A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall...

Since I was just scoping out tickets for Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson (and John "Don't Call Me Cougar" Mellencamp), I figured the title was fitting. And the fact of the matter is, when it rains here, it rains. None of this pansy "I might rain, I might not rain" Seattle gray--the rain in the Mid-Atlantic is serious--like inches in an hour serious! Audible rain serious! Seattle rain is quiet, peaceful, like a cold wet blanket; here the rain just seems angry and content to wash away whatever foul lawn chemicals (and soil) stand in its way. Granted, the on-again/off-again nature of the storms has been keeping everything a very lush green, but sometimes it feels like everything is completely saturated and it just won't stop.

We have been dutifully tending to our fledgling plants, trying to nurture them in sheltered surroundings before sending them out to the Lower 40 where they'll be subjected to all manner of yard beasts. But keeping peat pots intact with the torrential rainfall has been impossible. A week ago, we got such heavy rain, I wasn't sure we'd need to water the garden again all summer. But sure enough, by the end of this week, the pepper pots were dry and the young herbs looked thirsty, so we pulled out the hose. Not 36 hrs. later, we're back in the drowning rat phase, with the yard again a pond and the drip line a not-so-subtle reminder that the gutters are clogged with all that oak detritus. And having gone from high 80s to low 50s in less than 24 hours, the peppers were drained of their standing water and brought back inside to spend a few more nights living large in the spare bedroom. Of course this means the arugula is hanging on and the lettuces are really quite happy (outside of the abuse they take at the hands of the gigantic raindrops...powered by gravity), so we've been feasting on a steady diet of home-grown greens. Not a bad thing at all.

Catching Up

Ahhhhhhh--breathing a sigh of relief after a marathon semester. Judging by the Simpler Times in the yard hole (and the wayward one in with the lettuces) this morning, I think we did the celebration some justice.

That aside, I finally have some time to sit down and pen a post. The lack of writing certainly hasn't been for lack of things to write about--just non-stop.

I made my first trip to western VA last weekend--it wasn't exactly vacation, but I could see it being a nice place to be for vacation. The purpose of the trip was to electroshock some darters and small silver jobs (Notropis spp., but SSJ's will do, unless you're good at counting pharyngeal teeth after a half-dozen beers). We surveyed a bunch of different rivers and I was amazed by the diversity of freshwater fishes in the Southern Appalachians (perhaps the most diverse native freshwater fish fauna in North America). Highlights included the margined madtom (Noturus insignis), the fantail darter (Etheostoma flabellare), and everyone's favorite: the candy darter, (Etheostoma osburni), with colors to rival those of most reef fishes. Another cool find (besides a lot of rural road-kill, including a sizable snapping turtle) was a hellbender. I had no idea what this was before we caught one, but according to the Hellbender Homepage: "Hellbenders (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis) are extremely large, completely aquatic salamanders native to the eastern United States. The largest hellbender ever recorded was nearly 21/2 ft. long." Ours was closer to 1 foot than 2.5, but it was still a really impressive salamander...kind of prehistoric looking.

While we were out in that part of the world, we stayed at the UVA Mountain Lake Biological Station, which is my favorite kind of field outpost--a beautiful and peaceful location, with a few dedicated souls studying all sorts of ecology. I was pleased to strike up a conversation with a nice dude studying dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) and I learned a ton from our 15-minute chat.

There was another highlight to the trip (one I will, no doubt, be ridiculed for mentioning): the proximity to the resort where Dirty Dancing was filmed! How many times did I say "Nobody puts Baby in a corner..." and "Uh, I carried a watermelon?..." while I was there??? Too many to count, but I loved that "Kellerman's" was a stones throw away! Haha!


Beyond excursions, we've been watching all the trees flower and leaf out and are continually amazed by how much crap falls from the local oaks! Apparently, they spew leaves in the fall--lots of leaves--and catkins in the spring--lots of catkins. This makes for just a wee bit of pollinated mayhem in the yard! Thankfully, we seem to get these amazing thunderstorms every few days, which knock most of the evil yellow stuff out of the air--achoooo--good for the allergy sufferers, not so great for the canine, who has developed a major aversion to such meteorological events! At last try, we couldn't even get a rawhide treat to calm her nerves. Poor girl.


On the homefront, a day of freedom from the books, meant some major devotion to the garden. Our seedlings had long outgrown their starter flats, so I had to transplant everything into larger pots for the final few weeks before they get put into the ground--damn, we over-planted! I think fitting 40+ tomato plants (of 6 varieties), 44+ pepper plants (of 8 varieties) plus all the other stuff we have into the 72 sq. ft of garden we have set aside is going to be a challenge! Can you say annex?


We were able to harvest the first of the lettuces and arugula today! The gardener-in-chief braved a torrential downpour to put some food on our table--carefully selecting the best looking leafy green things for our dinner salad. It was delicious! Through the miracles of photosynthesis, we should be filling our salad bowl with more than just leafy greens in a few months...the peas are looking good enough that it could be just a few weeks before we steal some of those from the vines!

More signs of summer...stolen bases and Yankees losses!

In case the 90 degree weather isn't enough of a clue, summer is here (at least momentarily) and life is good for Red Sox fans (at least momentarily). Keeping us interested was Jacoby Ellsbury who managed to steal home and remind us that baseball isn't just a bunch of overpaid, steroid-addicted guys standing around a field doing nothing. Go Sox! You can see Ellsbury's fantastic play at MLB.com.

Signs of Spring

With all the trees leafing and budding out and the song birds serenading us each morning, signs of spring are everywhere. We're also delighted to see the first signs of life in our gardens (and no, they aren't weeds). Save for the pollen, this is one of my favorite times of the year--everything is coming into its own and vernal green has to be one of the most pleasing colors in the palette!


I decided to indulge my interest in spring blooms by dragging a few dudes and the dog around the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC for a look at the cherry blossoms. When I was in 6th grade, we were supposed to take a family vacation to DC to get the kids some civic education and see the cherry blossoms. As luck would have it, I inconveniently contracted chicken pox three days prior to our planned departure and that was the end of that vacation. My folks did dutifully get us to the Nation's Capital eventually, but not during cherry blossom season, so I guess I had to experience it to cross it off the life list (granted, I'm sure it was more my mom's addition than mine, at age 12). At any rate, we braved the apres work crowds and foreign tourists and dodged high-tide-induced puddles along the pathway on Friday evening to play tourist ourselves and see some spectacular blossoms.

It really was quite impressive to see so many cherry blooms at one time. And there was no shortage of cameras in the area as well. The corner of the lake by the FDR Memorial is always one of my favorites, being just a little bit more peaceful than the thoroughfare that is the Tidal Basin pathway, and the trees in that area did not disappoint--being slightly sheltered from the stormy breezes, I was able to duck off the path long enough to snap some close-up photos and to feel like I wasn't just on the tourist conveyor belt ("Look kids, Big Ben...").

Back on the home-front, the recent rains combined with this weekend's warm weather have the early garden plants pretty happy. The herbs especially have taken off, cilantro going from barely identifiable sprouts to seedlings in less than 36 hours and the mint looking like mojitos are only a few weeks off!

Our flats of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, and many more veggies and flowers are also doing well, with some of the cukes outgrowing the starter packs already! We decided to use tough love on a small batch of scarlet runner beans (a bit on the early side for beans), and they seem to be doing great in their porch-side planter. Upon reading that they would grow to 20', a towering trellis was rendered for them, now occupying a fairly substantial portion of the back deck.


The first peas (sweet peas for flowers and sugar snap peas for eating) have popped their little heads up and seem to be pretty happy.

We awoke this morning to find that the little birdie (purple finch) who built her nest in the shrub right by our front window now has a nest full of hatchlings to deal with. Gone are the baby-blue eggs and in their place are a bunch of fluffy little chicks. We can't really tell what they look like because there's so much fluff.

Signs of spring are popping up all over. With any luck, we'll have plenty of delicious veggies this summer, as long as we can keep the bunnies and voles at bay.

In the South, Winter Ends Abruptly

What a difference a few days make. It was 19 degrees (F) and snowy three days ago and today we were into the shorts zone (for Seattleites this seems to occur when you cross the 58 degree mark). I guess the difference between March snow at 37 degrees latitude and March snow at 47 degrees latitude is that here, we're having spring this weekend and up north they're relegated to 4 more months of winter. Bummer dude. While it all sounds good now, I'm sure I'll be bitching in mid-July when I'm near withering and on the coast of Maine it's a pleasant 78 and breezy!

Anyway, the Salty One and I took the opportunity to watch the sunset and chase some pine cones in the water (I didn't find the ball in the car until my second look). Once the ball was found, she engaged in some very good sand-ball wrangling/pouncing. I'm pretty sure she liked the sunset too.

And, spring may have officially sprung--I just walked out on the deck and heard some Spring Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer) filling the nighttime stillness with their sweet chirps.

Photo: USGS, http://cars.er.usgs.gov/herps/Frogs_and_Toads/P_crucifer/p_crucifer.htm

Cephalopod antics

I couldn't resist posting this video link I got from a friend. Truly amusing and clever!



According to a Video Chump I know, this was up for an Academy Award for animated short.

Snow Day

It's been a while since I've had an honest-to-goodness snow day. Yeah, it snowed on the Olympic Peninsula and in Seattle, but rarely would I get a snow day out of it. Typically, my employer would let those who anticipated having a hard time getting home leave work, but we were told we could make up the time on our weekends or in the evening or we could work from home--not exactly the liberating, "Get Out of Jail Free" snow days of my New England youth! But as luck would have it, all the hullabaloo and stocking up of batteries, water, and toilet paper by the locals was finally not for naught.


After listening to various forms of wintry mix strike the windows for the better part of the evening, the lights flickered a few times, an exploding transformer lit up the night sky, and that was that--we were cold and in the dark with enough conflicting scents from all the candles I've squirreled away over the years to make us nauseous. Once the power kicked on in the wee hours of the morning, I fired up my laptop with bleary eyes and read that school was closed! Wooohooo! Better yet, I dodged an exam! How great is that? Okay, I still have to take it, but 4 more days to prepare is a pretty nice snow day bonus! I tried to have a lazy morning, but my furry companion (who did a great job keeping me warm during our 6.5 hours without power) was anxious to get the party started.

Dogs are fantastic fun in the snow! Ours is no exception--she loves it and went on a tear the second I let her out the door. I especially like they way she'll leap at a snow ball and demolish it with her snout in mid-air. I tried to clear some of the downed branches from the yard, but the snow dog just assumed I was trying to play with her, biting at the sticks and ripping them to shreds before I could get them to the brush pile. We didn't get quite enough snow for her to do her patented snow tunneling move, which is my favorite, but I'm thinking she liked it all the same and was thrilled to run around all the neighbors' yards and get icicles on her muzzle as she was doing it!


P.S. NASA collected a very cool MODIS image of the recent snowfall along the East Coast. Impressive!