All posts in Nature
Agilities
For me, it was baseball practice. Soccer too, I suppose, but I usually weaseled my way out of them on account of I was lazy. I mean the goalie.
High stepping and sprinting and jumping over cones and balancing eggs on spoons. They were tiring. Afterwards you sweat and stank and your legs felt like soggy noodles. It was the dreaded portion of training. Their announcement was invariably met with grumbles. We partook because we had to.
Kenya Stove Project on Vashon
Payan moved to Kenya when he was two.
He knows first hand the black smoke which billows from traditional cook stoves in Kenya.
Party Fouling Shell
I usually try not to tweet things that aren’t real. In fact, under normal circumstances, I try to be a good internet citizen and do everything I can to avoid passing on fake stories. Wednesday’s event, where I took the staged, now viral, #ShellFAIL video at the Seattle Space Needle, was obviously an exemption to that rule–but one I considered carefully, and was glad to take.
In the case of Arctic drilling, all bets are off. The only reason Shell can now drill up there is that global warming has melted the summer ice to a fraction of what it was last time they tried. Shell’s new plans for exploratory drilling, with the permission of the Obama administration, is the just the first raindrop of a flood.
Shotguns need not apply
Damon and Rebecca have hundreds of grape vines tightly hugging tension wires along the crown of their southern facing sloped hillside on Vashon. These are trained vines with both single and double armed trellising techniques. There are highly diversified clones of Pinot Noir growing here as to deepen the body and experience.
The Forest
The hellebore is blooming outside the porch where the dogs run each morning, night… their white green blossom caught in amongst sword fern and the King Alfred daffodils that will bloom later this month. Spring, late winter, is a quiet return. Drinking coffee and leftover rain and dew catches the new growth on roses, their stems arc and bright green now shows at the ends and middle branches.
A Great White Shark
One sunny afternoon last weekend, I was out removing invasives and restoring a neglected little area just across the alley from my place with a neighbor, Kim. All of a sudden, Kim started laughing and, pointing to the big cottonwoods down in the ravine, exclaimed, “Check it out!”
A remote-controlled, very realistic, but helium-filled great white shark, maybe four feet long and a couple feet high, was drifting ethereally yet inexorably northeast, ascending higher and higher, toward the silver-and-gold-limned late-winter canopy, where it lodged itself in a crotch of the uppermost branches and promptly stuck.
Kim had seen it rise from the house two doors south of mine, where two young men live in a rental owned by John and Judy, neighbors just one door beyond. I said, “That’s the skyscape I photograph every morning! Now, it’s going to have a great white shark right in the middle of it!”
