The females are still pretty bland but will get a fair amount of a yellow color.


The males, on the other hand, are beginning to acquire a flush of gold around the neck, and that will spread and deepen to cover most of the body in a couple of months.


We’re shown to be in the southernmost part of the year-round range; our goldfinches stay with us all year around. The nice thing about them is that they’re fairly common all over the US, so comparisons can be made.

One day my mother, in Fairhope, AL, went on and on about how theirs demand special thistle food, won’t eat unless the birdfeeder is just so, and so forth and so on. I said, well, *Ours* eat anything.

Long Pause. Then:

“Well. Yours are just vulgar, rural goldfinches.”

Hers, on the other hand, leave her to lay their eggs elsewhere, despite all her pampering.

UPDATE: Deadbeat Mothers: Look at the bottom of this link. Sometimes the females lay their eggs, then go off to mate with another male, leaving the previous dad to take care of the kids. Humans could learn a thing or two.

UPDATE 2: (Very fast realization here) Let me quickly add, before I receive a small tactical nuke in the mail, that “deadbeat mothers” has NOTHING to do with my own!

20 seconds:
“Take bets on” —-> something to eat

T-bone steak.

Around 2000, Paul J. Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with Rowland and Molina on ozone depletion, suggested that a new Epoch had begun in Earth’s history, tentatively sometime around the advent of the Industrial Revolution. He recommended naming this most recent period of history the “Anthropocene Epoch”.

There have been valid semantic objections to this; earth historical divisions are usually marked by fossil boundaries determined by extinction periods, and Crutzen’s tentative suggestion that the Anthropocene begins in the late 1700s doesn’t conform with this (see here for the argument). Others have suggested placing the dating of this Epoch or, preferably Age, 10,000 or even 100,000 years ago.

If you ever had a geology or earth science course you might have had to memorize all the Eras, Periods, and Epochs; maybe even the Ages (and in that order), of earth history. Well I’m not going to make you memorize these names, but here’s where the Anthropocene would fit into the current scheme of things, whether as an Epoch within the Quaternary and after the Holocene, or as an Age within the Holocene.


I’ve added a few eye-catching events to the Cenozoic (Recent) Era which began 65 million years ago when a huge, 5-10 mile diameter asteroid struck the earth off the Yucatan and killed off the dinosaurs. This is sometimes called the Fifth Great Extinction event. The Cenozoic is the last, and shortest of the three eras that mark the evolution of complex multicellular organisms.

The Cenozoic Era and climate changes occurring within it, relatively close to our own present, is of interest to climatologists and geologists because it increasingly resembles our own in terms of the positions of the continents and tectonic plates. The Earth would have been easily recognizable from space 65 million years ago. Nonetheless a number of climate influencing tectonic shifts still hadn’t occurred and trying to draw close climate parallels between cause and effect may not be valid.

The Rockies and Himalayas, which probably influenced a large cooling trend globally would only begin to form 40 million years later as the California and India plates collided with their respective continents. The climate prior to that point was globally warm.

The periodic Ice Ages, occurring every 100,000 years or so punctuated by 10,000 or so years of warm interglacials, didn’t begin in earnest until the Pleistocene Epoch, 2 million years ago.

A number of extinction periods have occurred within the last 65 million years, although not included in the Great Five. An Eocene extinction event occurred 55 million years ago, associated with a spike in carbon dioxide levels and a warming of 5-8 degrees C over a period of just a few thousand years. This is known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. It is thought that a change in ocean current and upwelling patterns might have been responsible for the CO2 spike and subsequent warming.

Although the fine positions of the continents were certainly not the same as today, the parallels in global warming and CO2 spike are abundantly clear, though the causes 55 million years ago and now may not be the same. There is one very pertinant difference - the 2-5 deg C increase in temperature predicted over this century is happening in a mere 100 years, rather than the nonetheless tiny short span of thousands of years that the PETM apparently occurred. If you’ve been paying attention and have caught the recent references to the Global Conveyer Belt (more properly, thermohaline circulation) you have an idea why this is of some importance.

It’s for this reason that the current period of time, along with its proposed name, is often referred to as the Sixth Great Extinction, as proposed by E.O. Wilson and others. The fact of climate change repeatedly occurring over the earth’s history isn’t a relevant rebuttal to the current set of changes. The current changes are occurring over a mere century. Even ignoring the massive direct effects on humans, the much more serious consequences to ecosystems that can’t cope with these rapid changes lead to the recognition that something unprecedented is taking place, and largely if not entirely at the hand of the human species.

From Global Change and the Earth System, there’s this composite of human activities that have effects on the global climate.

The first five panels are readily understandable; the first three document the increase in greenhouse gases; the fifth one the increase in global temperature. The last six may be new to you, but are also easily understandable and indicative of massive changes in ecosystem changes and land use, with its habitat destruction and replacement by monocultures.

Oddly, the one panel that should be there but isn’t is the human population growth since the late 1700s, an increase to now more than 6 billion hungry, greedy, and often desperate people.

It’s not at all hard to see how some see an Anthropocene Epoch or Age occurring and the final panel at the bottom shows why a large number of biologists and paleontologists see this time as the Sixth Major Extinction.

One of the elements of strategy for preparedness is that you don’t actually *have* to squat in your radioactive basement eating your campmoor freezedried stew. With the luxury of foresight you can squat in your radioactive basement enjoying delicious pasta.

Both Glenn and I like pasta. I tried years ago to make some with a rolling pin and knife and decided that not only was it not worthwhile but it wasn’t the image we wanted . The grace of age has changed things since and I got a pasta roller. I spent some time yesterday afternoon playing around with it. It’s actually quite a lot of fun - almost as much as hanging up laundry.

Here’s my first attempt. The dough is very simple - just flour and water, eggs if you want. I used bread flour but durum would probably be better. Here I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of rolling the dough repeatedly through the wringer - I didn’t realize you were supposed to fold it over in-between rolls, so the spaghetti attachment gave a rather thick, gross-looking product. Yuck! Looks like something you’d pull out of a shot mammal.

Then I learned that it was best to feed the folded over dough *fold* first. Things are getting better, but I was still too timid to really roll it out thin, so these too are rather thick.

Now we’re cookin'. I actually rolled it out to a setting of “5”, whatever that is, and then fed it through the cutter. Not bad. I was also trying to use too much dough at one time.

Noodles!

UPDATE: Continued practice this morning, on a wet rainy day, what else is there to do? Here’s two of three drying cookie sheets made from 2 cups of flour. Glenn actually participated! We got it up to thinness setting 7 (of 9); at 8 it starts to tear. I learned that a period of drying of the sheets is important before shredding. The beer is not essential.


The flour mix this time was 1 cup bread flour, 1 cup masada corn flour, and black pepper, just for fun.

The Last Days of the Ocean

From Mother Jones I ran across this 12-page article. The piece is written by Julia Whitty,who last year accompanied the crew of the Oceanus of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on a sampling expedition.

(Parenthetically, I find it very odd that the excellent site Mother Jones isn’t more often a source for the blogosphere. Strange.)

It’s a very good piece. I tutor two courses in Marine Science a couple or three times a year, so I considered myself fairly well informed, but there are some items in this article that stunned me. And it pulls together in one piece a substantial amount of information.
Among the things I either knew or learned:

Freshwater addition to the North Atlantic, resulting in a gradual slowdown of the thermohaline cycle, the North Atlantic Conveyer Belt. This is one of John Schellnhuber’s (and others) 12 hot spots for abrupt climate change, and has been substantially in the news recently. I was aware of these entities such as the Sahara, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, ENSO, and so forth, but hadn’t conceived of them as “hot spots”.

Industrial fishing has become so pervasive as to be extremely inefficient. 90% of the populations of large fish species are estimated to be gone (more than a billion people depend almost exclusively on seafood). What remains is drastically undersized. This is something so extraordinary, and yet little known. The analogy of small fishers becoming noncompetitive and overtaken by industrial fishing which denudes and devastates is close to that of small farmers and large agribusiness. The analogy does not fail in the effects on the native ecosystems, either.

Tons of mercury continue to enter the oceans, especially from continental rivers, such as the Mississippi. Nitrogen wastes from agriculture, acting as fertilizer, also enter the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in an ever-increasingly large annual dead zone of hypoxia. Watersheds, anyone?

Vertebrates and invertebrates alike in coastal areas develop anomalous sexual and other organs, apparently from the vast quantities of pharmaceuticals entering the oceans through sewage. Apparently we excrete them. I was vaguely aware of this, and I think Phila at Bouphonia has written several times about things like this. Best case scenario - and it may already be happening as evidenced by declining sperm counts in Europe - when it starts happening to people, they’ll start paying attention. Hit them in the gonads, that’s what I say.

Coral reefs everywhere are in danger of extinction, either through destructive fishing methods, ocean temperature and pH increases, or various diseases not previously seen. This is something I’ve followed: coral reefs, mangrove forests, and salt marshes are so intrical to animal nurseries and filtering from continental watersheds (not to mention protection from hurricanes) that these threats should be setting alarm bells ringing everywhere.

Most outrageously, these and other threats are well-known, and recommendations have been made to attempt to reverse them. Political and corporate interests prevent these recommendations from being carried out. The entry of nitrogenous fertilizer entering the Gulf of Mexico through watersheds into the Mississippi is a great example of this; something that could be reversed, but for the recalcitrance of states and corporations. In other words, the political will is not there. At least here in the US, and through what little ethical influence the US has left on the rest of the world, I think we know why *that* is.

While it’s a fascinating article, you might want to wait until you’re in a suitable frame of mind before reading it.

To Rexroths Daughter and other kind folk who in their comments to a multifunctional post had nice words about the bowl.

I too would like to see more of what I’ve made. It really has been 25 years since I took classes to have easy access to clay, glazes, advice, and kilns. Over these many years most of the stuff I originally kept has been given away. Those that still survive I suppose might be classified as culch: though scattered about as decoration or cha chas they are mostly potentially functional pieces like canaster sets that are awaiting their true mission in life if only to store pencils or to serve as vases. But I do have a few pieces left that might be worth photographing, having survived into the era of cheap images. There is an often-used casserole, a large mixing bowl, a few art pots and a several failed pieces that were converted during their birth into bonsi vessels.

When I learned to throw, Ceramics Monthly was heavy into what was then called the ‘Funk vs Functional’ dicotomy. I have no idea if or how any of these movements or their progeny have evolved or what their descendents might be called today. At the time I thought Funk was silly and an example of how civilization comes to support nonproductive citizens. But I do admit to being heavily influenced by one of its lineages. I do not remember the artist’s name, but saw his work at Gumps in San Fransisco around 1978 and was blown away. Imagine ‘V’ shaped bowls with 16-inch diameters and half-inch diameter feet that looked as if they were fashioned out of brightly-enameled copper sheet. Low-fire glazes in bright yellow, orange, red and blue. These pieces just glowed and invited caressing but were totally infunctional. For about a year after, without being skilled in the art of throwing the correct shape, I happily spent tens of hours hand-tooling many a bulky form into an elegant ghost of its original shape just off-of-the-wheel. Alas, I had no kiln, and of the three pieces of greenware that were deemed keepable, two suffered the fate of all such objects in a house full of cats. The third, after 25 years as greenware, cracked as I was driving it to my class last year.

I should allow that I have been thinking retail. Such a provocative thing to say and it will invite all sorts of crass speculation as to motives for the original post. Let us pretend my motives were pure and the post logically followed its anticedents. Let us also pretend that my comments were made de novo without reference to ten-year business plans. The last is certainly true; we have no business plan!

So to you kind folks, yes there will be more pots!

As some of you may recall, I’ve been watching and learning about avian influenza H5N1 since well over a year ago, when I wrote several posts about it. I didn’t continue that writing, in part because there are several excellent sites making observations and discussions. I’m not a Flu Wiki regular but I have been checking in there on an occasional basis; it’s a very useful site for general disaster preparedness and specific information on bird flu, as is Effect Measure. On the other side of the debate are writers like Michael Fumento; the linked article is certainly food for thought although the sneering flavor detracts from his possibly legitimate points.

Although I’m bringing up avian influenza, it’s mostly as an introduction to a project of preparation I’ve been engaged in for about six months now. At this point I now have about 6 weeks supply of food, water, and essentials, and I’m considering augmenting that further. Glenn is less actively engaged, perhaps amused, but will even pick up items to add to the supply occasionally and is willing to discuss things intelligently.

This current project is probably a result of an attitude of mine; a hope that we can as much as possible be prepared and self-sufficient. I know that’s probably not entirely possible but I’m beginning to see it as more and more essential to try for it. A good bit of my writing here has touched on little projects like water supplies, solarizing, gardening, and all these are parts of the syndrome. Lest you see this as something of an obsession (ok, it is), the line I’ve drawn in the sand has been to do nothing that can’t be used anyway, even if my feelings of impending disaster are irrational and never come to pass. Stored food can and must be rotated. Spending money at Big Boxes is reduced. Conceivably a healthier diet can result. Doing something is a comfort.

Speaking of feelings of impending disaster, there’s an amazingly good and thoughtful thread on the Flu Wiki Discussion Forum. The discussion started out when Eccles asked for an idea of the ages of people who are involved in preparedness; it was his feeling that the age cohort is generally around 50 (bingo for me, anyway), but the discussion has broadened to people’s philosophies about preparedness and self-sufficiency. I was particularly struck by his comment about halfway through the discussion:

And so, like many of you, I have a screaming feeling in my gut that something really evil this way comes, and it is coming soon. Perhaps this is just the delusion of crowds, or some variant of Follie au Deux, but I can’t ignore it. Whether it is because some combination of news reports and personal fears have matched a template in my brain which causes a strong fear reaction and is just a personal foible, or whether it is because there really is something out there, I have elected not to ignore it.

I too have this feeling of impending disaster, whether it comes from avian influenza, the effects of a changing climate, or a general economic collapse (note, please, that I have no fears from terrorism). Doubtless some of it derives from the malignant nature of the political debate of the last five years. More, the direction, or lack of it, taken in regard to some of our most overwhelming problems seems especially dangerous to me at a time that may be historically critical (to put it mildly). I don’t have any idea of the magnitude of the consequences of our leaders' follies (as I see them), nor how quickly or slowly those consequences are going to appear. But increasingly, with a sharp burst of realization after Katrina, I’m more than a little suspicious that we’re not going to be able to depend on the US government for help. I’ve always had a bit of adolescent cynicism about the government but now it has completely lost its credibility with me.

Rexroth’s Daughter and I have exchanged back and forth on a little list of the events of the last five years that, as it has grown, has kind of shocked me. Even though I’m well informed, I didn’t realize just how much current idiocy sweeps idiocies of the past into the background so that you almost forget about them. Those past idiocies, I fear, are still with us and accumulating, fermenting, and ready to burst forth at any time.

That list, as a MS document, can be found here; feel free to read it. Add to it - there’s a large number of issues that I’ve neglected. Although I’ve organized it loosely, it’s far from finished, if it ever will be. I think it’s accomplished its goal of giving me some perspective of the degree of malign folly we’ve seen in the last few years. You’ll notice that it focuses on President Bush and his enablers as the figures about which all that I think wrong revolves; you may or may not agree. You’ll notice that I’m not bringing up his personal deficiencies - I find that approach distasteful. The events he has brought about are bad enough to speak for his character and the number of them is mindboggling, again, in my opinion.

I don’t talk about this preparedness thing very much. It sounds a little nutty, despite the consciously drawn line. And there’s a fairly large number of people who absolutely don’t want to discuss preparedness. I have a very good friend of many years, a very bright and thoughtful man, who will simply shut down and walk away, and he’s not by any means atypical. He doesn’t want to think about it, much less consider what to do about it. I actually understand that feeling; it’s unpleasant to contemplate a way of life taken for granted changing radically and involuntarily. Yet I think it’s in the wind, and as I despair of the appropriate measures taken at leadership levels to minimize the impact, I think I have to take constructive though self-absorbed measures to protect my little family.

I don’t have any graceful way to end this little screed and my thoughts haven’t been particularly gracefully presented. Maybe that’s the nature of this particular beast. Oddly, it sounds terribly pessimistic but at the same time trying to do something about it personally has done something for my optimism. Maybe there’s some value in that.

Or maybe this is just a Manifestation of Major Culch

In a comment to a post about Just Twelve Years Ago the dread pirate roberts writes that “the term ‘culch pile’ springs to my mind as a description of salvaged goods awaiting use. Ever hear that term?”

Last spring I was out in the country at a salt firing, having my first taste of white lightning (flavored with a kiss of peach), drinking beer and talking with the host and a friend of his who was much older in age and wisdom. Both they and their wives were potters, scraping by without side incomes, so they tried to be thrifty. For instance, we were using shipping pallets and crushed rock salt to fire a large kiln made of dry-laid recycled brick. Not romantic but the combination worked well together. The earthy image was nearly destroyed when a daughter showed me her second-generation camera/cell phone as she left to party in Athens 40 miles away.

I don’t remember the context; perhaps it was cans of used paint that were here and there and needed a home. The host allowed that 15 feet away he had buried many gallons of used motor oil left over from an experiment to see if it could be used as a kiln fuel (not with any modifications he had tried with his kiln). About 10 feet away was a buried TV and next to that ... The elder friend mentioned a tradition he claimed was common among rural folks with lots of land. I think he called it a ‘culch pile’ but it could have been something very similar. The pile was in a hole or would be periodically pushed into a hole to be buried. Cars, beds, farm equipment, whatever did not have another use or was waiting for that use to be discovered. He described it in the sense of a dump, not in the sense of a resource. I will allow that there may not be much of a difference and I am sure he would agree.

It did remind me of a hole, left over from a tree fall, that used to be so far away from the house, out in the distant wildland, but which has been creeping closer every year and is now well within civilized territory. It contains about 15 plastic garbage bags of used clay cat litter from before we converted to cedar shavings. That is the closest I have come to a culch pile. Definitely not a resource awaiting a newly-discovered use.

There was one pot of mine in the firing, the only one I finished during the course. My goal was not to produce pots, but to find out if I still could do it after 25 years of neglect and 16 years of disability. I could, and at the end of the course I rushed to finish a pot only to have some experience with salt firing and to have my bone fides at the firing. It was bisque fired while still damp, so of course it warped. And it was slipped by a friend only a few hours before loading and it suffered the usual tramas of handling that are faced by still-damp glazes and slips. And it was in the cooler, and less reductive, part of the kiln. But with all that, it did turn out nice. Many of the pieces a potter loves the best are often without any technical merit but yet somehow incorporate their faults into a unique fusion of form, clay, texture, color and function that describe great pots and sometimes great art. This pot is not one of those, even though the instructor/host has developed some very nice salt slips and glazes. The pot is about 8 inches in diameter.

I have recovered somewhat from Wayne’s adventure in reorganization over the weekend. Once started, he is impatient so of course he started at point Z (the closet) rather than point A (the attic), so the dominos have to rise up in reverse order, a rather improbable event, rather than nicely falling over in a line.

At about 1 AM on the evening of the event, I scanned the image below while thinking about what I should write and what tone to take. Then, down the stairs to the other closet, which Wayne has not mentioned, to get some catfood for Killer. Was presented with two lawn chairs, refugees from closet Z, laid over the sacks of catfood. Had to remove them, and what followed was all with items then stored on the floor of the closet: spilling damn birdseed; discovering another infestation of moths in the birdseed; Osmocoat fertilizer liquifying and ozzing out over the floor; lime doing the same; navigating SIX pair of Wayne’s shoes and several items from projects abandoned many years before.

An hour later it was all cleaned up and at least one layer of crap removed from the shelf (remember the shelf?). You can imagine the kind of post I was composing while dealing with this mess. Alas, I went to sleep at the kitchen table and when I awoke an hour later I just gave up for the weekend.



Which brings me to a small item found in one of Wayne’s many kitchen drawers, the item I scanned just before confronting Fibber McGee’s closet. A virgin checkbook containing a calender insert and three unused stamps. This small document shows a few of the many things we have lost in twelve short years. SSNs were on the checks and the insert has clearly-labeled fields to provide it and other personal information. The nondenominated G stamp was issued in 1994 with a value later defined as 32 cents, now worth about a dollar each on eBay. Take a look at today’s 39 cent version, not even identified by a Letter; Old Glory now needs the help of The Statue of Liberty.

It brings back memories of 1994. Bush and his cronies never to be heard from again. The Clintons off to a rough but promising start in the White House. The Republicans enacting their Pledge for America. Little was obvious of what was to come and all but the most pessimistic observers of human behavior were silent.

One of my top ten favorite birds is the Brown-Headed Nuthatch, Sitta pusilla, easily recognized by its small size, its characteristic behavior, and its little gray overcoat, brown cap,and white neck spot.


The pics aren’t great because the bird was about 100 feet away, fairly active as they tend to be, a cloudy day, and even though I had the telephoto I didn’t have it on a tripod, just steadied against the grill. But I couldn’t wait.

Nuthatches are very active birds, scouring trees in all directions and orientations, often hanging upside down to check out the underside of a particularly promising branch for insects. They also eat seeds, preferring sunflower, and brown-headed nuthatches were a particularly bold and populous bunch on our feeders in Gainesville north of here when I was a kid.

Not so here - I’ve seen them just occasionally. They seem to be rather shy.

Brown-headed nuthatches are confined to the Southeast US. There are three other species in the US - red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches occur in most parts of the US. The pygmy nuthatch is the northwest Pacific version of the brown-headed here.

I have to give Glenn complete credit for the first part of the two part answer:

Purge and urge, the second word meaning “desire” and the first word with a letter in front of it meaning “get rid of”.

Now that same letter “p" has to go in front of another word meaning ”desire" to give a word that means “get rid of”.

Before Glenn I had thought of glove and love, vomit and omit, trash and rash, but these become increasingly ridiculous.

It would not be a cruel thing to say I’m not the best housekeeper in the world; it would be true. I could wave it all away and speak of entropy and the Second Law, but that would be dishonest. It’s not laziness either. It’s more perversity than anything. Any mother knows these things.

Given a choice between putting a hammer on the kitchen table when I’m done with it and returning it to its proper place three steps away, the kitchen table wins every time. Take bottle opener out of drawer, pop bottle, close drawer, toss opener on counter. (NB - I *did* close the drawer.) Let’s not talk about doing dishes in a timely fashion, nor about discarding unused items.

A fair amount of chaos reigns unreined in this house, but most of it is kept in three drawers, one closet, and the attic. It’s not that these places have sequentially received overflow one by one and then on to the next hiding place, oh no! They all accumulated their sins simultaneously over 14 years. Big sins go in the attic, little sins in the drawers, medium size sins and implements of destruction make their way to the library closet.

So yesterday I decided to make a start. Rather, I decided to act upon my many decisions in the last five years to make a start. I won’t increase your dismay by showing you the drawers or the library closet, but once I had everything out of the latter it looked something like this (Gene, the cat on the couch, is alive and well):


It could be said in my defense that one of the problems here was that we only had two rows of shelves, but it could also be said that the floor need not act as a reservoir for everything that could go on six more rows of shelves. Just about anything could be said by the insensitive and self-righteous.

Just for starters we find outdoor chairs, six cases worth of mason jars (not in their cases of course, that would be *too* easy), tree wound tar, pond tabs, birdhouses, a broken hummingbird feeder, plastic goggles without a strap, windshield wipers that fit neither car, a forty-year-old amplifier, complete with vacuum tubes and matching speakers (it seems like only yesterday that I’d go down to Eckerd and fit several of those vacuum tubes into their Big Machine to see which one wasn’t working), some items that we couldn’t figure out what they were, and in the last couple of months dozens of plastic bags containing emergency food and essential items.

The shelves are inferrable only because you know that the piles of items on them are not floating in midair. Hundreds of loose screws, hooks, nails, brads, and bolts scattered into what looks like one of those metal trays surgeons throw their used scalpels and hemostats into (and by god there were some of those in there too). A dozen empty boxes formerly containing screws, hooks, nails, brads, and bolts. Hurricane lamps, fortunately without the oil, although *maybe* the two vintage fire extinguishers sitting next to them could have put out a fire. Tools of all sorts, wire, a very dangerous-looking soldering iron, and drill bits in those little plastic cases that pop open spontaneously, scattering their contents, some of which weren’t drill bits after all, like seeds.

It was a nightmare of re-organization and painful discarding. Painful for me, at any rate - like knowledge, there’s no such thing as a useless item. Look! Two bottlecaps. We can use those! We finally reached a compromise: I can have one (1) big box into which I put any item that Glenn finds useless. It’s full, now.

We put together a couple of bench shelves and put up two more rows of wall shelves and to make a lengthy story short, things looked pretty good at the end of it all. There’s even empty shelf space!




The drawers were easy after this; child’s play, as my mother might say, grimly, knowingly. Old notes, cards, photographs (from back when we had pictures developed!), dead pens, instruction manuals, maps, and at least ten dollars in pennies, nickels, and dimes. Plastic bags of seeds, unlabelled of course. Goodbye!

My father would be proud, until he saw The One Still To Go. Upstairs, in the bathroom, there’s a tiny door that leads to the attic. There’s a reason that door handle is secured with a bunjee cord.

Let’s open it, shall we? Stand back, please, we don’t want any *accidents*.


As my nephew characteristically deadpanned a few weeks ago, “You’ve got a lot of stuff in here.”


Yes, and we need not go into a full list of all that stuff. But it’s a neat space, as in cool, not orderly, and I’d like to see it become an office and workarea. It’s warm enough in the winter but gets a bit hot in the summer, yet could be quite liveable. I wonder if Glenn will let me have one more big box?

I notice that Saturdays and Sundays are light on hits; presumably people aren’t out to dig heavy posts, which means no factor analysis this weekend. Or they aren’t at work surfing the net.

I’m making shelves and cleaning out the library closet to organize tools and emergency food and other items. I’m being *industrious*. What are you doing this weekend?

This log, covered with Leucobryum or Pincushion Moss, seems to offer a great habitat for spring activities. The log itself is rotting, which probably adds a wee bit of heat to the structure, and the moss helps to insulate it, keeping the heat and moisture in.

I’m lazy today, so I probably won’t find the name of these tiny mushrooms erupting everywhere on the log. We can call them LBMs.


The moss keeps the log moist, which makes this slug very happy. I don’t know his name either and don’t have the Audubon Guide to Terrestrial Mollusks anyway.


The Leucobryum itself is putting out sporophytes.


This tiny plant is Cardamine hirsuta, or Hairy Bittercress, in the mustard family Brassicaceae. It literally covers the ground right now in little rosettes of leaves. Its tiny white flowers will produce the long siliques (fruits) which will explode on contact when ripe, scattering seeds everywhere.

I don’t do this very often - come to think of it, I’ve never done it. But I’m going to do it this time.

Wanna see something wonderful and disturbing?

Years ago, probably close to 20 years ago, I saw a remarkable movie, Koyaanisqatsi (1983). The subtitle is “Life out of Balance”, from the Hopi. “Koyaanisqatsi” is very easy to say, but it’s hard to watch. We don’t have a typical movie here, and we don’t have a typical plot, although it’s pretty clear what it’s all about.

It turns out there’s three of these movies, not really a trilogy except in concept; they’re very different from each other. Even so, each has a Hopi flavor to it.

I’d not seen the others until this past Christmas at Jekyll Island when Lisa, who will probably astonish me eternally, brought the second and third of the movies and one morning I just happened in and the second one was going. I was utterly drawn to it. Powaqqatsi (1988 ), or in the Hopi, “Life in Transformation”, although the reality is more sinister: life which consumes other life in order to exist.

If I were to recommend one, and I won’t because people often hate these movies, Powaqqatsi draws me the most. Part of the reason is that the Philip Glass music that churns through all these movies was something I recognized from The Truman Show, where I learned to love Jim Carey, of all things.



In Powaqqatsi, you’ll see a boy and horse in the ocean, incredible scenes of cultivation, funeral dances that will make you cry, and Peruvian dancers that boggle the imagination. There are faces and legs and arms with incredible musculature, and frankly, character, that you’ll never ever see in fat America. And toward the end there’s a terrible disturbing scene of a small child in a cart on a busy roadway whipping her mules onward while her passed-out father lies by her side.

These are difficult movies to watch for any without the patience to forego the expectation of a plot-driven story with recognizable characters. There’s none of that here. The plot in each of these movies, if you can call it that, eventually becomes clear; there are no characters; there are no voices even. There are parts that make my heart sing and parts that scare the crap out of me, and I know that for most of the world this is how it is.

The third movie is Naqoyqatsi. Made in 2002, it’s far above the technical expertise of the first two and as different from them as they are from each other. I saw this one too on Jekyll Island, but have to study it a bit more before I comment on it.

Despite the fact that they thrill me to death I am shy to recommend them even though I love them. Philip Glass, who provides the soundtrack throughout, and the episodic atypical nature of these movies, are both something you either love or hate. See them or don’t as you wish.

Yesterday I hiked a half-mile through the woods looking for the source of an alarming amount of blue smoke that was filtering through the area. That’s not an issue, but I did find the following dinner tableau, and went back this morning to photograph it:









I’m a bit mystified. None of these pics is a duplicate of another. The fur is strewn over a wide area, and I count at least four or five skulls or fragments. One of the ribcages with neck and skull attached was fresh enough, although stripped of gooey stuff, to have little flies all over it yesterday.

I guess the dined upon are deer, but what the hey? This area is atop a ridge in a largely piney area; just a little farther up there’s a logging road which has been largely unused for the last two years. There’s our creek down below several hundred feet, and the nearest human habitation is probably a fifth mile away.

I certainly don’t see hunters leaving this. We know we have coyotes, foxes, and the occasional pack of dogs, some wild, some bored family pets left out who get together to roam around. I didn’t find any tracks to identify the diner.

Oh yes, we have bobcats too, and I have to tell you I am dripping green with envy over Karen’s and the Bums' wonderful bobcat pictures.

Any ideas?

UPDATE: Glenn’s come up with (to my mind) a less than defensible idea that they’re roadkill dragged back into the woods. The road is *possibly* negotiable, but I’m just not seeing someone dragging ripe roadkill at least a hundred feet into the woods from the road, which itself is gated and at least a fifth mile from the main Wolfskin Road. Maybe though.

These guys are not friends. But they’re gonna cut out that competition crap or I’m calling Dick Cheney.

Understand that I have no dearth of apostrophes here; but it makes it hard to put in the first word of the title for the captcha .

I’m a bit late on Charles Darwin’s birthday; I didn’t actually have to offer the occasion any more than I post just about every day on this blog. There’s seldom a post that I make that I don’t think about the fellow who offered us an explanation of where we came from that has withstood almost two centuries of testing.

I do have a couple of thoughts that strike me as warm fuzzies, even if I am a bit of a philistine:

Each and every one of us, shark or lion, tiger or sunflower, right whale or Escherichia coli; rust, smut, or human: we’re all related.

Each of us, including every one of the trillions of living things that now exist together on this planet, is the child of an unbroken line of survivors that stretches back an almost inconceivable 3.8 billion years. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.

In Darwin’s time these ideas might have been reasonably supported supposition, but they’re rock hard facts now.

As a corollary, and especially for the religious who scorn these ideas: What exactly will you say to your maker when he asks you why you allowed the wanton and unnecessary destruction of your relatives?

Take with it what you will.

I’ve been starting to dismantle the fallen oak that I wrote about a few days ago. I’m pretty certain that it’s a Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) but need to look at it a little closer to be sure.

UPDATE - Glenn confirmed it.

I haven’t yet gotten out the chainsaw to cut through the trunk closer to what used to be the ground, but I have cut through a tertiary and secondary branch to look at the tree rings. The saw marks the secondary branch cut:


The tertiary branches, already sawed, are about 3.6" diameter, and the secondary branch is about 5.8" diameter. Here’s the tertiary branch; it seems to be about 28 years old:


I did a little dendrochronology on this thinner branch, but decided to go for the thicker one. One relevant piece of information that I’ll refer to below is that the thinner branch has about 24 annual rings per inch, or 1mm per ring, and the thicker branch below has about 14 annual rings per inch, or 1.8 mm per ring. Strangely to me, the lower thicker branches grow faster than the upper thinner ones. Here we’re at 36 years old.


This branch shows many of the characteristics that you note in a woodcut. You first notice the lighter colored cylinder of wood around the darker core. The lighter is called sapwood, and the inner is heartwood. The branch converts xylem (because that’s what wood is, xylem - pulling water up the tree to hydrate the leaves) into heartwood for storage of organic materials, and the cutoff here seems to be about 1997. Younger xylem is sapwood; older xylem is heartwood. Glenn says the heartwood smells wonderful.

The second thing you might notice is that the rings are not fully symmetric; they might bulge outward on one side or inward. Tighter rings on one side show that that side is under mechanical stress, perhaps the bottom of the branch supporting more of the weight of the branch than the opposite side. This is tension wood. The relative sizes of the rings stay the same though.

The third thing you notice (or maybe it’s the first thing - but it’s the third thing I *want* you to notice) is the light and dark rings. The light rings, which are thinner, are supposed to be springwood, or earlywood. The cells here grow in the springtime when water is plentiful and temperatures are benign. The cells are large and have thin walls, giving the light color. As temperatures increase in the summer, and water becomes less abundant, the next set of cells are smaller with thick walls, dark fiber, and appear darker in color. This band of dark ring is summerwood, or latewood. This constitutes an annual ring; alternating light and dark.

Here’s how it works. The first panel below shows a three-year-old branch. The green layer on the outside is the vascular cambium. This is the meristematic tissue that makes trees get bigger around. It’s called bifacial, because it produces two types of cells; xylem toward the center, which is the wood; and phloem on the outside. Phloem is living tissue which carries sugar to all parts of the tree (I’ve omitted the phloem here - it’s doesn’t produce substantial rings; it gets crushed by the expanding xylem every year and has to be renewed).

The second panel shows that the springwood has been laid down, pushing the vascular cambium outward. The third panel shows that the darker summerwood gets laid down later in the summer. The last panel shows that in the following year a new layer of springwood will be laid down, and you get those nice alternating ring patterns.


Here’s a cutaway of the older secondary branch, with the left side the youngest and the center on the right side. I’ve numbered the years and measured both the light and dark ring widths. This branch started in 1969; it was 36 years old when the tree fell.


And here I’ve plotted the numbers for springwood and summerwood:


A few interesting things that I’ll get more into later, perhaps. First, the linear rate of growth of summerwood slows down as the branch ages, although the correlation coefficient is pretty low. Nonetheless there are years in which late summergrowth can be as extensive as in earlier summergrowth. The annual springwood growth, on the other hand, is pretty constant over the 36 years, although there’s still a lot of variation. I suspect that the growth of the summerwood doesn’t actually decrease with age so much as that our summer temperatures have been getting warmer in the last 36 years, and warmer temperatures means more stress and less growth in the summer.

Take a look at 1983-1984: Very little summerwood growth that year, although springwood growth was considerable. 1982-1983 was the most intense El Nino every recorded, and it was followed by a La Nina in which we tend to have drought here.

Here’s the trunk itself:


It measures 73" around at approximately “breast height”. That’s roughly a diameter of 24". If we go by the secondary branch annual ring width of 1.8mm per ring, (and this may be an incorrect assumption) it suggests that the tree was about 160 years old.

One thing that falls out from that kind of age is that the creek and surrounding bank that this tree grew near has been at about the same level for over a century. I had assumed much of the carving out had been done relatively recently, perhaps even by cotton farmers, but our long hollow may actually be quite old.

Gotta get out that chainsaw!

Floridacracker has an entertaining new game for us to play - the soil non-meme. This is too good for me to pass up and mutate to my pleasure.

I actually have six sites planned, but this is the first one - Sparkleberrysprings Creek, down where the oak fell. Since it had already done such a good job of creating a hole, and since FC doesn’t want us to hurt ourselves, I just shaved off a foot or so of soil from outside the crater left behind:


There are people who practically keel over in shock when they see our soil, although this isn’t as red as it can get by any means. This is probably half clay, a third sand, and a sixth organic material; as befits its location at the bottom of a hollow a couple of feet away from a creek prone to some flooding.

No half-worms, sliced by the shovel, no ant nests, not a whole lot to indicate tunneling, but then this is the winter. There is a bit of a smear of darker blue soil, which might be an indication of anaerobic conditions. It’s pretty boring and homogeneous, really, although you do see a rock at the bottom left, just to liven things up.

Now here’s the mutation:


I carved back another couple gallons worth of soil from the entire foot or so of depth, and carted it off in a bucket. I dumped it in a somewhat similar environment - shady and moist, close to the house. Spread it out and after the next rain will cover it over with a thin layer of mulch to keep it moist.

Over the years and years plants drop their seed, and others come in by various means - water, animals, wind. If conditions aren’t quite right, they don’t germinate and get covered up. Many are still alive, just waiting for Wayne to come along and liberate them. This is called a seed bank, and it’s a considerable resource of seed for germination after major disturbance - fire, erosion, or human disturbance.

Since FC was so thoughtful as to offer us all this inspiration in February, it means that there will be a couple of months of environmental change to really get these seed going! So in the next few months I’ll be watching this and five other little plots that I have planned out.

"horn" +3x “se” = horse sense.

Do I stay up all night to watch, or do I cynically note that I’ve been disappointed five times in a row in the last two weeks? We’re supposed to have snow tonight, but I don’t believe it. I really don’t. Really I don’t. And tomorrow night too.

Well, the moon performed tonight and there were no high clouds, just low ones.

There’s nothing like taking a few beers down into the woods on a pleasant, only slightly cool day and sitting down in a quiet, secluded high place to see what walks by. First you need a little kit - ok, this was obviously taken after and not before.


The jars are for collecting water samples. The book is for reading. The camera is in use. The four cans you already know about.

I sit first for an hour on Goulding Creek bank. Nothing but a few lazy vultures wander by but something had been there before, checking out the creek:


Clearly bird tracks of some kind, but nowhere near the size of the blue heron's; these are just an inch long. Cute curved toes. I’m not sure what they are yet.

After a time I move on up the hill on the west ridge looking down into the hollow and across to the east slope. From there I can see a distance of 500 feet along the stream and slopes. I’m quiet as a little mouse except for the occasional popping of a beer tab - let’s have another!

No birds in the trees; no squirrels; nothing wanders by. Negative result. Everything is so quiet except for the clicking of the camera, that smooth, industrious sh-shwop sound of a real lens shuttering.

For Pablo, to show that we have mysteriously bent trees too. This is a sweetgum.


It’s 4pm, and nothing has come by, the first negative result. Too early for waiting until real dusk when something might happen, so I walk up to the house, cold wet butt and all.

I pull out my old aquarium kit to test the water samples from Goulding Creek and Sparkleberrysprings Creek. It’s a fairly limited kit; can’t test for phosphates or heavy metals, just nitrogen and pH and hardness.

Both samples are free of ammonium, nitrates, and nitrites, to the level my kit can detect. Both samples of water are slightly acidic - pH 6.0, no surprise there. Something must be wrong with the general hardness reagent - I put in 50 drops of reagent gradually and there’s no color change in the Sparkleberrysprings sample, nor in our well water as a negative control. Carbonate shows very low levels.

So the second set of negative results - no nasty levels of a few usual inorganics and no difference between the water sources, which is a little surprising considering that Goulding Creek comes out of an artificial lake less than a mile upstream.

And then there’s the first positive results of the day - a moon nearing fullness.


We’re expecting a full day of rain tomorrow, and the high clouds are already beginning to obscure some of the details, but even handheld, the telescopic lens on the camera does a fairly decent job.

Our Wolfskin Volunteer Fire Department meets two Thursdays a month, one for training and one for business. Last night was an off-Thursday, but the supertanker is coming “sometime” this month and the firehouse had to be cleaned up to make room for it.



Above, Fire Chief Phyllis and Ed are checking the new doors Frankie put on after busting out the end wall of the kitchen/former meeting room. As you can see, it’s pretty much filled with junk, some dating back 20 years or more. All of that had to be excavated and sorted into throwout or keep - Glenn, with his excellent organizational skills and lack of sentimentality, had that job.

Why bust out the kitchen? One of the firetrucks, presumably with ample amounts of lubricant, has to fit there, because the supertanker gets the big bay in the middle to the right of the kitchen in this photo.

A fine time was had by all dozen of us that showed up at 6:30. We had already gotten well-started building shelves when the pizza and supper arrived, carried in by four more firefighters. Phyllis put on selected fire music and we spent some time eating and organizing and then went back to work.

Ultimately we threw out tons of stuff, got the kitchen completely cleaned out, boxed up and shelved old turnout gear, and did it all by 9:30.

Ob-cat: we’re still pushing to have the supertanker named “The Genie-Weenie Supertanker”.

For the last week I’ve been hiking around the area taking photos of animal tracks. I have a little library now, but they’re not very good - contrary to the warm January, the current February has become a little chillier and the nocturnals aren’t leaving tracks in the frozen mud; the kind of disappointment that accompanies the frustration of a recent obsession.

However late this afternoon, as the light was beginning to fade after a slightly warmish day, I wandered down to Goulding Creek, noted a few raccoon tracks, and then started up our little Sparkleberry Springs Creek.

Close to the juncture with Goulding, I found this large track. That’s a six-inch ruler.

Now some of you are already going to know what this is, so hush. I knew too. I walked about 500 feet further and there were more of them, always pointing the way upstream. Lookit how *big* they are, more than six inches from front toes to back!

I kept walking up the stream, finding more and more of these tracks, and then I rounded a little bend of the creek close to the southern edge of the property and there was the perp, presumably sucking up all our little fish and crayfish and whatever else might be visible on this cold February day.

It’s an odd photo, in a way. He seems poised between the possibility of oblivion and a continued future, completely dependent on my intentions. He’s in the same boat as the rest of us, wondering what the idiot plans to do next.


My intentions, at least, are good; the water is clean, the fish are tasty, and the idiot isn’t holding a gun. We can only hope without much of that that this metaphor has some truth to it.


Fare well, cousin!


I’m assuming we have a Great Blue Heron here; the only other possibility in our part of the southeast would be a green heron and it isn’t that. I’m not sure how to distinguish male from female, but there sure isn’t the ornamentation on the head that I would have expected.

Soon Great Blues are going to mate and begin to raise kids. The good news is that there’s nothing uncommon about Great Blues; they’re found frequently, but I was surprised and delighted to find this one stalking our little bitty creek, under such a canopy instead of along a nice open lake.

Well, it happened, anyway, about 7 months ago. To give you an idea of how observant I can be, I was pulling Microstegium in a gully close by for an hour before I noticed that this oak had fallen in the previous day.


It’s just about ripe enough now to begin to cut for firewood, and when I do, I plan to shave off a piece of lower trunk to get the tree rings and estimate the age.

This was a sizeable tree, growing just above the little creek on a slope. This close to the creek at the bottom of the long hollow there are a lot of exposed rocks, and the ones entangled here in the roots, or flipped a few feet by the fall, were more like boulders than rocks.


The oak fell across the creek, making a perfect cat highway, and took two other trees with it. They were a *little* smaller.


This event isn’t all that uncommon here - perhaps one such tree falls in any given year here. Year before last, a few hundred yards farther up the creek we lost a white oak this size and a very large sourwood to Ivan and then to Frances that summer. In the next few years they’ll probably start to sprout oyster mushrooms - bon apetit!

The hollow that runs the length of our property, and this area of the creek particularly is fairly shaded in the summer by large numbers of mature oaks, beeches, and tulip poplars. This fallen tree, and its fallen victims, have opened up a broad sunny spot that doesn’t really exist anywhere else along the length of the creek. What interesting possibilities for ecological change this opens up!

A fluff post today - hopefully Pablo will get Roundrock back online. I wonder if his ISP is in the Northwest with the power out? I couldn’t immediately tell you where my ISP is located.

I wish I’d had these ready last week for the Bums' “I and the Bird” Carnival. Well, maybe not, they’re pretty generic test pics - pics of rapidly moving animals are a whole different can of worms than slowly moving plants.

My second favorite bird (or maybe third or fourth, but definitely up there in the top ten) is the Tufted Titmouse. I love their big black eyes, crest, and orange highlights contrasting with their gray feathering. They’re very active and fearless, but they don’t have much of a sense of humor. This one is disgruntled because the birdseed isn’t *pure* sunflower. They’ll let you know it too.


Chipping Sparrows are ok, but not quite as satisfactorally in-your-face as another of the top ten, Carolina Chickadee, a close relative of titmice. One of the things I discovered in Norway is that they have tits and mice too, but a huge diversity of incredibly colored species.


Within two minutes of my starting to replace the food in the feeders, Maxwell appears. He’s always loved to eat the birdseed. Caught in the act.




Oh, and ob plant: that’s Common Chickweed, Stellaria meadia, in and around Max. It grows in profusion in the late winter and early spring and can be eaten as a lettuce substitute in salads. It’s fairly good.

Postcard and Podcast!

Or, “The Watershed Meme”.


I can’t seem to let well enough alone, and that satellite photo in the previous post really sucked. Microsoft’s Terraserver has much better aerials now - these are from 1999, so you see I really have to post them.

Everyone who reads this consider yourselves tagged with this meme: aerial shots, and Your Watershed.

Let’s go from the large scale in. Fairly self-explanatory. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac. The house is actually visible, sort of, in the last photo in this series, at the end of the red line. Lake Oglethorpe is to the upper right, and you can imagine my walk along Goulding Creek, the heavy blue line. Red lines are roads. Yellow lines are our property boundaries.


A medium scale:


And the smallest scale - there are three other houses in this pic, but I thought maybe I wouldn’t circle them. The fainter blue line is Sparkleberry Springs Creek.

On Thursday I took a little hike up Goulding Creek to the dam that forms Lake Oglethorpe. Here’s some maps of the area. First, a little section of a topo map:


Our house position is marked by the red cross to the left. The topo map above is not recent enough to include Lake Oglethorpe; it just shows the former route of Goulding Creek into and out of the area marked by the right red blob.

Goulding Creek (and I haven’t been able to find the origin of the name) runs north-south. My hike was to the north.

Here’s a recent satellite map of the same area, and this one does include Lake Oglethorpe.


Some time back I challenged everyone to come up with a map of their watershed area. Here’s a small portion of the map I came up with, more or less in parallel with the above maps:


The little orange square and path shows our house and the route I took. Along Goulding Creek itself it’s about 0.8 miles to the dam. About 0.5 miles is through nicely wooded area through which a broad path has emerged.


About 0.5 miles along the creek is a large pasture that extends for the next 0.2 miles.


Just a tenth of a mile farther and we’re at our target - the dam. The green slope in the background is a small portion of the earthen dam, and it’s probably 40 feet tall.


Goulding Creek is not big - just about 10 feet wide and seldom deeper than a foot or two.


Lake Oglethorpe residents want their lake full, of course, and so the flow along Goulding Creek does vary somewhat as they open and close the drain to keep the lake high during summer periods of low rainfall. Fortunately the fellow who does this, a fellow firefighter by the way, is sensitive to the requirement that the Creek be kept flowing and contacts us to see if it’s ok when he’s made an adjustment.

In recent news, the Lake Oglethorpe Association had to come up with a study that would predict the water flow down Goulding Creek should the dam break catastrophically, an extremely unlikely event. My best recollection is that it would produce a wall of water 50 feet high and 100 feet wide that would roar down the creek, taking out the bridge farther south of us and irreparably damaging the bridge along Wolfskin Road. Fortunately our house sits about 100 feet above the floodplain so we’d have a great front seat show.

Coming back, I ran into this tree covered with oyster mushrooms, in a later state of drying up than the ones I presented a few days ago:

Depending on what happens in February, it seems to me that this could be close to being the year without a winter. Mike at RealClimate has an interesting and fairly non-technical post up about this, treating ecological ramifications. The comments even feature one proponent of global warming!

At NOAA I found the following information.

First, we have a La Nina! Expected to be 3-6 months duration, it results in winter temperatures colder than average in the western US, and drier than average in the southeast US. If it lasts into the hurricane season it encourages the formation of hurricanes.

Second, also at NOAA, we have these absolutely precious temperature anomaly plots by the month. (A temperature anomaly plot just takes the difference between the monthly average for 2006, as here, and the average for a set of years (in this case 1970-2006), and color codes it as indicated.)

Since January is on everyone’s minds, here it is:


As everyone has noticed, and you were certainly right if you live in the northern half of the US, January has been very warm, as much as 12-16 degrees warmer than average.

Here’s the plots for August 2005, the autumn, and December.

August was several degrees warmer for those of us in the Eastern and Western US.


You might remember that I posted back in September about how warm it was. How warm was it? 2-4 degF warmer than normal in the eastern US but cooler in the northwest.


October was fairly normal most places; at most 2 degF above normal here in the southeast:


November was warmer than usual, especially in the mid-US.


And finally, December. It was 2-4 degF colder than usual in the Southeast, but the January warming trend was beginning to become apparent in the north-central US.

I’ve been running across a number of blogs that have commented on the unusually warm January temperatures. Pablo in Kansas/Missouri, Laura in Saskatchewan, and Linda in Kansas, have remarked on the warm month. I’ve also read comments from Washington, DC and Boston about the warm January.

I’ve looked at the high and low temperatures in Athens for each day of the year for the last sixteen years (*).

Summary, for those who don’t want to slog through the admittedly dry writing but just like to look at the pretty pictures:

We’ve had more warm days this January. They haven’t been all that warmer than usual; just more of them. Athens is a pretty mild climate; we don’t notice warm days all that much in the winter since we *always* have some warm days. But we do notice the cold, and December had more cold days than usual. Not colder, just more cold days.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is probably the explanation. If you look at the NAO plot on that page, it appears to be trending down into the negative. This would suggest that cold Arctic blasts will resume their normal passage into Canada and the US for the remainder of winter.

Now for the fun. Here’s our January. First, the daily high temperatures.

The black dots are the high temps each day from 1990 to the present. They give you an idea of the range of temperatures we’ve experience for that day over the last 16 years.
The red line runs through the high temps for each day in Jan 2005; the blue is for Jan 2006.
The green line runs through the highest temps recorded for each day from 1920 to present. This line doesn’t represent a single year - each point does.



It does look like only a couple of days this month have had high temperatures below the average high temperature for 1990-2006; we’ve had only three days where the high temperature has been below 50 degrees and 18 days where the high temperature has been above 60. In 2005 there were eight days with highs below 50 and 16 days above 60, but there were also days last January where the temperature was even higher than days this January.

Now let’s look at the low temperatures for days in January. Same figure legend applies.



We’ve had 9 days this January where the low temperature has been 30 degrees or below, and 4 days with low temp 50 degrees or above. This is compared to last January with 12 days below 30 and 3 days with 50 or above.

So I think it’s safe to conclude that in Athens it’s been marginally warmer this January than usual for the past 16 years but not particularly so. This isn’t to say that others' observations and anecdotes are wrong - Athens is much milder to begin with and we wouldn’t notice a warm January like folks farther north do - we *always* have *some* warm days. (We would though, notice a *colder* than usual January, and no one around here has been talking about that.)

Laura has the explanation right, I think and it has to do with the North Atlantic Oscillation. This is an air pressure pattern that has high and low values; for the past month we have been in a block of high values but appear to be heading into a negative region now. When the values are high the air pressure over the North Atlantic shunts cold Arctic air eastward into Europe instead of down into Canada and the US; when the values are low, we in Canada and the US get cold Arctic blasts and Europe is warmer. This is a cyclic sort of thing but much less predictable than, say, El-Nino/La Nina.

Let’s look at December, where this year the NAO was in a block of negative values during the first half of the month, and then hanging midway during the latter half. We’d predict cold temps, especially in the first half of the month.

Here’s the same sort of plot of December high temps as above for January; the red line is for this past Dec 2005:



In Dec we had only four days with the high temps above 60, compared to 18 this January. On 10 days the low temps in Dec were 50 or below compared to only 3 days this January. Definitely much colder during most of December, and you can see how the red line trends below most of the black dots for most of December before heading upward.

Here’s the December low temperature record:



We had only 4 days this past December with low temps 50 or above compared with 4 days this January - no difference. We had 13 days this past December with low temps 30 or below compared with 9 days this January. It looks like the difference between January and December have not been that the low temperatures have been unusually low, there were just more of those days in December than in January.

Same with the high temperatures - January’s haven’t been particularly high here in Athens, there have just been more days this January with high temperatures than usual.

One caveat - the range indicated by the black dots through all these figures is *only* for 1990-2005. Since those years have also been the warmest on record, globally, there’s the possibility that those black dots are giving us a slightly wrong picture of what’s normal, but probably not. Just sayin'.

For your entertainment, and because *I* at least think they’re pretty pictures, here’s the high temperatures for the full year; the legends are as above:



And here’s the low temperatures for the full year:




**Data from National Weather Service Forecast Office in Peachtree City, GA.

Wayne with my cat Celeborn 27 years ago, after the three of us moved into a rental house.

Ordinarily I don’t notice the date, or if I do it’s weeks before and I forgot or it’s weeks after and I remember, and say to Glenn (who never thinks about it anyway), Happy Anniversary!

So how do gay people reference the beginning of their partnerships? Probably by similar routes as male and female partners (what a friend mischievously refers to as “mixed partners”). Some date that is of significance. I thought it unseemly to choose the date of our meeting, although that would have been July 4 1978, and ultimately we decided on the date we moved into our first place together. That was Feb 1 1979, into a little rented house on Oconee Street in Athens, so this is our 27th.

That little house on Oconee Street, and FINALLY getting out of it when we moved into our built house in 1991, is the subject of a recurrent dream that I have to this day. Several things that happened in the last couple of years of living there probably motivate this nightmare. The neighborhood had become increasingly bad and unsafe, with multiple break-ins (two just above my head) and a random triple axe murder three houses down; it was in 1989 there that Glenn developed multiple sclerosis, with all the adjustments that that requires; and just generally there was an enormous tiredness of the place. It’s in this dream that we can’t seem to get out of that house although we’ve given our notice months before, the new residents may or may not be there already, the new house has been ready for months but we haven’t moved, etc., etc., you probably know the dream and all its inventive variations.

But most of that 12+ years there on Oconee Street wasn’t the stuff of nightmares by any means: it was there that I went through and emerged successfully from graduate school; it was there that Glenn went from being a postdoc to being an assistant professor and then tenured; and it was there that in 1985 we discovered the existence of 28 acres of the land that we now live on. It was during that time that we were saving at least a third of our salaries (that famous, nonexistent “disposable income” that better consumers than we are spend on frivolities) and putting it toward our plans. It was from there that we commenced acting on those plans by starting the building of our house.

Who knows what the 28th year of our partnership will bring? We know one thing it won’t be bringing. This year I remember the date because it is coincident with this:


Those are the last two checks to be written and mailed off after 20 years of paying off loans: the larger one for the house, and the smaller one for an additional 12 acres of land we bought ten years ago. The full impact of the lifting of that vaguely persistent and seemingly eternally overhanging cloud hasn’t quite hit me; nor has the feeling of well-being. I expect this is one of those things that will come in stages over the next few months as I recall periodically - hey! We’re free at last!

So although it may seem like That Day Will Never Come when that last check gets written, take heart: it eventually does.