Yesterday morning I woke to three young raccoons in my backyard. They were digging hard in the fruit crate planters. I yelled out the window for them to stop. Miraculously, they did. They got out of the planters and went looking about under the cedars. But by the time I got myself together, I realized… Continue reading The Daily: 8 July 2024
Category: Home & Garden
The Daily: 3 July 2024
Things to look forward to... visiting a museum The Dog Days begin today. This is when Sol and Sirius shine together all day long, creating blast-furnace heat. Or maybe that's just carbon... Either way, it is the hottest time of the year in northern climes. My mother keeps calling to tell me the latest and… Continue reading The Daily: 3 July 2024
The Daily: 1 July 2024
Today, though the string of longest days ended last week, the latest sunsets end in my part of the world. Tomorrow, the sun will set earlier enough to knock a minute off the evening. By the end of July the day will be about an hour less than its Midsummer length. Also, this Friday the… Continue reading The Daily: 1 July 2024
The Daily: 28 June 2024
Paul Bunyan Day Paul Bunyan statue in Bangor, Maine. (Wikipedia) It’s that special day in June again. No, not that solstice thing. No, forget graduation. No, not the wedding thing. It’s Paul Bunyan Day! A day to celebrate an absolute idiot who blundered through the north woods, wearing plaid flannel, leading a bull named Babe,… Continue reading The Daily: 28 June 2024
The Daily: 24 June 24
Today is St John's Day and Midsummer's Day. Traditionally, this is the best day to harvest herbs. Most of the very large mint family — sage, thyme, lavender, balm, catnip, motherwort, and rosemary, among others, in addition to all the plants named "mint" — are in flower now. Some are approaching the end of their… Continue reading The Daily: 24 June 24
The Daily: 17 June 2024
Summer may have decided to arrive. We've flirted with heat here and there, even hit 93°F back in May, but it has not lasted. It would be warm for a day or two, then it would return to jacket weather. As of this writing I still have not planted out the nightshades because it's been… Continue reading The Daily: 17 June 2024
The Daily: 12 June 2024
The Daily: 10 June 2024
The earliest sunrises, 5:05am, begin on this Thursday in my part of the world and continue until June 17th, with the sun rising one minute later at 5:06am on the 18th. If you don't count seconds, then the longest day length of 15 hours and 30 minutes begins on the Sunday the 16th, Father's Day… Continue reading The Daily: 10 June 2024
The Daily: 3 June 2024
Holy shit! It's June! How did that happen?!? I missed much of the last eight weeks. It began with a long bout of COVID. Then there was a new job with pretty much an entirely new learning curve to master. There was fitful garden activity, mostly of a cleaning up of disasters variety. And I… Continue reading The Daily: 3 June 2024
The Daily: 24 May 24
It's been the sort of month that pushes even climate deniers out of their comfy head-in-the-sand world. Every day there are pictures of homes and lives destroyed by extreme storms, from one end of the country to the other. In May, folks... The Northern Hemisphere is not yet heated to its summer temperatures and we're… Continue reading The Daily: 24 May 24
