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Week Ten, May 21-27
Sunday, May 27, 2001
I spent a lot of my time in the garden today, planting bush beans and pulling weeds. And then this evening I retreated to cutting back blackberries, morning glory, and Japanese knot weed that is trying to take over the southeast corner of our place. It is funny - we work week after week removing invasive plants from Puget Gulch, while the whole time the same kinds of plants are trying to take over our small place up here on the hill. I am trying to fight the good fight.
My photo today is of an iris that opened this morning in the back yard. I wondered if I would get a decent shot of it with the breeze blowing in clouds from the southwest tonight...
Saturday, May 26, 2001
The weather is in transition tonight. After another warm day that was more sunny than not, high clouds started rolling overhead this evening. There is a chance of rain on the remaining two days of this three-day weekend. The garden can surely stand the moisture. I spent some time gardening this morning before we headed to Point Defiance Park for a picnic gathering. Tiny grass starts threaten to take over and choke out the spinach and lettuce, so I spent some time aiding the fight for vegetable kind.
This was an exciting day for butterfly watching in our yard. This morning I put Rhia out with food and I saw a butterfly that looked a lot like the painted lady I took a photo of a few Saturdays ago down at Puget Park. It landed and let me take a good look back in Rhia's part of the yard, but by the time I went inside it had flown away. So I missed snapping a picture of it.
I got my chance to take the photo when we returned from Point Defiance. It was sitting alongside the sidewalk when we pulled up and got out of the car, and after flying away once again for a short bit, I saw it again along the side of the house. So I set down what I was carrying and watched and waited. This time I had my camera with me. It settled down on a flower growing out of the rotted remains of a tree stump in the middle of the back yard, allowing me to take the shot above and then for me to open the file and compare the photo to those in the Audubon Field Guide to Butterflies and confirm that it was a painted lady.
My new interest in butterflies is just the latest in a series of things that have drawn me to nature in a new way, and last night I was reminded of that while reading Wintergreen by Robert Michael Pyle. The chapter I was reading last night struck me. Pyle wrote about watching an otter basking in the sun atop a stump at McClane Lake near Olympia, and I flashed back to the time I spent at that nature center one summer in the 1980s when I contracted to clean up the campgrounds in the Capitol Forest. It hit me that at that point in my life, as a teen who didn't yet know what he wanted to learn or where he wanted to go in the world, that incarnation of me spent a lot of time wandering the Black Hills blindly. I didn't take the time to see those small details that Pyle notes in his book. For all I know, I may have crossed paths with Pyle at McClane Creek.
Now, fifteen or so years later, I am on a path similar to Pyle. Paying attention to the small details, noting the world around me. I need to do more reading and exploring. I have learned much, but there is much more to learn and see and know...
Friday, May 25, 2001
Another sunny, although pleasantly not quite as warm day greeted us today in Tacoma. On the Friday that launches us into a three-day weekend, I spent much of my day tied up with work inside. But shortly before dusk, Natalie and I ventured down to Puget Creek to see what we could see. What we found was a few new plants in bloom and that dusk isn't going to be the best time to hang out down there due to the mosquitoes. Among the new plants in bloom, I snapped photos of the comfrey patch at the northern entrance to the trail through the gulch, then walking a few yards farther upstream there are bright white thimbleberry blooms emerging from the dark green folliage. But what really caught my eye a bit further down the trail was this bright red salmonberry off to the side of the trail. This is one of the plants far enough from the trail to escape the wrath of the Tacoma Parks Department and their ill-advised pruning efforts of a week ago.
It is funny, but if you look through this Weblog project from its beginning to now, it has turned out to be an exercise not only of marking the seasons, but of marking the change of the seasons in one place - Puget Park. And, mixed through all the daily entries and photos, the life cycle of salmonberry bushes at the park is prominent. From blooms, to post-bloom, to the formation of berries, to a bright orange berry, and now to this bright red berry. Just an interesting observation...
Thursday, May 24, 2001
Sometimes all it takes is a new sense of perspective to turn an everyday image into something else. On a day when my photography skills and lack of knowledge reached out and bit me, I decided around sundown that it would be nice to walk the few blocks from home over to Mason Gulch and take a photo of Commencement Bay. After crossing the street to check out the view, Natalie and I walked around looking for the best vantage point for a shot when I noticed the arms of this fern reaching up toward the sky. It was too short to really block my view of the bay, but I immediately though that its fronds unfurling toward the sky would form an interesting foreground for a familiar view of the bay from the end of the gulch. So I knelt down and took my picture for today through the fern, blurring the bay in the distance.
I was frustrated with digital photography today because of some communication I had with editors of the book project we are wrapping up over the next week. It turns out that they needed the hundreds of photos that we shot for Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula sent to them at 300 points per inch (ppi) rather than 72 ppi. So, this is one reason that at this point it appears that so few photos have made it into the final manuscript of the book which will be in stores late next month or in early July. The source of my frustration is that despite many monthly requests for feedback and reassurance that the photos we were submitting were OK for publication, it has taken until this late date, right before the book goes to print, before this major mistake is brought to my attention. I know that it is par for the course...mistakes happen. And after working in the newspaper business for years, I know all too well that the publishing process is not perfect. I was just frustrated that I felt like we did what we could to make this go smoothly, and despite those efforts, a major communication snafu reared its head.
I am sure everything is going to work out fine in the end. And now I have learned I need to upgrade some of my tools to produce high-end digital images for print. I need to be shooting uncompressed images in TIFF format, which would bring my photos up to the required 300 ppi. That simply requires an investment in larger disk storage and larger memory cards for shooting in our Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera...
Wednesday, May 23, 2001
Yesterday may have seemed warm, but today was even more so. It reached a peak temperature of 84 degrees here today, and with humidity hovering around 75 percent according to the hygrometer in our living room this afternoon, it was sticky. I have had to break down and run the soaker hoses in our garden beds the last couple of days to keep the plants happy.
With the heat, much of today was spent indoors. And this afternoon Natalie and I were excited to see the final page proofs for our book, Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula. We will be busy the next week or so doing one last edit over the pages before sending them back to Connecticut and off to the printer!
One last update on the spiders along our front porch: Only a few remain after it got breezy this afternoon. They are bundled up together under a leaf, just waiting for the right conditions to make their escape into the big, bad world...
Tuesday, May 22, 2001
Summer is definitely here, and today's warm weather betrayed the fact, even for those who stubbornly stick to the summer solstice as being the true start of the summer season. As can be seen in the photo of the fresh sugar pod peas ready to eat in our garden, summer is here, whether someone's calendar agrees or not. Add the fact that the high temperature today reached 80 degrees here and even higher in areas farther from the cooling effects of Puget Sound, and there is no doubt about it. My childhood home town of Rochester peaked at 92 degrees today.
The arrival of summer means many things. It means that I am just three weeks or so short of wrapping up my first goal for this Weblog - that I post a new photo and short journal entry each day between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. It also means that we are entering the dry season, that little more than a week after we had nearly an inch of rain in one day, it is very likely that we won't see much of the signature wet stuff between now and fall. And it means that I had better get real busy planting the last of the garden. Green beans, pole beans, more lettuce and spinach, more carrots...all of these need to go in the ground while we still have a few weeks of cool nights and not so parching daytime temperatures. There is much to do...
An update on the tiny spiders alongside our front porch: Their numbers dwindled today. There were still dozens of spiders bunched together on the forsythia bush tonight, waiting for more breeze to float off to new horizons. I doubt there will be many left by the end of the day tomorrow.
Monday, May 21, 2001
My nature focus today went from the large scale landscapes as seen from Mt. Walker down to the tiny details of everyday life here at home. This weekend Natalie discovered three clusters of tiny spiders around our front porch, and I snapped a few pictures of them bundled up against the breeze. But today the spiders are on the move. They climbed from their home about a foot off the front porch floor, one-by-one, up a single thread to a pair of leaves on the forsythia bush on the north side of the porch. And from this new vantage point I have watched them one-by-one venture out on delicate threads, first to the other side of the porch, and then eventually a few brave spiders fashioned their tiny thread parachutes and floated off on the north breeze. Venturing out on the porch tonight before sundown I could see a myriad of threads trailing off from the forsythia bush toward the south, with the ends of the threads gently floating in the breeze, the last remnants of those spiders who set out on the breeze for a new home.
It is intriguing watching nature on this scale. One tiny spider spent part of the day practicing its web building skills, as it fashioned a web on a lower branch of the forsythia bush, not far from the majority of the baby spiders that were still clustered against the breeze above. It will be interesting to see how many days these tiny spiders hang around before one-by-one each one of them ventures off to a new life...
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