennewick, WA where this happened. It's a nice town. You wouldn't expect such a thing to happen there.
  
• I think it would be hilarious if the Large Hadron Collider DID spawn a black hole. Remember in the 1950s, when some people thought that nuclear weapons would set all the oxygen in the planet's atmosphere on fire, and burn Earth to a crisp? That was a hoot, too.
  
• Moronic thieves think bananas are weapons.
  
• Moronic abusers think snakes are weapons. "Get 'em" he yelled at the snake to attack the police officers. Dumbass. Snakes are fucking deaf. And not very trainable, either.
  

Thank you for visiting

I want to take a moment to thank you for visiting my silly little blog. It's not really about anything, just my meandering thoughts. I appreciate you taking the time to read them.

I, in turn, would like to know a little bit about you. I can see you visiting in the real-time IP tracker on the right side of the blog, but I don't know it's YOU unless you comment. I know a few people by the places where they live, but I'd like to know more of you.

Please leave me a comment, or send me an email on my profile and just tell me your "handle" and your city/state/country. That way I know you've been here and I can smile to myself when I see you visit in the future. If I was sharper, I would put up a guestbook, but I'd have to research how. It's simpler if you just say hi. ;-)

Thank you all. You're very kind to me.

And Happy 4th of July! God bless America.

The lost class reunion

A friend of mine is, at this moment, winging her way back to her bazillionth high school class reunion. So is my sister. I think it's interesting.

My own reunion was two years ago. I never heard anything about it, and never gave it any thought, because I wouldn't have gone anyway. The people I care about, who care about me, have kept in touch with me, or we found each other again over the Internet.

Most of the people I care about from that time, weren't in my class anyway. We don't need reunions to check up on each other.

The others... [shrug]. It doesn't matter. The past is the past. Their faces and names have faded with time. Even when I look at a yearbook (if I could find my yearbooks... I'm not sure where they are), I don't recognize many of the faces or names from my class. Even on Classmates.com, there are many names from my class whom I've never heard of. Our school was not that big. Our class only had 180 people or so. My memory must be awfully poor.

Still, some small part of me feels as though I should have gone to my reunion, that I missed something. That part of me also feels annoyed that no one tried to track me down, and yet that's proof again that I didn't fit in anyway. I know in my heart that even if I HAD known about a reunion, I would not have gone. I did not fit in there, socially, and to have tried to fit in again now would have just been a painful reminder of a past best forgotten.

I marvel that others are willing to travel across the country to be there, at their reunions.

I wish that I felt the way that they do.

Yard decorations, part 3

I have to make it clear that I have had nothing to do with any of the beauty you see. It's all my wife's doing. My help is limited to (a.) paying for it, if we buy something, and (b.) moving it, if it's heavy. Everything else, she has sweated countless hours in the jungle heat to make it the way it is.


Our wedding arbor. We were married under this arbor (from my garden, placed at her house into her garden) aeons ago. We've brought it with us to the jungle, even though its decay and destruction is inevitable. We cover it with plastic toy shovels that we have found at the beach.


I'll bet you know what this is. A "flower bed!" (groan) It's an iron bedframe from the 1920s that we acquired from a friend who was throwing it out. It was her nasty horrible mother's bed. We decided to take an object of evil and make something beautiful out of it.


A path into our next-door lot, which is the future foundation of the Empire of Marvinia. You are all loyal subjects already, you just don't know it. ;-)


An old park bench that we found, and put in the yard. And yes, those are faeries scattered round. MDW likes faeries.


More flamingos. These are flower pot holders.


Old iron and wood chairs we've found. Neither one is suitable anymore for sitting, but they look cool. The closer one is actually a rocker.


We use palmetto branches as mulch for the bananas, to keep the moisture in the ground. The flamingo helps also.


These are trunks of yucca trees that we cut down a year or two ago. They are growing again, from where they lie. You can't kill a yucca.


More of the same.


Stained-glass flamingos are kind of rare in yard art.

Yard decorations, part 2

Hibiscus. We've got several hibiscuseseses (hibiscae?) around our house.


A wedding anniversary gift that I gave my darling wife one year. It makes a pretty sound, splashing, but if we don't run it (and fill it) constantly, it just breeds mosquitoes. We have a bunch of glass shells in it that we got at Cost Plus World Market, I think. They're pretty.


A nice aluminum patio set that we found in the garbage, practically new. We bought new cushions for it, and we put them out if we have company.


One of two rain barrels that I built, along with some banana trees and the obligatory flamingo. The 30-gallon barrels you can get from your local car wash. Get a brass hose bibb, a flexible downspout and a few other parts from Home Despot (about $10 worth), cut a few holes, bungee some window screen on top to keep the bugs out, and viola. You have to paint the barrel, though, because direct sunlight will degrade the plastic.


A golden bromeliad (I can't locate the Latin name - there's a million types). You have to put coffee grounds down into the spouts of the leaves, because they collect water. The coffee grounds make the water acidic, and prevent mosquito larvae from hatching.


I think these are day lilies. They open their flowers during the day for bees and other pollinators to feed. Then they close them again at night.


Flamingo chainsaw art that we picked up the other weekend. It was the only one he had, and just as we said "we'll take it," another couple walked up and wanted it. It was a matter of seconds, and we got there first. Bahahaha!


Another tree frog. I believe these are Cuban tree frogs (Osteopilus septentrionalis). They get upwards of 120mm in length. They change colors, as you can see here. He's very well-camouflaged.


BJ's is a Sam's Club-style shopping club. They started in Rochester NY, I think, and they have several stores around the country. One is in town nearby, and we spotted pink, PINK adirondack chairs there. She simply had to have them. (Sigh.) Then I canceled my subscription to BJs, and to Sam's Club, and to any other "shopping clubs" we belonged to. We simply spent too much money there, on things we didn't need. You'd be surprised at all the stuff you buy that you don't need. The last thing we still spend money on that we shouldn't, is eating out. We need to stop that too. Many people already have stopped - I know the restaurant industry is withering quickly.


Our garden shed. It is neatly hidden in a bower of bushes and trees, far from the prying eyes of the building/zoning officers who would make us pay $300 for a permit. Permits? We don't need no steenkin' permits.

A new word: Misprision

It's unusual that I learn a new word. Today I did: misprision. I like the literary meaning: "creative misreading or distortion of a previous thesis or argument."

Yard decorations, part 1

We find all sorts of crab trap floats on the beach. They wind up on this tree.


We have a banana plantation behind this jungle here, and another plantation on the other side of the house. Banana trees must produce at least 45 leaves before they can bear fruit. The leaves grow and then die and hang along the trunk, looking like gray skin. Only about 15 or 20 leaves are on the tree at any one time.


We have a couple of flamingo things in our yard. This is about one percent of our collection.


This is a barnacle-encrusted sidewall from a truck tire that we found on the beach. We drilled holes in it to drain the water, filled it with shells and coral, and now it's a pretty ring for a potted fern.


I'm not sure where my darling wife (MDW) found this. It was part of a larger piece that we cut down. We hung it on the wall. The shell-shaped stepping stones, we got from a concrete place over in town.


Her potting bench, which is a wrought-iron sideboard thingy that someone had thrown out. We are inveterate trash-pickers.


I'm surprised MDW has this item in her flamingo collection. Notice that the knee bends the wrong way, looking like a human's knee instead of a bird's. And the foot is webbed. MDW is a stickler for anatomical correctness in flamingo art. She must have let this one slide. I don't buy her flamingo stuff without her seeing it first - she has to pick it out and I'll pay for it. She would no more think of buying a gun for me without me being there. We're both picky about the things we like.


A nice bench from the concrete place. That mother was hard to move.


Some of these plants will grow to be enormous. We put them in the wetter part of the yard, where the water runs as it drains away from the house.


A white tree frog that MDW found on one of our banana trees. He's about 50mm long, perhaps the size of the palm of your hand. He changes color too, to match whatever he's on. I didn't realize they could do that.

Pictures from Fort Worth, Texas

I was in Ft. Worth last week (the sister city to Dallas) for about 20 hours last week.


The only vehicle that Budget had available to rent was a giant Toyota Tundra pickup truck, with a 5.7 liter V8 engine. My boss had never driven something that big before. I think she enjoyed herself, especially when she hopped over a curbed median (on purpose). I think it's well-designed, and very comfortable to drive. But completely impractical in the new, oil-scarce economy. I wonder how long it will take Toyota to announce that it is scaling back, or ceasing, production of the Tundra.


I met a lady who has a ton of flamingos in her cubicle. My wife would be proud. I have no idea why the center of the photo keeps blurring with my cellphone. Perhaps I've sat on it once too often.

We went to the Ft. Worth stockyards. At the time of World War 1, these were the largest stockyards in the world. All the buildings burned down in 1912, so they rebuilt the buildings and the stables with concrete. It's a huge complex. It's mostly a tourist attraction now.


They have rodeo events (and visits from emergency medical crews) on a regular basis.


This is a cow statue of Annie Oakley. I think it's cute. I certainly wouldn't want it in front of MY house, though. ;-)


This is a railroad water tower and a roundtable for turning the train locomotives around after they brought in their trainload of livestock. There's a huge derelict Armour-Swift meatpacking plant right next door to the stockyards.


An ugly beast. The longhorn steer isn't too pretty, either.

The most boring person on the planet

Bill was a dinner guest last night at our little gathering. Someone (I wasn't sure who) had dug him up as a blind date for Sue, who lost her husband last year in a scooter accident. Bill's wife died last year also.

Bill was the most boring person I've met in a long time. Oh, he was nice enough, but literally, the only thing he could talk about was the "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" DVD. Over the course of two hours, I'm pretty sure I heard every joke and story that's on that DVD. Now I don't have to watch it.

Sue found him most unappetizing, mostly because of that. A man should always listen to his date. Ask her about herself. Make her think she's the most fascinating person in your universe, because if you hope to get anywhere with her, she needs to be.

Bill apparently never learned any of that. He talked about himself incessantly, mostly in terms of that stupid comedy DVD. Or about Germany (his late wife was German).

Dull, dull, dull. It was a relief when he left early.

All of us were silent, looking down at the table, after he left. I was thinking obnoxious thoughts, but I wasn't sure whose friend Bill was, so I was reluctant to say anything. I'm always thinking the most obnoxious thoughts in any gathering of people, I believe, but I rarely say a thing, because it's usually just hurtful.

Finally Donna broke the silence. "If I hear one more stupid joke, I'm ready to scream." We laughed with relief. And it turned out that Bill was her friend.

I told my darling wife later that she should smother me with a pillow if I ever, ever get that way. (It's too late, I'm sure some of you will say. ;-) ) She smiled and said I never would. Ha, I thought.

Wonderful neighbors

It's so nice to have neighbors who are your friends. I've never had that, ever, in any neighborhood I've ever lived in, even as a child. It's a wonderful thing, to have neighbors who are your friends. You can buy luxury in a home; you can buy location; you can buy (to an extent) safety and security.

But you can't buy friendship. It's an amazing thing.

We had a lovely dinner last night, the five of us, plus Bill (a guest, the most boring person on Earth). We ate and drank and talked in copious amounts.

After Bill left, the conversation relaxed and drifted from topic to topic. We discussed hurricanes, and how we should prepare for a hurricane as a group.

Sue has a big generator and a swimming pool full of water for drinking.

Bob and Donna have food and firearms and radios.

We have food and fuel and ammunition and tools.

We decided that we'd be pretty well set, as a group, in the event of some sort of disaster, like a particularly bad hurricane.

"But what about Ray and Claire down the street?" asked Sue. We had discussed Ray and Claire earlier. They are elderly, frail and of modest means. We all thought Claire had died months ago because no one had seen her in awhile, but then Bob found her face-down on the front lawn several weeks ago, where she had fallen while tottering to and from the mailbox. Ray is also very frail, and won't spend a dime on his house unless pieces are actually falling off of it. I'm sure they are very nice people, but they are very reclusive and no one really knows them. They keep to themselves, and are suspicious of others.

All of us fell silent, wondering whether to include them in our little survivalist group.

I spoke up. "We eat 'em, and take their stuff," I said, nodding sagely.

We laughed ourselves silly.

Pete the really annoying window salesman

We invited Pete to come over and give us an estimate for new windows in our home.

Two grueling hours later, I told him "no thanks," and he left.

He talked incessantly. He had a bone-crushing handshake. He insisted on telling us how great the windows were, the best ones made, even though we told him three times that we'd already had those windows in another house, hence we wanted them again.

He just would not shut the fuck up. My wife filled her notepad with dark, repeatedly-traced doodles, which even the most unobservant person could interpret as "I'm bored."

He also quoted a price of $17,000, which was a bit much. We got the same windows four years ago, in a greater quantity, for $10,000. "Oh, what a deal!" he said. "Today only!"

What a huckster. It made me long for MacGregor the salesdog. At least MacGregor would have been quieter, even though we would have risked being licked to death.

No sale, Pete. And next time, just shut up, measure, and give us a number. I will tell him that when he calls tomorrow to see if we've changed our minds.