Somebody save me

from Facebook!

Driving Rain

This is a quick glimpse at what I drove into on my way home from work last night...

More Light . . .

On the boardwalk at Plum Island


Sun Dog


Sunset on Plum Island

Lightplay

and today's special birthday boy is . . .

49 YEARS OLD.
O, LOST YOUTH.

Are you a Life Victor?

In one of those rare moments when I am bored and distracted at work I decided that if people can write books such as "The Secret" and "Who Moved My Cheese" (whose cover, incidentally, I redesigned to read "Who Moved My Cheese Pizza" after a homeless man tried to steal my slice of pizza once, but I digress) and make tons of money, well then I too should be able to invent some crappy self-help slop of make a bundle too.

In typical self-help fashion, I categorized people and their habits into several self-denying profiles into which they usually slip. All to be contrasted by the one, life-affirming category: Life Victor. Are you a life victor?

Title: Life Victor: Seizing the day in everyday life.

The life-unaffirming categories:

Life Waster - has opportunity in front of them, but does not act
Life Waiter - waits for good things from external sources
Life Wanter - has dreams, but does not make the opportunity
Life Aggressor - no sense of proportion or context
Life Denier - refuses to accept the beauty and richness in life
Life Acceptor - works within the status quo
Life Confused/Conflicted - does not know their wants or needs

Why do I bring this all up? Well, Michaela and I have a habit, whenever work begins to get really stupid, to slipping in super buzzword corporate speak, and often the Life Victor vocabulary slips in (as it did halfway through a 1.5 DAY conference call which I have been listening into):

What happens when our Life Victor should meet TSOD? Who would win? The absolute in life affirmation or our beloved doctor death? (yes, this is challenge, Anthony).

V. ?

In search of the elusive Twisted Stalk

Over the last couple of years I have volunteered for a couple a plant monitoring projects through the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, a hiking association that arranges for and maintains hiking trails in New York and New Jersey. The first project, a scientific study done in conjunction with the NYNJTC, Rutgers University, and the USDA, used hiker volunteers to monitor 22 invasive species (thus my habit to call out "invasive species" whenever I am walking outside). To balance this, I volunteered for another monitoring project, also run by the USDA and NYNJTC, to monitor rare and endangered plant species in New Jersey.

Each volunteer was assigned a plot and given a particular species to monitor. My plot, on Maple Hill along the Appalachian Trail, sits in Northern New Jersey along the New York border. It is in a small gully of a hill where the forest descends to a cool, dark stream. Ferns and skunk cabbages grow. And, as it turns out, it is the perfect climate for the rosey twisted stalk. The Twisted Stalk is rare in New Jersey, the southern tip of its range, but common as you move north into New England. Last weekend Michaela and I went out to the plot to do our counting (~125 individual plants found). The twisted stalk is named because it has, well, a twisted stalk. And its flowers are a rose color (shocking, I know).

Some photos:


Shot from above--shows the characteristic twist in its stalk


Against the background of the clipboard, you can see the delicate rose flowers

This is friggin' brilliant

Give the speaker some time to warm up, but these mushrooms are truly magic:

Belly Shots!

Guess the beets and flax aren't the only things growing this spring...

Garden Update

A few developments on the garden front: turnips (2 kinds) are up; beets (2 kinds) are up. So are:
chives, marigolds, flax, cabbage, onions, carrots, radishes, coreopsis, safflower, cosmos, and basil.

And some photos:


Flax:













Detroit Dark Red Beet:













Marigolds:













Lavendar

We should all hang our heads in shame

The Devil Rays? Tampa Bay?!? In first place??!?!? Incredulous!!

PAWS

One vacation, quite a number of years ago, Michaela & I asked our friend Alan to look in on our cats. Little did we know that Alan had just purchased a new (and then very novel) digital video camera. Upon our return we found our cats safe and well fed and a little movie waiting for us.

He called it PAWS.

More Than a Feeling

I am listening to the album "Boston" by Boston--AND NO ONE CAN STOP ME!!!!

Ah, spring.