Nice Little Weekend Visit

A few pics from this past weekend.

Cyrus and I went outside to play so that Shirin could complete her nap after Cyrus woke up from his. I asked him to make a happy face.

This is what I got when I asked for an angry face. I said, "Aw c'mon, make an ANGRY face!"

This is what I got - so scary I took a blurry picture!

Nearby the wisteria were in full bloom. They smelled so good and I could smell them from this far away.

Wow! I'll bet Cyrus got a snort full of fragrance!

Dinner at The Grit. Cyrus ate his dinner and some of Shirin's and mine.

Should I have included this picture in my blog? My sleeve is in it and Saeed looks really unhappy! He wasn't unhappy, I just have a hard time getting him to smile.

I don't look like my children or my grandson. Where the heck did my genes go?

I love this picture. Shirin is doing a crossword puzzle and Cyrus is reading by himself.

I bet he knows this story by heart.

Must be good - look at that grin.

I took some video too but don't have time to upload them right now. I have book club tonight, so maybe tomorrow? Check back later. :-)

National Cancer Control Month

April is National Cancer Control month so here is Dr. Weil's newsletter item for today:

A healthy diet can help the body in its efforts to heal itself, and in some cases particular foods can help protect against the development of serious illness. To help reduce your risk of some types of cancer, try the following dietary steps:

1. Avoid polyunsaturated vegetable oils, margarine, vegetable shortening, all partially hydrogenated oils, and all foods that might contain trans-fatty acids (such as deep-fried foods).
2. Increase omega-3 fatty acids by eating more cold water oily fish, freshly ground flaxseeds, and walnuts.
3. Reduce consumption of animal foods and try to replace them with vegetable proteins such as whole soy products.
4. Use hormone-free, organically produced products whenever possible.
5. Eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.
6. Eat shiitake, enokitake, maitake, and oyster mushrooms frequently.
7. Drink green tea daily.

I can do all of those but the cold water oily fish. I eat walnuts daily but those flaxseeds, which have to be eaten quickly due to shelf life and ground to release the nutrients from the hull, are a challenge. The Japanese mushrooms are also difficult for us but worth doing some research.

Out Of Control

Out of control - that's how I see the Republican Party at this point. The concept of the Dems and the GOP keeping each other in check is basically a sound one, albeit with problems aplenty. Currently, however, it's like a marriage gone bad with one of the spouses refusing to take their meds. Here is the link to an awesome post titled "An open letter to conservatives" by a conservative republican blogger known as "American Dad." He's spot on.

Puddles Of Plenteous Pollen

Yes it did rain, quite a lot in fact, but not enough to wash the pollen down the drain. Big puddles of pollen are everywhere. I ended up taking my car through the car wash once the sun came out. It looks much better :-)

Puddle of pollen

Spring Has Sprung

You know I love to take pictures of the flora and fauna around our house...

These first few pictures are of the holly bushes by our front steps. How long have I lived here? I never remember them flowering this way, but the bees were going crazy so I looked more closely and had a beautiful surprise. Have they flowered this way every spring? Surely.

This is the picture I used for my blog background above. Can you see the pollen dusting the leaves? The pollen is particularly heavy this year.

The forsythia flowers are actually on their way out.

Last weekend the azalea bushes looked about to explode with flowers. This bush shows four early bloomers, but further down you'll see pictures taken three days later. BOOM!

If you enlarge this picture you can better see the pollen coating the blossoms.

Redbud tree.

Redbud blossoms.

Look at the baby leaves!

The apple tree blossoms are so pretty.

I worry so much about the declining butterfly populations so it does my heart good to see them in our yard.

We have several large beds of periwinkle groundcover.

Two little shy girls hiding in the leaves.

So simple, so beautiful.

As I'm coming back into the house I notice Obi in the sunroom.

He loves to stay in here and look out all day.

This picture was taken three days later. See how many more of the azaleas have bloomed.

This is actually Chappu on the other side.

More azaleas of a different hue. Even the leaves are a different hue, more of a blue-ish green than the true green of the azalea bushes above.

Not to be outdone by the flowers these maple tree 'helicopters' are beautiful in their own way.

Mystery blossom -- do you know what it is?

Today it finally rained a bit. All the pollen that was dusting every surface just glopped up into yellow puddles and yellow clumps. It's supposed to rain more tonight so hopefully it will all wash away.

Our yellow-dusted deck rail.

On NPR this morning they said the usual high point for pollen in this area is 1800 granules per unit measure. Yesterday they measured it at 9000 granules per unit measure. Local 'experts' have suggested that the large volume of pollen this year is due to the fact that we had such a relatively cold winter with such an abrupt and sudden heat spell. Temps the last two days were over 90 degrees with high 80s before that, perhaps fooling all the trees to throw out their pollen when normally different species release it at different points throughout the spring. I'm just ready for it to be gone! I've had to use my windshield wipers to clear my car window each morning as if it had been dusted with a light flurry of snow during the night.

Obi Smells My Sandwich

I walked into the living room with my freshly made sandwich and placed it on the end table. Obi was so cute sleeping in the chair that I turned on my camera to take his picture. I accidentally woke him up (poor baby) and that was a bad move on my part....

Damn that woman, (yawn) waking me up...

Hmm, do I smell something?

Oh yeah, I just got a whiff of a tofurky sandwich!

At this point I had to put the camera down and go save my sandwich, so sorry, no more pictures.

OWL!

Over the last couple of years we have noticed an increase in owl vocalizations in our neighborhood, primarily at night as one would expect. When we first moved to this neighborhood (15 years ago?) I don't remember any owl sounds at all. So imagine my surprise one recent morning as I was trying to rush out the back door on my way to work when I looked out my kitchen window and saw an owl sitting on the bird feeder post.

(taken through the screen and glass)

I opened my back door to be able to take a better picture and he/she flew to the tree and looked back at me.

This is an enlarged as I could get the picture without it getting too pixelated.

Although several species of owl migrate through South Carolina there are only four species of owl that live and breed here year round. Below is a brief description of the barred owl which matches this fellow perfectly, including the  "who-who-who-who, who-who-who-whoowha" sound we hear every night. (It's only about 7:15 pm and an owl is hooting right now!) The excerpt comes from  hiltonpond.org. Bill Hilton is well known in this area, was a local high school biology teacher, and runs The Hilton Pond Center which serves to conserve animals and plants in this area and allows for study and research. In fact when I was studying to be a biology teacher I subbed for his classes for three weeks when he went on an expedition to Australia.

Barred Owl
Of all owls found in the state, the Barred Owl (Strix varia) is seen most often because it is "crepuscular." This means it is active in twilight hours of dusk and dawn, and sometimes in broad daylight. Named for its breast markings, this large owl is the only Carolina species with dark eyes; all the rest have yellow irises. Barred Owls also have the most recognizable call, a "who-who-who-who, who-who-who-whoowha" that most people translate into "who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-all." Barred Owls are especially vocal during courtship when, in the words of Allen Eckert (The Owls of North America, Weathervane Books), there are "specialized calls made with relative infrequency which virtually defy written description. Some are coarse, guttural, and, to human ears, almost uncouth in character. Others are much like the fierce, hair-raising shrieks of mating alley cats. There are deep chucklings, harsh laughing sounds, maniacal gibberings and gabblings, disconsolate mutterings, howls, and yells. Occasionally there will even be a decidedly disconcerting humanlike scream of pure agony." Such vivid description explains why my friend Russ Rogers Jr. barely slept for the three months it took a Barred Owl pair in his Fort Mill backyard to court and then raise offspring. Barred Owls are most common in wooded bottomlands and swamps.

This is what the owl sounds like:

Found Two Videos

Just before I started growing my sabzi for Norooz Cyrus (and probably his mom and dad) came for a visit. I must have taken a couple of videos of Cyrus toward the end of that weekend that got in with my 'growing the sabzi' pictures and found them today. In the first video I catch the tail end of a game he and his Baba had been playing and clearly Cyrus wasn't ready for the game to be over! In the second one we were just hanging out on the deck and at one point he keeps saying 'bin'. You'll see that eventually I figured it out. Notice too the condition of the deck; it has since gotten a nice coat of stain on the floor boards and paint on the railings.