Gleanings of the Week Ending July 17, 2021

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

The 'Zoom Boom' Can't Save the Midwest – People are leaving dense, high-cost urban metro areas…but very few of them are going to the heartland.  Maybe some of the areas will benefit from migration because of climate change. Or maybe the Midwest should simply focus on investments to help their economies and create places people want to live….do the groundwork to encourage people to move to the region.

Poison Mushrooms: How to Tell – From the Natural History Society of Maryland…good pictures.

The Avenues of America – An overview picture of Washington DC taken from the International Space Station.

The Invasion Of The National Park System – Quagga mussels, Burmese pythons, feral swine, household pets gone wild, tamarisk trees….and those are just the ones pictured!

Incredible Footage of Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall Volcano – And there are people in many of the pictures to provide scale!

Major advance in fabrication of low-cost solar cells also locks up greenhouse gases – There are so many articles about technologies that sound promising toward creating faster pathways away from fossil fuels….hope a lot of them move forward.

Elephant Trunks Can Suck Water at 330 Miles Per Hour – Wow

Pyramid made of dirt is world’s oldest known war memorial – Located in Syria…and at least 30 people – male and presumed to be warriors – buried in horizontal steps.

COVID-19 pandemic has been linked with six unhealthy eating behaviors -- ScienceDaily – Eating disorders are one of the deadliest psychiatric health concerns and 6 of them have a correlation to the pandemic: mindless eating and snacking, increased food consumption, generalized decrease in appetite or dietary intake, eating to cope, pandemic related reductions in dietary intake, and re-emergence or marked increase in eating disorders.

How flooded coal mines could heat homes – Evidently the water in the mines could be tapped as a source of geothermal heating/cooling!

Alice B. Woodward – Illustrator

I found and browsed 5 books illustrated by Alice B. Woodward in June. They are all freely available on Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg.

The first one I found was published in 1895: Eric, Prince of Lorlonia, Or, The Valley of Wishes: A Fairy Tale of the Days of Chivalry. It is one of her earliest books.

She became a prolific illustrator in the early 1900s. The other 4 books are from that period. The illustrations are richly colored….full of detail…enhancing the story the book is telling.

The Brownies and other Tales by Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing in 1910

The Pinafore Picture Book by W.S. Gilbert in 1908

The Story of Peter Pan Picture Book by Daniel O’Connor in 1915

The Story of the Mikado by W.S. Gilbert in 1921

She continued to work into the early 1930s so there could be additional books that become more accessible as the copyright expires.

30 Years Ago – July 1991

In June 1991, we had guests from Texas at our house. In July 1991, we went to Texas. I remember it vividly and was surprised when I looked back through my notes from the time to find that we were only there for 4 days. It seems like we did so much: went to the Dallas zoo, did a lot of water play with hoses and plastic bins big enough for each 23 month old girl to have her own, and explored several playgrounds where the swings were big favorites.

It seemed like my daughter had a step increase in language and coordination…..and became a lot more opinionated about what she wanted to do. Maybe that last part was a precursor to her ‘terrible twos.’

We had two rounds of colds – before and after the trip to Texas. My husband did the best which was good since he was settling into his new job. My daughter had an eye infection along with her cold. I had an eye and ear infection that took 3 different antibiotics back to back; finally the last one worked.

The garden my mother-in-law had tended the previous summer was producing tomatoes, chives, dill, oregano and sunflowers. She died in Fall 1990 and we felt closer to her in the garden she had created than at the cemetery where she was buried.

16 months in COVID-19 Pandemic

16 months into the pandemic with vaccines available to anyone 12 or older…and the Delta variant is surging in some areas where the percent of the population vaccinated is low. Unfortunately - Springfield, Missouri is one of those places. It is frustrating that the deaths and the start of long term disabilities from COVID-19 that are happening now could have been avoided via vaccination….that the impact on lives of individuals and the economy (through increased health care and loss of productivity for those that became ill and didn’t fully recover) will be part of the legacy of (what I hope is) the late stages of the pandemic in the US.

I was at home in Maryland – a state with a high vaccination rate – for most of June. Even with Maryland’s stats, the Delta variant has me still wearing a mask any time I am in an indoor space like the grocery store (early morning when there are not many people around) or doctor’s offices (catching up on appointments I put off during the pandemic). We are still in takeout mode for restaurants and my husband wears a mask when he picks up our food. At other stores, we are doing curbside pickup. I wear a mask at the Farmers Market even though it is outdoors because it is difficult to keep distance while I am shopping. By this time, I had hoped we would be at the point of not needing masks, but the variants have changed the situation.

We are enjoying outdoor places: Brookside Gardens, Howard County Conservancy’s Mt Pleasant, Centennial Park, and Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens. We choose times where there won’t be many other people around – usually in the mornings. I’m glad we’ve been able to avoid crowds/not wear masks since sometimes the temperature is warm enough that masks would be uncomfortable. Our yard is a great place to enjoy the outdoors as well; I enjoy yardwork in short bursts…when it’s not too hot.

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Webinars have been a boon during the pandemic and this past month included one of the most thought-provoking: The Institutions of Extraterrestrial Liberty. It was an interdisciplinary 4 days of sessions (Day 1: https://tinyurl.com/4t7zjv72 Day 2: https://tinyurl.com/2f9n4b72 Day 3: https://tinyurl.com/48rbba2k Day 4: https://tinyurl.com/5bbey7pr)).

I’ve been thinking about the most effective pandemic coping mechanisms for me…deciding that the variety of strategies I’ve developed over many years have all contributed. It is having many familiar strategies to choose from that is important….and utilizing them often – together or alone. There are some that are part of my daily routine: journaling, 12,000 steps,  browsing 4 online books, mindfulness/yoga, blog post, noting something I am celebrating, creating Zentangle tile. My office is arranged such that the view from the window is a wall of trees with a roof at one side where birds occasionally perch. My husband and I try to plan one ‘field trip’ each week – a garden walk, birding, hiking, astronomy. Overall…we’ve settled into a routine that is sustainable.

I have road trip plans for the next month….and will be taking precautions to stay well while I am on the road and visiting family.

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 10, 2021

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Fibromyalgia likely the result of autoimmune problems – Maybe this change in thinking (neurologic to immune system) will improve diagnosis and management of the disease.

How freezing changed the green pea – A little food history

Massive Antarctic Lake Vanishes in Just Three Days – A lot can be learned with observations from space…and once we see something interesting like this there is historical imagery that can provide a view from past years too.

Tuberculosis: The Forgotten Pandemic – The search for a better vaccine for TB….some history of the past 100 years of TB around the world.

Top 25 birds of the week: Bird Interactions! – Birds with others…of their own species and sometimes another bird species.

The Finalists of the Bird Photographer of the Year 2021 Are Announced – Just found this post that came out back in April…enjoy a double dose of bird photos in this gleanings list.

Photos of the Week – June 17, 2021 – Spider photos from The Prairie Ecologist

Fire Destroyed 10 Percent of World’s Giant Sequoias Last Year—Can They Survive Climate Change? – Very sad….and this year there could be more fires.

6 Surprising Tales of Predatory Birds – The 6 birds featured are: pelicans, great blue herons, turkeys, crows, kelp gulls, and vampire finches.

Coelacanths may live nearly a century, five times longer than researchers expected – An ancient form of fish that evidently lives a long time, reaches maturity at about 55 years old and gestates offspring for 5 years. This slow life history has implications for conservation of the fish. I also wondered how many other species we know only from fossils had slow life histories compared to organism we observe today.

Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens – 3

Continuing the posts about our hike at Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens in Washington DC…today the topic is everything I noticed other than the lotuses and dragonflies.

I looked for a shelf fungus on one the trees near the entrance that I’d seen over several years. It was gone but there was some pancake looking fungus patches on one of the high branches!

There were other flowers blooming:

Pickerel Weed. In past years it attracted tiger swallowtail butterflies. I didn’t see any in the gardens this year.

Hibiscus. Not as many as in previous years. This one was growing at the edge of one of the ponds.

Water lilies. There were none of the giant lily pads that have been at Kenilworth in previous years and some of the ponds usually filled with water lilies were open water…but there were enough for  a few pictures.

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Button bush. Again – not as many as I remembered. I wondered what happened to them since it seems like they would be durable along the pond edges from year to year.

Trumpet vine. A robust native. My mother planted one in the 1960s in a corner of our back yard and then battled it with pruners to keep it from deconstructing the fence.

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We walked on the boardwalk out to the mash and river. I was hoping to see herons but didn’t spot any.

At the very end there was a tree with lots of seeds growing in the loop of the boardwalk. It looks like a tree of heaven….a non-native and very invasive. I was surprised that it had not been cut down.

It was getting hotter, and we headed back through the gardens to the car. I was glad I had some cold water to drink on the drive home!

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 3, 2021

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Top 25 birds of the week – June 2021! – The first picture startled me – a bird with a turquoise beak!

Beach Safety Tips: How To Avoid Being Bitten or Stung This Summer – I’m don’t go to the beach frequently…and then am usually more interested in shells and ghost crabs than being in the water! Still – the safety tips were interesting.

Concrete: The material that defines our age – With the collapse of the reinforced concrete building in Florida….this story seemed particularly timely.

Edible Cholera vaccine made of powdered rice proves safe in phase 1 human trials, study suggests – Reminded me of distribution ease of the polio vaccine sugar cubes back in the 1960s. In this case the special rice is powdered and sealed in aluminum packets that are then mixed with 1/3 cup liquid and drunk. Hopefully, the subsequent phases of the trials will be successful…it could save a lot of lives.

Yellowstone and Warming: An Iconic Park Faces Startling Changes – A few degrees makes a big difference….in National Parks too.

Scientists Find Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in More Than 100 Popular Makeup Products – I hope manufacturers of makeup will check their ingredients more carefully….make their products PFAS-free.

Canada is right to classify single-use plastics as toxic – I hope the US takes similar action. Industry should get on board with this idea and be innovative rather than taking legal action.  There is no ‘responsible plastic use’ for single use plastic. We consumers are too accepting that single use plastics are inevitable. It’s pretty easy for us to avoid singe use plastic bags, straws, stirring sticks, six-pack rings, plasticware….the one that is challenging for me is the hard-to-recycle food containers because of the lack of options in grocery stores and restaurant takeout.

Move Over Bald Eagle: Meet 12 of the World’s Coolest National Birds – Some are flashy…some are majestic….a little history of how they were selected aa representatives for their country.

Losing Ladybugs – Native and non-native ladybugs….you are more likely to see the non-natives now.

Florida’s Manatees Are Dying at an Alarming Rate – Starving because water pollution (nutrient runoff causing algal blooms) smothers seagrass. More than 10% of the manatee population of Florida has died so far in 2021. Very sad for other aquatic species that need the same habitat … and people too.

F.M. Melchers and L’an

My ‘book of the week’ is L’an (The Year) published in 1897. The French text was written by a Brussels lawyer, Thomas Braun but the Franz M. Melchers illustrations are the reason to browse this book. I’ve selected two illustrations for each season from the book.

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It is a treat to discover a book like this – enjoying it and then searching for information about the artist’s life. In Melchers’ case, there is not a lot of information available via search. He was Dutch, born 1868 and died 1944 in Antwerp (during the German occupation). He evidently made his living as an artist – moved around and included in many exhibitions (Munster, Veere, Brussels, The Hague, Antwerp). The only book he illustrated was L’an….and it is a gem.

Ten Little Celebrations – June 2021

After being away from home in May…being in Maryland again rippled with little celebrations associated with home. Here are my top 10 little celebrations from June 2021:

Scenic drive from Lexington KY to home. Light traffic, good highway, beautiful scenery….I took a picture to celebrate being back in Maryland.

Farmers Market. I’ve been going every week and it’s a celebration every time. The piles of produce fresh from the local farms (and artisan bread) make it a happy errand…and then I enjoy the bounty in meals all during the week. It’s a great substitute for belonging to a CSA (which is not practical for me this year because of my traveling).

A good watermelon. There was a sign in the produce section of Wegmans for seeded watermelons. I always remember them from my childhood….sweeter than the ones without seeds that we find more frequently in stores today. I bought one – hoping it would live up my expectations. And it did. Celebrating a watermelon as good as I remembered!

Yard work. An hour of work (several of them on mornings when it is still cool enough to be pleasant)…2 wheelbarrow loads to the brush pile or compost bin….celebrating a neater yard and satisfaction of encouraging native species.

Apple crisp. While I was away, my husband did curbside pickup for his groceries. He somehow got a huge bag of apples. Some of the excess apples made a great apple crisp…celebrating bounty (and not wasting food).

Howard County Conservancy Mt Pleasant. Every time I hike there, there is something new to celebrate – most recently dragonflies and a black-crowned night heron.

Maryland sunrise and partial solar eclipse. Celebrating being in the right place at the right time to see it.

New crowns. I had anticipated that getting 3 new crowns was going to be uncomfortable but was pleasantly surprised that my expectation was way over the top; there was almost no discomfort during the drilling or sensitive areas afterward…. celebrated that it happened that way.

New computer glasses. Hurray for seeing better…and the red frames.

The Institutions of Extraterrestrial Liberty talks. There were 4 days of webinars….and I found many of them very thought provoking. I celebrated the content…and that they were made available by the sponsors of the virtual conference. (Day 1: https://tinyurl.com/4t7zjv72 Day 2: https://tinyurl.com/2f9n4b72 Day 3: https://tinyurl.com/48rbba2k Day 4: https://tinyurl.com/5bbey7pr)

Mini-Landscapes

I enjoy photographing the mini-landscapes of my yard more that the larger ones; it’s hard to get enough distance from our big trees to get the whole thing. Photographing the small assemblages of plants to capture their world is a more satisfying project. I like the diverse shapes of ferns and violets and other small plants gradually covering stepping-stones under our deck.

One fern was thriving by a downspout when we moved the deck furniture near it (for the deck to be stained). The starburst shape of the fern…the heart shapes of violets. Now we’ve moved the furniture back to the deck and the fern is more isolated.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I liked the wavy shapes of the fungus growing on a stump. This picture could be in a forest…but it is not. The stump was from a bush growing at the corner of our garage that I recently cut down! It’s a bit of serendipity to notice something interesting and beautiful in an unexpected place.

I battle the deer for the day lilies. The deer usually win. The brown stems in this picture are the ones the deer got. I cut all the stems with larger buds to take inside. They might have been saved by their shorter stalks, the milkweed plant that was growing between them and the yard where the deer would be, and the house/bushes behind them.

Gleanings of the Week Ending June 26, 2021

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Top 25 Birds of the week: Habitats! – Birds are everywhere (at least now/recent past). The decline in insect populations could make it problematic for many species to survive.

The Institutions of Extraterrestrial Liberty (Day 1: https://tinyurl.com/4t7zjv72 Day 2: https://tinyurl.com/2f9n4b72 Day 3: https://tinyurl.com/48rbba2k Day 4: https://tinyurl.com/5bbey7pr) – A series of webinars chaired by Charles Cockell (I enjoyed his astrobiology course on Coursera back in 2015 and his “Life in the Universe Pandemic Series’ back in Spring 2020). The subject in these webinars is freedom beyond Earth with talks on everything from liberty in Martian settlements to war in space. This is not about the search for life beyond Earth, but it is about the human future beyond Earth and how human societies might evolve over time. The schedule for each of the days is in the comments section so it is easy to select segments easily.

Gigantic flying pterosaurs had spoked vertebrae to support their 'ridiculously long' necks -- ScienceDaily – Their necks were longer than a giraffe’s…and the vertebrae had internal structure not seen in any other animal. The discovery was made with a CT scan and petrographic sections through the bone.  

Linking Birds, Farmer Attitudes and Conservation – The approach is not as straightforward as it might seem…there are nuances and feedback loops that need to be considered to get a positive result.

A breathtaking treasure reveals the power of the woman buried with it : Research Highlights – Early Bronze Age southeastern Spain…heavy silver diadem, silver ornaments…pots with intricate silver plating and daggers with silver-plated handles.

Challenging Conservation Not to Leave Women Behind – An example from the Solomon Islands….globally relevant.

100-Year-Old Lungs Yield Genetic Samples of 1918 Flu Viruses | The Scientist Magazine®- Lungs of 2 soldiers and a civilian preserved in formalin….from the first wave of the 1918 flu…when it was not as deadly as the later waves.

Why Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water - BBC Future – One of the world’s first efforts to integrate nature into water management on a national scale. Projects include protecting high altitude cushion bogs and shoring up ancient water storage (routing water in the wet season to natural infiltration basins). These are ‘slow water’ solutions…mitigations that should be studied for other areas that are drying out as the climate changes.

An Estimated 50 Billion Birds Populate Earth, but Four Species Reign Supreme | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – And the 4 species are: house sparrow, European starling, ring-billed gull, and barn swallow.

How humanity has changed the food it eats - BBC Future – Perspectives on the processing of food through our history (and pre-history)…and where we are now. It is still possible to make choices that are healthy for us…but a lot of ultra-processed ‘foods’ readily available that are not.  

The Sculpture of Abraham Anghik Ruben

Not all the books on Internet Archive are old; sometimes the copyright holder give permission to make a book available with provisos like Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International – which is the case for the book I am featuring in this post

Arctic Journeys, Ancient Memories: The Sculpture of Abraham Anghik Ruben

The book is the catalog of an exhibition that was at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian from October 4, 2012-January 2, 2013. I wish I would have seen the exhibit in 2013, but finding the catalog and discovering the artist now is the next best thing! I picked 4 favorites from the images in the catalog which is well worth browsing.

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The sculptures can be enjoyed visually but the backstories add to their meaning. There is an additional one that I noticed on the sculptor’s website that stands out: The Last Goodbye which depicts the sculptor’s lived experience with children being sent away to residential schools in Canada and the US. There are stories in the news recently about what happened in both countries; there are people still alive that lived it. The sculptor is only a couple of years older than me. The first step is acknowledging what happened.

Look at the sculptor’s web site and Wikipedia entry for more info.

Summer Plans

My theme for this summer is catching up….and consciously maintaining practices that sustained my wellbeing during the pandemic. Being at home right now is such a pleasure: there are mornings cool enough to comfortably work in the yard or go for a hike, there are fabulous seasonal veggies and fruits available from the farmers market…and I am catching up on all the health-related checkups I put off for over a year. My husband organized our house’s heating/cooling system check up, asphalt driveway sealing, and deck re-staining. And I am continuing my high-volume book browsing (Internet Archive is like a candy store for books!), Zentangle making, getting 12,000 steps per day, a bit of yoga, writing down what I am celebrating/thankful for, writing blog posts….days are full…never boring!

Being able to go to Texas to see my aging parents in May was an important milestone…a relief from the time we had to stay at home where I could only see/hear them virtually. I’ve already planned another trip for July and will see more of the family then at a wedding. The big event for my parents after I left was a large mulberry tree being cut down in their yard. It had been ailing for some time and finally the rot around an old spilt was significant enough that the big trunks could crack apart at any time with the potential to damage three houses! My sister sent me a picture midway through the cleanup. I found myself wishing I would have been there for the drama! There is grief for the old tree….but also relief that it didn’t fall and cause a lot of damage.

Being vaccinated gives me confidence to make the plan to drive to Texas in July and then again in September. I had anticipated that I would be more confident in July that I was back in April just after I was fully vaccinated…but the delta variant has reduced my confidence and I’ll keep wearing a mask when I am not sure everyone I am encountering has been vaccinated. I’ll be making the drive over 3 days with a stop in Springfield MO to visit my daughter where they are having a surge of cases due to the variant. I am glad she got moved to her new house during the lull in cases in late May. She is back to curbside pickup rather than going into any store.

I have opted to not volunteer this summer…waiting until the fall to get back into those activities…but the decision isn’t because of the pandemic.  The type of volunteering I enjoy the most is outdoors; in the summer it tends to be in the hotter part of the day which is sometimes problematic for me; I don’t want to cancel at the last minute because the temperature is too high or the air quality is not good. Toward the end of the summer there will be training for the new fall programs – I’m sure the pandemic has changed them a bit – and then I’ll get back into the fray.

Overall summer 2021 has been enjoyable so far and I am looking forward to the rest of it!

Short Hike at Howard County Conservancy – 3

Continuing the posts about our recent hike at Howard County Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant –

We met some birders along the path along the restored part of Davis Branch …they told us about a heron standing in the stream. My husband and I went into quiet mode as we walked – checking the stream through the vegetation between the trail and the water…looking for the heron. Nothing. We got to the end of the trail and headed back…and saw it! The vegetation had blocked the view coming from the other direction.

The birds was a Black-crowned night-heron. It was standing very still in a shady riffle. At one point, we though the bird might be looking for breakfast, but we didn’t see it go after a fish or move very much for the time that we were watching. It did look around briefly. The red eye is striking.

I enjoyed experimenting with camera adjustments and magnification. It helped that the bird was so still. The smooth water in the foreground was a contrast to the turbulence beyond the bird.

Then bird then flew to a nearby snag in the wetlands area. I zoomed in for a closer look at the feet.

This was the first time I’d seen a Black-crowned night-heron at Mt Pleasant. I vividly remember seeing one on a birding field trip in Baltimore back in May 2018 – standing in trash that had accumulated in the water. It was refreshing to see the bird in better habitat.

30 years ago – June 1991

Looking back at June 1991 – it seems that life had a faster pace…almost an unsustainable pace but common in families where the adults work and the child is less than two years old. We had company for 2 weeks out of the month. The first was a visit from a sister that had recently moved into a new house and needed a break for the flurry of that activity; we enjoyed several outings to the park and Ladew Topiary Gardens…discovered that McDonalds was an excellent place for lunch with a 21-month-old.

The second visit was a sister’s family – that included their daughter (a week older than my daughter). We prepared the girls prior to the visit by showing them pictures and videos of each other; it worked…they were immediate buddies. We went to parks and several museums (one was The Cloisters which was a children’s museum then and is now a wedding venue, another was Rose Hill Manor Park & Museums)…read books, splashed in the small pool on hot days, and enjoyed every inch of our house and yard. One was talking more…the other seemed to enjoy more complex books. We all had ‘Maryland is for Crabs’ t-shirts! In the picture below my daughter is hugging a tree along the Cunningham Falls State Park boardwalk – one of the outdoor places that was enjoyable for everyone in our group.

Being outdoors…doing something with water…was one of my daughter’s favorite activities. We had tomato plants and gladiolus getting ready to bloom in the garden around the oak tree.

A summer cold made the rounds. My daughter had it for a few days…mine lingered and I eventually went to the doctor – got medicine for ear and eye infections.

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In world news – children in Iraq were dying of cholera and other water borne disease…the Kuwait fires were slowly being extinguished.

Overall – it was a month full of juggling work with home life. I can’t say that it was a balancing act…it was more of a blending and using every minute optimally…exhausting but rewarding.

By the end of the month, I already had plane tickets to visit Texas in July. My husband would be with us on the flight down then continue to San Diego for a conference…the blending rather than balancing strategy again.

Gleanings of the Week Ending June 18, 2021

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Top 25 birds of the week: Terrestrial Birds – Several ancestors of chickens in this group!

3D-printed material to replace ivory -- ScienceDaily – ‘Digory’ made of resin and calcium phosphate particles….can be used to restore old ivory artifacts.

Managing Colorado River risk | Science – The reduction of water in the Colorado River basin over time…the challenge of managing that reduction for 40 million people that depend on the water source.

Death metal: Evidence for the impact of lead poisoning on childhood health within the Roman Empire – A study of 173 skeletons from 5 sites dated AD 1st-4th centuries.

First State National Historical Park Gains 254 Acres – This could be a good day trip for my husband and I…getting there early enough in the morning for it to not be cool enough for a good hike.

Incredible Close-Up Portraits of Solitary Bees Highlight Their Character – Wow! A great project done during COVID-19 quarantine!

Human Teeth Hold the Secrets of Ancient Plagues - The Atlantic – Finding ancient pathogens in old bone….an interview with Johannes Krause, director of the archaeogenetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Teeth are like a time capsule: bits of blood protected by the enamel.

Cool and COVID-safe: How radiant cooling could keep our cities comfortable and healthy -- ScienceDaily – Looking for ways to stay cool at lower energy costs than traditional HVAC systems.

Tiffany Stained Glass at Art Institute of Chicago | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – A church window transitioned to a museum and restored…now on display.

Mysterious Ailment Blinding and Killing Birds in Washington, D.C. Area – Glad we’ve had our feeder and bird baths put away for the past 6 weeks or so since we are in the process of getting our deck worked on. Fledglings of blue jays and grackles seem to be the birds impacted the most.

3 Heinrich Schliemann Books

Heinrich Schliemann was a pioneer in the field of archaeology focusing primarily on pre-Hellenistic archaeology. His techniques were often destructive by today’s standards but that is often the case with pioneers in the field. He did publish his finds and I browsed through 3 of them back in May - all freely available. I’ve selected a few images from each of the books.

The Book of the Mycenae (1877)

Is that the back part of a crane on the right side of the pot? The three disks give me ideas for Zentangle tiles. Two of them are clearly nature based – an octopus and a bee.

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Ilios : the city and country of the Trojans (1880)

The simplicity of the gold bracelets…I wondered if people wore them all the time once they put them on or if they were items were only worn intermittently. The decoration on the whorls – another source of Zentangle patterns. It’s appealing when a culture has the practice to make ordinary objects into art.

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Tiryns; the Prehistoric Palace of the Kings of Tiryns, the results of the Latest Excavations (1886)

(Use the arrows to move through the three sample images to take a closer look). This is the only book of the three that has color images…using it effectively to depict the fragments of wall painting with the whole pattern derived from the fragments. The fragments of vases were complete enough to have meaning on their own. The terracotta idols appeared to be mostly women!

I posted about Sir Arthur Evans a few weeks ago. He was another pioneering archaeologist with some overlap with Schliemann; Evans took over the excavation of Knossos after Schliemann’s plan to do so ended with his death.

Rose Georgina Kingsley

One of the books that I added to my list of botanical print books this month was Roses and Rose Growing by Rose Georgina Kingsley. The pictures of roses and learning a bit about the author appealed to me.

She does not have an entry in Wikipedia…not even listed in the entry for her father, Charles Kingsley. She was the oldest child and evidently followed her younger brother to Colorado Springs in 1871 (a few years before her father died) but was back in England and establishing Learnington High School (now The Kingsley School) for girls by 1884.

Her first book that I found on Internet Archive was South by west; or Winter in the Rocky Mountains and spring in Mexico – published in 1874, a year before her father died – about her experience in Colorado and travel into Mexico. Her father wrote the preface and edited the book; her name is not on the title page even though she wrote everything except the preface and created the illustrations! The metadata on Internet Archive makes the attribution but puts her name in brackets. Maybe it was easier to get the book published with her father’s name.

All the other books I found for her on Internet Archive are from the period where she was also establishing and running the school:

The Children of Westminster Abbey in 1886

The History of French Art in 1899

Eversley Gardens and Others in 1907

Roses and rose growing in 1908

Garden colour: Spring in 1911

I was surprised that I couldn’t find a complete biography for her.  She left a legacy in her writings and her school that is significant – maybe that is the way she wanted to be remembered rather than what someone else wrote about her.

Gleanings of the Week Ending June 12, 2021

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Water treatment: Removing hormones with sunlight -- ScienceDaily – Research to find and remove micropollutants. Micropollutants have become more concerning over the past few years as research has shown the potential for health impacts.

Which processed foods are better than natural? - BBC Future – Processed foods are not all unhealthy. Some are better than fresh (for example, canned tomatoes, pasteurized milk). But watch out for ultra-processed foods – ones derived from foods and additives; they can alter gut bacteria, cause inflammation….and many people have a tendence to overeat ultra-processed food.

Top 25 birds of the week: endemic birds – Birds found only in a small area of the world…and no where else. My favorite is the Bee Hummingbird – smallest hummingbird in the world and only found in the Cuban archipelago.

Dietary cocoa improves health of obese mice; likely has implications for humans -- ScienceDaily – Hmmm…maybe my 2 squares of dark chocolate for 1st breakfast is not a bad thing at all…even though I am not obese.

Chipmunk Quest – We have had chipmunks around our house periodically. They are fun to watch. They seem to taunt our cat through the window!

Why Bald Eagle Populations Soared in the Last Decade | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – A good news story of species recovery.

Europe’s Drive to Slash Plastic Waste Moves into High Gear – Hope similar efforts are made in the US. As an individual, it is hard to avoid single-use plastic although I have made an effort to avoid plastic shopping bags and buy products in paper/metal rather than plastic when that is an alternative.

Move Over, Cicadas: 5 Other Great North American Wildlife Hatchings (and Emergences) – The Brood X cicada emergence is beginning to wane in our area….it was interesting to think about other emergence type events. Maybe one of the events mentioned in this article will motivate a road trip in the next year or so.

Tropical species are moving northward in U.S. as winters warm: Insects, reptiles, fish and plants migrating north as winter freezes in South become less frequent -- ScienceDaily – Shifts already observable…others projected.

Report exposes power gap at US universities – Only one in ten top-earning faculty members is a woman.

Home Again – Day 1

My time away from home on the road trip (Maryland to Texas to Missouri and back to Maryland) was from April 17 to June 2. It was my longest time away from home since my junior year of high school when I traveled with an Up with People cast/traveling high school; I was away from home for semester length stints then. This time was very different both because of the intervening years of experience, returning to my own home/husband rather than my parents, and more recently impact of the pandemic but there was a similarity too – coming home was a return to the place I felt most secure after going out into the world with some anticipated trepidation.

The first thing I did when I got home to Maryland was to walk down the driveway taking a few pictures. I had missed almost all the iris blooms. There were only 2 flowers remaining…no more buds. The day lilies were beginning, and the deer had not eaten very many (yet). The Virginia creeper was vigorously growing up the oak tree. The trees and yard had filled out while I was away.

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I unpacked the car…tried to disperse items close to where they could be put away. For some reason I was exhausted even though the drive had been easy…and sedentary. Being home again felt odd instead of ‘normal.’ I was grateful that my husband had kept things in good order while I was away. Somehow the list in my head of what I needed to do felt overwhelming. More about that in tomorrow’s post.