Gleanings of the Week Ending March 26, 2022

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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.

How triple-pane windows stop energy (and money) from flying out the window – How long will it be before all window replacements and windows in new houses will be triple paned? I guess is depends a lot on affordability….and then availability. I like that they reduce noise too.

Yellowstone At 150: Challenges Go More Than Crowd-Deep – A post about Yellowstone’s past, present…projections for the future. My husband and I have only visited the park once…hopefully we’ll be able to see it again.

Beware the joro spider. Scientists say the giant, but harmless, arachnid is spreading – A native of Japan…it has been in the southeastern US for the past decade. It may be poised to continue up the eastern seaboard. Fortunately, they are not lethal to humans and the eat mosquitos/stink bugs.

Top 25 birds of the week: Seedeaters! – We see some of these at our birdfeeders!  

Cognitive Bias Codex, 2016 – A graphic I had not seen before….very thought provoking.

Revealing an Ice Age Route of Indigenous Peoples – Vancouver Island…analyzing lake sediments. One of them, Topknot Lake, was evidently never covered by glaciers so the sediment was very deep.

Hidden dangers lurking in your kitchen - A little history…and one that is relevant to my house hunting: I don’t want to buy a house with gas stove…if I do, it will be replaced with an electric ASAP.

Common house plants can improve air quality indoors – Modern homes are more airtight than ever…and indoor air quality can become a problem. Good to know that plants can help – and they are generally aesthetically pleasing too.

Spring is starting sooner and growing warmer – (A color coded map) Almost the whole US is experiencing earlier Spring. A small area of North and South Dakota is the exception.

Here are the world’s 25 most endangered cultural heritage sites – The post is a summary from Smithsonian Magazine. More details are available from the World Monuments Fund. There are sites in Ukraine that are in danger from the war there – will probably be on the next list (Smithsonian post and article with pictures of the 7 Ukranian UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Our new House: House Hunting (1)

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I’ve looked at 5 houses in Springfield, MO…am gaining more appreciation of the changes in house hunting in the intervening 25 years since I last moved. I did the looking in Springfield while my husband was at home in Maryland but we both are refining our expectations based on this initial foray into house hunting.

Some of the changes in house hunting include:

  • The amount of information available via sites like www.realtor.com. Most houses for sale have 30+ pictures (most professionally done). There are flood and noise overlays on maps as well as satellite images and street views. The verbiage provides a varying amount of information but is often quite detailed. I learned a lot looking at Springfield houses virtual while my daughter was house hunting last year and them more recently for us.

  • Since the neighborhood is listed on listing sites – it is sometimes worth looking at the HOA covenants which might be available online as well. This has turned out to be important to us since my husband wants to have a small observatory for his telescope in the back yard; some neighborhoods in Springfield (and probably elsewhere) don’t allow extra small structures like that…and some don’t allow fences!

  • Now there is an expectation that the buyer will provide a pre-approved loan or cash purchase letter from financial institution before bidding on a house. The days of doing loan application after agreement is reached on purchase price (like we did 25 years ago) are no more. This is our first time to not need a mortgage to purchase the house…but we hadn’t realized that we needed to get a letter saying we had the cash in hand for the purchase!

  • There is less time spent in the house before bidding. In our previous house hunting, we had to take whatever pictures we needed to remember the house we bid on…and to plan where our furniture would be placed as the movers unloaded into the new house. This time we can do a bit more with the pictures already available even though we might need to measure rooms that might be ‘tight’ or in houses that are photographed empty (so no furniture to judge room sizes). Sometimes dimensions of bedrooms are included in the verbiage part of the listing online…but not always.

  • We had assumed we needed a basement for storm shelter…but a clean ‘crawl’ space with easy access from within the house or garage may be adequate too. We had not seen houses built like this previously but there are some in Springfield that have unfinished, unfloored spaces under the house that are tall enough to walk into!

  • Technology can allow detailed walk throughs remotely. I started a DUO call with my husband (we both have Android phones) at one of the houses so I could show him the situation for astronomy at the house. It worked relatively well, and we may need to do something similar with our agent if the perfect house comes on the market and we can’t get to Springfield fast enough to bid. The pace of the housing market is much faster than 25 years ago.

Overall – we made a start. Not to get our letter from the bank and get serious. My next visit to Springfield will probably be for The House!

Road Trip to Missouri

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I set out on my 2-day drive to Missouri the morning after a winter storm came through. Fortunately, the roads were all clear…no snow or ice on the interstates and only a little packed snow in the rest stops during the first morning. I decided to walk fast at my rest stops rather than wearing my coat in the car. It was very cold and breezy along my route from home in Maryland to a hotel in Lexington, KY the first day then warmer on the second day (my fleece vest was still needed but I didn’t need to walk fast). I noticed my skin had become very dry during the first day (when the temps were in the teens and low twenties for much of the day)…didn’t recover until I was in Missouri for a day.

I had braced for higher gas prices. I bought gas 3 times with the price ranging from $3.99 to $4.55 per gallon. After hearing so many stories about getting stuck in winter weather on highways, the tank never got below ¼ full. I also had a sleeping bag in the car….just in case. Thankfully there were no weather related traffic problems.

My route the first day was very scenic….starting out going west through Maryland to familiar rest stops at South Mountain and Sidling Hill. There was snow at both stops. The parking and sidewalks at South Mountain were totally clear but icy at Sidling Hill (I walked in the road rather than on the sidewalk!). Note that my car was still relatively clean at that point….it did not stay that way in West Virginia.

The roadcut at Sidling Hill had ice falls where the water seeps out of the rocks.

The interstate route through West Virginia must be one of the most scenic in the country. This time it was very cold too.


The snow on the ground was not melting even in the sunshine…and the wind had caused drifts across some sidewalks. The highway crews had done an excellent job treating the highway and the access roads into the rest stops. There were some patches of white on the highway that I thought was blown snow at first…but it was salt! My car became more white than red!

The snow was melting at the one rest stop in Kentucky….making the picnic area soggy. It was still cold but warmer than then morning…and much appreciated.

I stayed at a hotel I’d stayed in previously. My room was in a wing that is probably slated for renovation soon. The chair at the desk/table looked like one we had taken to the landfill! I noticed that I had salt on the back hem of my jeans…must have touched the running board getting out of the car.

Lexington was very dark when I headed away from the hotel at 6:30 AM. I took no pictures until the 3 rest stops in Indiana.

I discovered that the Goshen Rest stop has a wetland behind the building…a bridge over the little stream. There were a lot of redwing black birds in the trees.

My route is very brief in Illinois. It stopped at the welcome center and then by buy gas.

I’m glad a made the stops in Illinois because I got stuck in traffic in St. Louis. There was some roadwork that closed some lanes at the exit to I44 just after the bridge over the Mississippi River. On the plus side – the traffic was stopped for long enough for me to take a picture of the arch. This is probably the only picture I will ever get from this vantage point!

There were the two rest stops along my route between St. Louis and Springfield. The day was a comfortable spring day…with puffy clouds. I noticed that the Route 66 stop had a ‘Diner’ sign over the vending machines with food items!

After unloading the car…my daughter directed me to the nearest car wash to get the salt off the car.

Our House – Touch up of Interior Painting

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The work to get our house ready to sell has begun. Last week, the painters arrived to touch up the interior painting. Prior to their arrival my husband and I had prepped the rooms they would be working in: cleared off surfaces, removed table/floor lamps, and removed smaller furniture. A recent donation and trip to the landfill had removed the old desk chairs…made for fewer pieces of small furniture to move out of the way.

In the calm before the painters were due, I noticed there was frost on the deck. I was surprised since the temperature was right at 32 degrees. I went out with my phone and macro lens. The ice crystals were melting…but were still interesting. I wondered what started the crystallization swirl seen at two magnifications in the last 2 pictures below.

The painters did as much as they could the first day….left equipment in one room and part of the plastic draping up. The job was complete after a second day of work!

One task down….more to come. The next one may be the touch up of the exterior paint; it will depend on warmer temperatures for a few days which could happen this week…or not.

24 Months in COVID-19 Pandemic

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24 months in COVID-19 pandemic and cases/hospitalizations are continuing to decline rapidly in most parts of the US. Most states, local governments, school districts, and businesses no longer have mask mandates. My personal choice is to still wear a mask when I am indoors in public places. A lot of other people are making the same choice where I do my grocery shopping. In the medical building where I went for an appointment recently, the ‘mask required’ signs were still up….and everyone was complying (it’s become the norm for medical settings).

I am traveling today – another road trip to Missouri and then Texas. Hand sanitizer and masks are in the car for rest stops. I am taking the food I will need for the 2-day drive to Missouri with me. An air purifier is going into the hotel room in Lexington, KY (turned on ‘high’ to filter the air for the duration of my night there)…and I have a supply of rapid test kits. I am using the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Level map to assess the higher risk areas along my route. There is a lot of yellow and orange in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Springfield, MO is green. The route between Springfield and Carrollton, TX is green with some yellow (and Carrollton is green). I’ll be gone for a little over two weeks and the trip back to Maryland will be less risky if the trend continues.

My rationale for continuing to wear a mask indoors is all about protecting the high-risk family members (older and immunosuppressed) I will be with in Missouri/Texas and when I return home. At the same time – my husband and I are in the process of house hunting…getting ready to move from Maryland to Missouri…not something we could have done last year at this time. Progress has been made and I hope the COVID-19 cases will continue to decline…in the US and around the world…that the pandemic will end.

Another Load to the Landfill

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My husband and I are taking carloads to the landfill (included electronics recycling and hazardous waste facilities in our county) – things we don’t want to move and cannot be donated (i.e. not in working condition). This past weekend the largest pieces were two broken office chairs. I’d already donated the ones that were still usable. There was also an old frame for collecting newspapers to be recycled in the days before single-stream curbside recycling….and when we subscribed to physical forms of newspapers. There were several broken light fixtures too. Some of these should have been jettisoned years ago!

There were two sets of old computer speakers with connections that don’t work for any of our current computers. Those went into electronic waste.

We went to the landfill on the one day of the month that hazardous waste was accepted. That part of our load included fluorescent bulbs, a ‘black light’ fluorescent from the 1970s (hadn’t been unwrapped since we moved to the east coast almost 40 years ago), a lead acid battery and a tablet with a swollen lithium battery.

Overall -we felt good about getting rid of another carload of ‘stuff’ and it was a pleasant drive on a sunny Saturday morning…not too cold. The next load – probably in April - will include a different kind of hazardous waste: old paint and yard/cleaning chemicals. There are also two very old desktop computers that will go into the electronics recycling.

Signs of Spring in our Yard

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The daffodils are coming up in our front flower beds. There are more of them every year…poking through the dried oak and day lily leaves from last season.

The miniature daffodils are always the first to bloom. Maybe their shortness is a benefit – keeping them closer to the warmth of the decaying mulch. I’ll dig a few of the bulbs up to take with us when we move just as I did from our previous house; my mother-in-law bought the original bulbs more than 30 years ago, not long before she died, and they have been very prolific…a nice reminder of her every spring.

The irises seem to be more numerous in the chaos garden than last year. Hopefully they’ll do well this year too. I might move them to where they are more easily seen from the house.

Several years ago, I planted some daffodil bulbs in front of our brush pile at the edge of the forest. Now they are behind the brush pile because I keep moving the pile further into the yard (reducing the turf area a little each year)! The bulbs were planted about a foot apart from each other; every year the clumps of daffodils get bigger.

So - there are the usual signs of spring appearing…always welcome. As I walked around I noticed lots of deer tracks; there is a muddy deer highway through our yard!

A house where we can ‘age in place’

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One of the big considerations for the house we are looking for in Springfield, Missouri is how well would it meet our needs into our 70s and beyond. We’d like to ‘age in place’ in a neighborhood with mixed ages of people rather than a ‘senior’ living development. Here are some things about the neighborhood and the house itself that we’re thinking more about than we have in previous house searches:

Walkability. We’d like to be able to easily walk for a mile or more within the neighborhood. Sidewalks and interesting trees/planting are a plus.

Stairs. Right now, both of us go up and down stairs very easily. I don’t like to carry anything heavy up and down stairs though (my knees start to hurt). It would be OK to have a house with stairs…but it should accommodate 1 floor living too (i.e. kitchen, laundry, bedroom, living area, garage, and going outdoors should require few or no steps).

Flooring. I like tile or wood for all rooms except bedrooms where I prefer wall-to-wall carpeting; carpeting is hard to keep clean over the long term. But – I am anticipating that area or entry rugs will be something that might need to be removed as we get older. My parents made the change in their house when they were in their late 80s.

Layout. All the doors need to be wide enough to accommodate a walker/small wheelchair. In newer houses this is not a problem, but older ones sometimes have narrower doorways. If we become enthusiastic about an older house, we’ll measure the doors!

Location. The house needs to be convenient enough to where my daughter lives….but not too close; within a 30 minute drive sounds about right. Medical facilities should be within 20 minutes or less…ideally in the same direction as our daughter. The area needs to be one that has good mail and delivery service too.

Energy efficiency. We want to protect ourselves from rising energy costs so the house needs to have energy efficient features when we buy it and we might update some appliances (make the house all electric) and then add solar panels….maybe battery storage.

Landscaping. In our early years in the house, creating minimal maintenance landscaping would be our goal. Sometimes home owner associations have some limitations; if they were too restrictive, hopefully they could be changed.

Astronomy. My husband’s objective is to do most of his amateur astronomy from our backyard. If enough sky is visible with our Springfield home purchase, he will be able to enjoy his hobby for many years to come…from the comfort of home.

As I look at houses on the market and in our price range in Springfield, there are houses that will meet our ‘aging in place’ house hunting criteria! I am excited to tour some houses in mid-March when I am in Springfield!

30 years ago – March 1992

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What was happening in my life 30 years ago (March 1992)?

As I look back through my notes from the time – I saw several items that are still part of our lives:

  • A Nordic Track. It was new then and I was using it daily. It is still down in our basement, but it’s been a long time since we used it last; it will be jettisoned before we move.

  • Curbside recycling was new, and I was already thinking about how to reduce trash…doing a small amount of composting. Now all the recycling goes into one bin and more things are accepted; it is not as clear that all the items avoid the landfill though.

  • My husband and I had created separate offices because both of us had started doing some work at home (we had progressed from a 1 PC family to 2 PCs!). In 1992, floppy disks were the primary mode of data transfer for us – no internet connection or World Wide Web yet.  We were both using email from our employers (dial up connection). The work that we did at home was totally on the PCs (presentation development, document development). Toward the end of the month, we were talking about getting a laser printer. We still have two offices - each have multiple (and more functional) devices and a lot of what we do is network enabled.

  • In a manager training, I became aware that there was a growing problem with employees using swear words/foul language…and that the younger employees were more OK with it than the older ones. The company was concerned that it was a growing issue…and thus the training. My personal thought was to stick to civil language…and was uncomfortable when foul language was used.  I’m still that way; the coarse language (that seems to have entered the mainstream in the past 5 years) is stressful and I find myself looking at ways to stay informed…but not hear the language being used.

  • And the miniature daffodils planted in our yard by my mother-in-law before she died were coming up. I dug up some of the bulbs before we moved to our present house to take with us…planted them in a front flower bed…and they are coming up again this spring.

There was a lot going on with our family. Our 2-year-old daughter’s favorite phrase was “I don’t want to.” She had finally made the transition from her crib to a twin sized bed, and she enjoyed a kite festival at the Washington Monument. My husband finally got a diagnosis of why his back had been so painful for over a decade (and some exercises that began to help). My 80-year-old grandmother was cooking huge meals for the birthdays in March (that I missed since I was in Maryland rather than Texas…which probably was a good thing with my need to lose weight)! Both of my parents were still working. One of my sisters was pregnant with her second child, another was enjoying her ceramic hobby, and the youngest was surviving a breakup with her boyfriend.  

Overall – March 1992 was a month at home…busy but not as overwhelming as the months before or after!

Icy Morning

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I was surprised when I looked at the forest behind our house one morning: the forecast was for the temperature to be above freezing overnight and into the morning but there was ice accumulating on the trees! I took some pictures: The sycamore

The red maple

The pines

The tulip poplar

I went downstairs to check the thermometer we have measuring the temperature on our deck – taking some pictures of the azalea near our front porch (always some good color in ice and snow) as I got the bottom of the stairs.

The thermometer was reporting 35.5 degrees Fahrenheit…so the forecast was correct, but the rain was cold enough to freeze to the branches! It was a good morning to be indoors and enjoy the icy scene. By the afternoon the ice was completely gone, and the sun came out.

Ten Little Celebrations – February 2022

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The little things that brightened the February days…..

Rose bud in the kitchen window. I was happy that the small plant I bought for Valentines has a new bud opening before the end of the month…celebrating some color in winter.

New battery installed in my laptop. The flurry of activity to fix a problem…what a relief (and celebration) when it was done!

Winter Hike. A celebration of the outdoors in winter…and a return to a pre-pandemic activity.

Deciding to move and getting started. We are off to a relatively slow start…but it’s an exciting prospect…celebrating the decision!

Finding my husband’s favorite sausage again. Our grocery store did not have many empty places…but the sausage was one of them. Now it seems that the problem has been at least partially resolved and we are celebrating finding it again.

A sunny day from my office window (very cold outside). Celebrating winter from inside a warm house!

Frost patterns – feathers, flowers, flakes. The frost patterns have been my ‘project’ this February and I’ve celebrated the variety of the crystals that form.

Leftovers. I celebrate great meals that are easy – leftovers! All the more complex dishes I cook these days are good for more than one meal!

A warmer day. When we have a lot days in the teens and 20s….I celebrate a day in the 50s and 60s!

Finding Wick Fowler chili mix at a local grocery. For a while over the past few years, we couldn’t find our favorite chili seasonings in our grocery store - so we started ordering it and having it shipped to us. After a mix up in a recent order, we looked again at the grocery store, and they had it! Celebrating finding it locally!

Unique Aspects of Days – February 2022

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Snow on turkey tails. I always look for turkey tails/shelf fungus when I am hiking…and enjoy photographing them. This month was my first time to photograph them with snow!

Finding some new office tools – Microsoft PowerToys. My office environment is well established so it is very unusual for me to look for new tools and unique for me to find more than one new tool that makes what I do easier. Microsoft PowerTools was a great find. The tools I am using frequently now are Image resize and Power rename.

Miniature potted rose for Valentines. I was thinking of potted tulips or hyacinths when I went shopping (not realizing that it was too early for both of them)…but found a miniature rose instead. It’s a unique purchase and my husband and I are enjoying it in our kitchen window. It already has a new bud opening. I’ll plant it outside after the last frost.

Frost crystals. I have been thrilled to discover how many kinds of frost crystals there are. At some point they will become familiar to me, but February 2022 is my first concentrated effort to look at them frequently enough to see the variations!

People smoking in the grocery store parking garage. Not all unique experiences are positive. As I came out of the grocery store one morning, there were two separate people standing near their cars smoking and working on the phones. They were on the side of the garage closest to the store – maybe using the store’s Wi-Fi or maybe they were waiting for someone that was shopping. I could smell the smoke from one of them as I walked to my car and loaded my groceries even though I was still wearing my mask! It reminded me of years ago when people smoked around the entrances to office buildings, but isn’t something I’ve experienced in recent years…and it hasn’t happen on subsequent shopping trips. I glad it was a unique experience for 2022 (so far).

Thinking about our previous houses…and the next one

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I am thinking about the houses my husband and I have lived in during our almost 50 years of marriage. The first one was in Plano, Texas – purchased about 5 years after we got married. It had almost no insulation and single pane windows…4 bedrooms, 2 baths, kitchen/dining, living room and 2 car garage. It was all electric. It was brick and siding; I painted the siding and under the eaves (and learned that I never wanted to do that again!). The hot water heater was in the garage and was the only item we had to replace in our 5 years in the house.

The second house was in Springfield, Virginia – the result of our both getting career advancing jobs in the area and the organizations paid for the long-distance move. We moved in July and the air conditioner broke down about 2 weeks afterwards. The house had been built in the 1950 but insulation and storm/double paned windows had been added. It was our first house with a basement – and that was where the washer/dryer hook ups were. It had 4 bedrooms (one in the basement), 2 bathrooms, kitchen/dining, dining/living, den in basement, and a carport. It had a gas furnance, water heater and stove. I was thrilled to have big trees in the yard – oak and beech so large a person could not reach around them! I trimmed the boxwood in November … made boxwood wreaths with the trimmings. There was a dogwood that grew beside the patio. We had the roof done and the siding painted during our three years in the house.

The next move was across the Potomac into Maryland because my husband’s commute had become painfully long from Virginia his new job in Baltimore. The house was newer…built with good insulation and double paned windows. It was a Colonial with 4 bedrooms and 2 baths upstairs; living/dining, half bath, kitchen/breakfast area, and den on the first floor; finished room downstairs for an office; and a 2-car garage. It was our first house with a deck rather a patio. It took longer to get into the house after we bought it since the people selling it were buying a house and there were delays. We rented an apartment for about 6 months; that difficulty clouded the 7 years we spent in the house. We moved to out of it before it was sold.

Our fourth house is the one we are in now – for over 27 years. The house was only about 3 years old when we bought it…a Colonial again. It has 4 bedrooms, 2 baths and a loft upstairs; living/dining, office, half bath, kitchen/breakfast area, laundry room, and den on the first floor; a single large finished room and bathroom in the walkout basement; 2 car garage; large deck with part being roofed/screened. I love the view of the forest behind the house from my office window.

And now – we are in the beginning stage of planning for a second long distance move and a fifth house. This time the rationale is to live closer to our daughter/son-in-law (so moving from Maryland to Missouri). We are getting started this week: getting an estimate for some house painting, having a charity pick up a porch full of small furniture/household items we no longer need, and taking a carload of stuff to the county electronics and metal recycle. The things I want in my next house are a mix of what I’ve had in my previous houses:

  • All electric (like my first house) or a path to get there

  • Big trees (like my second and fourth house)

  • Window over the sink (like all four houses)

  • A 2-car garage (like three of the four houses)

  • Being able to live on one floor (like my first house)

  • Double paned windows and good insulation (like the last two houses)

  • A laundry room on the same floor as the bedrooms (like the first house)

  • A screened deck (like current house) or a garden room

  • A good view from my office window (like current house)

  • High speed internet (like current house)

There are some new things we are looking for this time too:

  • Being able to do astronomy from the backyard

  • Roof aligned and unshaded enough for solar panels

  • Within a 30 minute or less drive from our daughter

There will be a lot more about this project over the next few months!

Two Frosts

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I watched the forecast for some cold morning temperatures and put a red glass plate out on the deck the night before the temperature for the next morning was forecast for 23 degrees. The idea was to get some frost accumulation on the glass for some macro photography. It worked - even thought the crystals were relatively small. One of my first attempts was an almost round structure…at two different magnifications.

Then I surveyed the rest of the plate and noticed crystals like feathers, spikes that branched off in all directions, other round collections of crystals that looked like a splash or explosion.

I couldn’t resist taking some pictures of the crystals on the deck railing. They were small; the pictures below are with my macro lens and then with my phone digitally magnifying that 8x!

The next morning was even colder – 17 degrees. At first, I thought there was no frost at all on the plate but when I looks more closely there were some very small areas of crystals. I immediately thought the crystals looked like small organisms in water (rather than ice crystals).

Then I spotted one that looked like a butterfly on a flower with its wings folded. The mind jumps to ‘looks like’ type thinking!

A little less magnification and the sheets of ice with spikes (I imaged cactus) are interspersed with the smaller organism-looking structures.

The temperature and dew point probably make a big different in the type of frost crystals that form. Photographing them has become my favorite February project! So far – each day has been unique.

Savoring February

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February is a month to be at home, not traveling during the cold weather…enjoying sunrise through a window, maybe opening the front door and taking a quick picture. The nights are still long enough that it doesn’t require getting up early to see the sunrise; the challenge is to look at the right time; I like to skew early in the sunrise to get the pinks rather than the later orange.

February is also a month to remember my grandmothers. They were both born in February and lived long enough for me to know them well. One lived until I was in my 30s; the other almost twenty more years. They were very different personalities and had been shaped by their lives. One was my only grandparent to graduate from high school; she had married after high school and had 9 children; her husband had owned grain elevators/mills; she had taken over running the business about the time I was born when my grandfather has an extended illness. My other grandmother told her granddaughters that her favorite subject in school was arithmetic; she married at 16 and had her only child at 19;  she and my grandfather farmed until a drought forced them into town shortly after I was born; the health challenges she had during her 20s and 30s could have been a disaster but she stayed healthy for the rest of her life…living until a few months shy of her 99th birthday; she would have been 110 this year.

Everyone develops their ideas for living by observing the adults they are around early in life…and then more selectively as we grow older. I am realizing how fortunate my life has been to have both grandmothers as I was growing up and then after I was an adult too. The final lessons from them were about growing old gracefully…rolling with what aging brings and still finding joy in living.

Frost Flakes

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Sometimes the frost forms flatter than the frost flowers that I posted about earlier this month. They patterns take on more the appearance of flakes with much smaller crystals. I photographed some of the frost flakes that had formed on the vertical sides of our recycle bin when it was out by the curb waiting for the truck.

At first, I though the ice was along scratches in the plastic…then decided that it was simply the way the frost formed on the very smooth plastic surface. If it had formed in the way it does on horizonal surfaces, it would not have adhered well enough to stay attached.

It also occurred to me that the blue color of the bin enhances the fell of winter temperatures and ice!

30 years ago – February 1992

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30 years ago – in February 1992 – it was a big month for milestones.

My paternal grandmother celebrated her 80th birthday. My mother had arranged a week-long celebration with various relatives appearing throughout the week, my daughter and I were there for the duration. My daughter had done enough airplane travel in her 2.5 years that getting from Maryland to Texas was uneventful, but the week was full of new experiences and lots of desserts; she and her cousin of similar age (the two great-grandchildren) were a pleasant distraction even when they were overly excited!  We stayed with one of my sisters for several nights because my parent’s house was needed for other relatives on those nights and my daughter discovered the fun of bunk beds (when we got home, she told her dad that she wanted bunk beds in her room). One of the enduring gifts from that birthday was a pink rose bush that a nephew and his wife brought; it is blooming profusely (in season…picture from last fall) beside my parent’s garage always reminding us of my grandmother and the couple that purchased it.

Another milestone was my daughter being accepted into the Montessori School I had selected as my first choice for her in the fall. It turned out to be a very positive experience for her over the next 3 years of pre-school and kindergarten…and was the last educational decision I made for her without her input!

Our grand piano was delivered in February 1992. It has been the largest part of our living room furniture since then! I took some pictures of it recently. Only the nicks in the legs from the vacuum cleaner give an indication of its age. It’s had an annual visit from the same piano tuner for almost the entire time!

Overlaid on those milestones – my daughter had a terrible cold and ear infection after we returned from Texas! Between our daughter and 2 careers there were frequent unexpected events; it was often a challenge to not feel overwhelmed – but there were always times to savor along the way too.

Foggy Forest

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One morning it was warm enough to be foggy and wet in the forest rather than frosty and snowy. The fog softened the view from my office window. It’s a view of winter that could also be early spring. But I know it’s not early spring in February; this day is a brief respite from mornings below freezing. The taller trees in the background are tulip poplars. The tree to the right in front of them with the darker trunk is a red maple. The branches even more in the foreground on the left is a sycamore.

Zooming in on the sycamore….the droplets of water condensed from the fog are evident on the small branches. The wet branches are more colorful when they are wet; when they are dry the cracking, curling bark is brown or grey and the smooth parts are white. In the wet, it is easier to see that there are chloroplasts in the smooth parts….the tree can make sugars even in winter!

Frost Flowers on our Deck

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One of my favorite winter macro photo opportunities happens on very cold mornings…when the humidity is high enough to create frost flowers. I get my phone set up with my clip-on lens and bundle up – this time the location was only a few steps from the house onto our deck. It was my first time with the new lens my husband got for me in December that allows more room to work (i.e. I don’t have to be as close to the subject as with my older clip-on lens).

I found myself taking themed series:

What do the crystals look like around the knot holes on the deck railing? I liked the textures of the knots overlaid with the frost flowers.

How do the crystals change when they go over an edge? The crystals seemed to get almost fuzzy…or flattened.

Where are the largest crystals? The largest crystals seem to form around a center…on a flat surface…making ‘frost flowers’. The ones below were on the cover of our gas grill; the weave of the fabric provides a size comparison.

I’m going to watch the weather forecast…see if I can predict when a good frost flower morning will occur…put out a glass plate the night before…and then photograph the frost flowers that form on a very smooth surface. I photographed some frost on the windshield of my car back in December 2011 (below)…would like to use my improved equipment (and skill) in a similar situation!

Hawk on Deck

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I was enjoying the snow flurries as I looked out my office window in late January when I heard a commotion below my window on our deck. I moved closer to the window to see what it was. A hawk was perched on the deck railing. I guessed that it had swooped down onto the deck – maybe for a meal of junco or mourning dove – but whatever the intended prey was, the hawk was not successful. It was looking all around the narrow strip of grassy yards and into the forest recovering from the failure and seeking a new target. Note: There are several pictures where the dark nictitating membrane is closed over the eye.

And then the bird flew off toward the forest. I used the picture id feature of the Merlin app to confirm my initial ID: red-shouldered hawk.