gainful employment – and it’s in the woods

Here’s something I’ve never seen before, though it must have been all around me on any number of occasions:

It stands to reason that if deciduous trees produce buds for next year’s leaves and flowers, coniferous trees must as well. This is a cluster of this year’s new needles, so fresh that the bud coating (no doubt there are more technically correct terms for all this) hasn’t even fallen off yet. Awesome!

Other back yard beauties include some buttercups...

The lawn is littered with fuzzy-leaved asters. Here’s hoping the landlord is negligent in his lawn-mowing duties. He can’t possibly be as negligent as we are – I believe we mowed our lawn in Vermont last year 2.5 times.

In other news, I have a summer job at an aerial forest park. So far, we’ve only been open on weekends, but as soon as school lets out, we’ll be open seven days a week. So what’s an aerial park, you ask?

Sort of like a ropes course, without the ropes. A lot of cables and bridges or other obstacles, strung between trees.

There are five courses, each of which starts from a central platform. Some are easier than others – lower to the ground, and not quite as technical – while others demand that you climb a ladder before you can even get started.

...like so.

Kevin and I first heard about this park because it turns out our next door neighbors down here own the land the park is on. So we headed over there a few weeks ago while it was still being built...

I immediately thought, “I gotta get me some of this.”

And lo, I am now a “course monitor”. I am charged with fitting customers into full-body harnesses, showing them how to use their carabiners (think, “safety clips” – you’re always clipped into something in case you get into an argument with gravity), and wandering around on paths under the courses, providing moral support. And if necessary, actual rescue.

I’m easily twice the age of most of my coworkers.

 

Don’t ask what that is in my hair. It involves a mutilated balloon animal. It’s a fun crew to work with, I’ll leave it at that for now. And, I DO have boobs. I swear. I prefer running bras, what can I say.

So yeah, rescuing people. I’ve gotten some training in how to safely lower folks off of platforms both low and high (low = you can get a ladder to them and high = you cannot), as well as off the middle of an element (an element is anything strung between two trees, typically a bridge of some sort.)

Here are two of my coworkers, preparing to practicing a bridge rescue. After I took this shot with my cell phone, I worked my way out to where they are and practiced rescuing and being rescued myself. I was nervous, but I got over it.

Here’s a view from where I was stranded for several minutes while my neighbor’s son, who helped build the place, came to my rescue (a piece of equipment needed to be installed before I could proceed – I was the first person, aside from the guys who built it, who ran this particular course and they’d just overlooked something.)

I believe this is the element I was waiting to do.

I love this stuff. I’m not especially afraid of heights, but I do get an adrenaline rush the first few times I encounter a particular element. And, I still haven’t done all five courses yet: I’ve been waiting for the construction of the fourth to be completed before trying both it, and the hardest one. That last one gives me the willies. It’s going to take more upper body strength than I have, but I’ve looked at it from the ground for a while and I have A Plan to Deal with That.

What I’m loving about all this? The in-the-trenches experience of fear, and overcoming fear through action. Really, there’s no point in standing around on a platform going “oh.shit.” You just have to move, and keep moving. Somewhere there’s a life lesson in this.

Me being me, I’m always on the lookout for our wee little woodland friends. The wildflower diversity is not great on this site.

Canada mayflowers abound. I’m going to work on a series of macros that feature blurry park elements/platforms in the distance. The one above was my first try. What do you think?

A fair number of them are flowering, bonus.

There are some starflowers.

And, last but not least, I’ve seen a few of what I believe might be sessile-leaved bellwort.

 

 

Alas, I’ve noticed some poison ivy.

Speaking of which, I have NEVER seen so much poison ivy, generally speaking, as I have down here in Connecticut. Damn!

In other news, Kevin-my-Kevin (which is Kevin’s new nickname now that my new boss turns out to be named Kevin as well) is returning home this evening from a bizness trip to Spain and Italy. Boy, am I looking forward to seeing him!

Even the plants are better organized than I am

Take the lilac: it’s made and released seeds…

“Laaaaaah!”


…and they’ve already made their buds for next year.

Rhododendron: same story. As for me? I haven’t even put away my summer T-shirts yet.
I get complimented occasionally by my slavishly devoted blog fans for how Observant I am, How Great that I Notice All the Beauty in the Ordinary World Around Me.  Explain to me then how I managed to miss this entire huge shrub, right next to the Maybe Arrowwood Maybe Hydrangea shrub.

Huhhhh...? Anybody have any suggestions? It’s a shrub with opposite leaves. That’s all I got.


Deformed magnolia buds are turning red. Did you see the one where I dissected these in the hopes that they were insect galls? Turns out they were growing seeds. Ooops. Sorry.
And now for the wildflower report.

Starflower. The evergreen leaves are vinca – which, incidentally, are still throwing off purple flowers.

Miterwort. 
Yeah, I know, not as beautiful as you were hoping for, huh? It’s fall, people! Here’s what miterwort looks like when it’s flowering. And here are its positively cute-alicious seeds.
OK, one last bit of news. The other day’s fall dandelion is actually Cat’s Ear (Hypochoeris radicata). Thanks, Arianna, for figuring that out for me!

Mmmm, sweet. Relish this color, cause it’s all gonna fade soon…
The tie-breaking indicator? Fuzzy leaves.


Charlie greets his namesake flower.

happy memorial day weekend!

How are you celebrating it? We’re going with our usual strategy of embracing the beauty of the every day around here. Our next two weekends are going to be jam-packed, so we’re laying as low as we can today. Today started as our Saturdays generally do: “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” on NPR, pancakes, and bacon. This week, Local Hero Tom Bodett (he lives not far from here) won the contest. Hometown proud, that’s us.
Kevin’s been busy the last couple of days setting up garden beds. This year, we’ll have three 4’x12’ beds. He’s in charge, given that I don’t garden. (I know: you’d think I would, being all nature girly Princess Groundy Pants, but I’m not there yet.) I believe the plan is, watermelon, cantaloupe, white onions, bell peppers, and green beans. Plus – still in the realm of imagination, as I have not lifted a finger to make this happen – cherry tomatoes. (Those will be on the deck in containers.)

Voilà!

In today’s flower report, the wild strawberries are going to seed, bit by bit. If you stare at the center of the one on the right and squint, you can see little green bits that look like they’ll be the surface of a strawberry. Don’t strawberries have lots of little seeds like, on their surfaces? Yeah, that sounds right. So will the berry grow outward and end up encompassing each of these little stamens? The more I look at the world, the more I realize I don’t know nuthin’.

before…	and after

 

Iris flowers are getting bolder. Go, go, go!

Most of the big ferns are just about completely opened up – they’re as tall as my ribcage. Sometimes the tips of the ferns get tangled up in one another and it takes them a while to sort it out.

Round-leaved dogwood (Cornus rugosa) suddenly appeared out of nowhere, complete with ants and other buggies crawling all over the flowers. This is a shrub; I’m not sure how big it can get.

Apparently I don’t get tired taking pictures of bluets. They have a magical floaty look to them that I can’t resist…

The honeysuckle opened up today! Yee haw!

In the mystery woodland today, as I was being eaten alive by mosquitos, I saw a couple of starflower plants that had actually produced flowers. I’d seen a lot of these over the course of the spring, but no flowers until today. These guys were HUGE – easily twice the size of any of the plants I’d seen all along.

They’re dusty with someone else’s pollen.

I love how the flowers themselves look just like the plant. The flower stalk is the most delicate thing you’ve ever seen.

Not all the flowers around here are white…the second azalea out back has popped open in the last two days.

The first azalea’s still kicking butt, too.

Plus, nestled under the azalea, we have what I think are your basic chives…

Hi sweetie!

the big picture and the small picture

I had a marathon conversation with my best friend today – I call her my wife, which gets confusing, since this blog is named “musings from dave” and there’s no Dave in sight and I’m a girl married to a guy named Kevin. (New here? Here’s who Dave is.) ANYHOW. Long conversation. With the camera in hand. This is what happened while we were having ourselves a good soul spring cleaning.

“I’m in jail!”

Oh, no I’m not.

(Actually, this is part of what we were talking about. How to get the screen out of the way. The human dilemma: we get to choose our own perceptions, which means, rats, we’re responsible for ourselves. You know, you can be the bug, you can be the windshield, something like that.)

Let’s be naughty and go out on the roof.

You get a lovely view from the point of no return. Or so Terry Pratchett says.

Ho hum. Back to ground level we go…

For the record: On May 7, 2010, the last of the magnolia blossoms was about to drop. This year, they’re just starting to open, still, after a couple of days hanging out like this:

I guess they’re savoring the sun. I should start a betting pool on when we get x (say, 50?) percent of them wide open. Any takers?

The aliens lilac flowers are coming along nicely. They appreciate the sun – it was rainy for two days before today.

OK, we’re entering the Woodland Mystery now.

‘Tis guarded by the venerable yellow birch, here seen with some of its retinue of admirers. Seriously, there’s a whole pile of wildflowers at the base of this tree, most of which appear on this blog somewhere or other.

The butternut (white walnut, Juglans cinerea) that skulks at the side of that birch. Is it just me, or do you see the main leaf in the middle having a conversation with the leaf on the right? “Well, I never!” Oh wow – see how much this has opened up just since yesterday?

Also in the retinue a the base of the yellow birch: I used to think this was a sessile-leaf bellwort before it it big enough for me to see the wee little buds forming in the axils with the leaves. Whoops! This makes it look like Solomon Seal (actual, not false), but it’s so tiny… (maybe three inches tall.) I guess a big plant has to start off tiny at some point, right? I guess I’m having a learning experience here.

Into the leaf litter and sea of vinca we go. I tried HARD to get a shot of a spent birch catkin that shows that the little bits are arranged in a spiral down the length of the catkin, but I just couldn’t capture it. So you’ll just have to believe me. It’s something I didn’t notice until I started playing with one that had fallen. It makes sense from a design point of view – it’s like a tightly coiled spring, a way to get a lot of materiel organized for rapid deployment.

Pretty sure this is starflower, so…where’s the flower? (There “should” be a stalk coming out of the center where the leaves meet…) (Maybe they’re like Canada mayflower and take two years to come to full throttle?)

Pachysandra, making inroads from its headquarters at the base of the magnolia, into the vinca-dominated woodland mystery. I almost didn’t take this picture, but I’m glad I did, because you can see the bases of the flower bits swelling up, compared to when I first saw them.

A shy vinca.

Charlie comes along for the ride. That bright green to the far right is the pachysandra’s base of operations.

In the meantime, on the west side of the house, the snail ferns plot their next move. Another spiral. Nature’s awfully sneaky.

We have a sea of vinca over there, as well. Hooray!

This is how a beech responds when you cut it down. A hell of stump sprouts. This will take several years of disciplined cutting back to starve out, I think. I know that sounds mean! But this tree was too close to the addition’s footprint – its branches would have overhung the roof. So down it came.

Oh hey, that’s where I stopped. Hope you’re having a lovely day, wherever you are!