Junk Mail and Plants

Junk mail.

We all get it, and most of mine goes straight into the bag of mixed paper I take to the recycling center on Saturdays. Well — not straight. It tends to hang around on my kitchen table for a while before I get around to sorting it, but I rarely get something I read, and even more rarely something that I order.

Except seed catalogs, which I keep to drool over in the dark days of winter. And plant catalogs.

I got a Logee’s catalog in the mail several weeks ago. I drooled appropriately. I told myself firmly that I did not need any new houseplants.

I do have a beautiful, light area for houseplants, thermostated separately from the rest of the house. When I bought this house eleven years ago, the one thing that bothered me was the location of the doors. There were two, one from the kitchen into the heated garage (a luxury my cars had never known before) and the other right next to the garage door. I had just been through a fire, and emergency exit during a fire was never far from my mind. In this house, the furnace was in the garage, and the bedrooms were all at the opposite end of the house.

Granted the bedroom windows were large and not too far above the ground.

I still didn’t want even to think about them as emergency exits. It’s a considerable effort even to reach one to adjust the blinds.

So I decided to have an arctic entry added at the bedroom end of the house. Granted it’s somewhat unusual to have an entry directly from the master bedroom, but given the floor plan of the house, that was the only possible way of putting in a door well away from the furnace. (It was a furnace fire that got me the first time.)

As long as I was putting in an arctic entry, why not a plant room? I was already overrun with plants, as I have been in every place I’ve lived. So there is now a small room, about 8’ by 10’, with windows on three sides, jutting out from the southeast corner of the house and opening off of the arctic entry. It’s wired for 8 fluorescent tubes, on timers, in the ceiling, and another set of timed outlets where I have a set of trays and 4-tube fluorescents. What’s more, I’d just cleaned it up, after throwing out the plants I’ve had for years when I could not get rid of the cottony scale on the amaryllis.

The Logee’s catalog won.

I’d already planned to bring in the potted geraniums and the rose for the winter, and I just couldn’t resist an orchid Safeway had on sale. They will now be joined by four small citrus, three jasmines, a streptocarpus, an episcia and a peach-gold Christmas cactus that I’m gambling will not be too badly affected by the long days programmed for the plant lights.

I also ordered two plant books: Spectacular Container Plants and Growing Tasty Tropical Plants in Any Home, Anywhere. Well, I enjoy reading plant books, and it’s been a while since I had citrus and jasmine. But I do remember the scent of their flowers, and between those, the rose-scented geranium, and the potted rose, the plant room should be a pleasant place, this winter.

Fairbanks Weather, 9/19/11

The sun rose this morning at 7:24 and will set this evening at 8:07 pm for 12 hours 45 minutes of day — 6 ½ minutes less than yesterday. The sun is 26 ½ ° above the horizon at noon, and nights are getting longer. The waning half moon, however, has been high in the sky the last few nights.

Early Friday morning is the autumnal equinox – on Central, the southward equinox, sometimes called Feastday. (The Central year begins with the vernal equinox, called Yearday there.)

Very few deciduous trees have even a hint of green left.

I still haven’t had a frost at my place, though I’m expecting one every night. It’s interesting to watch the progress of the trees. Those that were among the first to show yellow are now almost bare, while only the slowest still show some green. The grass in the North yard is almost covered with dead leaves.

The tomatoes are beginning to ripen, and the zucchini – well, another trip to donate to the food bank had better be part of the agenda for today.

The Farmers Market had their last session of the season yesterday. I’m sorry from the point of view of getting local produce (though there is now a market that carries local products) but relieved that I will not be spending every Wednesday at the market trying to sell my books.

Even the big chain supermarkets show signs of fall. Sweet cherries have vanished, replaced by winter squash. It’s time to keep an eye out for delicata, which I have not succeeded in growing. I like to cut it in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, brush the cut surfaces and the seed cavity with olive oil and microwave it –about 10 minutes for a medium squash. Then scoop out the flesh and add sausage, meatballs or meatloaf. Someday I’ll put up my favorite turkey meatloaf crock-pot recipe.

Six Sentences from Tourist Trap

This is the end of the section I’ve been using for Six Sentence Sunday. In fact, the end of the section was reached after 4 sentences, so I put in two from the next section. Starting next week, I’ll be using bits from WIP.

Her hand rose to touch her aching jaw, and she realized with a start that she was still wearing the breathing mask that had kept her from drowning as she was carried downstream. She didn’t need it to sleep in, she thought, and pulled it off of her face. She was half hypnotized by the dancing flames, and very tired. Gradually her eyes became harder and harder to keep open.

****

The sun woke her from a nightmare. She had been somewhere else entirely, cramped into a cage.

Tourist Trap is now published (it wasn’t when I started blogging from it) and available from Barnes and Noble and Amazon — I hope by now in all formats. I’d love some reviews.

Other Six Sentence Sunday authors:

 

Blogger Ball #7

Welcome to my blog!

I haven’t quite figured out how to do a day-of-the-week link for past posts, but my current schedule is:

Sunday: Six Sentence Sunday, so far with snippets of scenes from my 2nd book, Tourist Trap. I will probably go to a WIP next week, as the scene I’ve been doing is almost finished.

Monday: Meteorological Monday, with posts about current weather in Alaska

Tuesday: Review (very broadly interpreted — I’ve reviewed an amazing variety of things.)

Wednesday: Contexts for the quotes I’ve tweeted in the preceding week. Mostly from science fiction and fantasy, but I’ve also done mystery, Jane Austin, Shakespeare … Follow at @sueannbowling if you want to try to identify them yourself. I follow writers back.

Thursday: Anything that comes to mind. I’ve posted poems, essays. postcard stories, gripes … I’ve also done series on Christmas Carols, horse color genetics, and planet building, among others.

Friday: Bits of the background of the sf universe in which my books are set. Right now that’s a fictional Journal of an alien stranded on Earth 125,000 years ago.

Saturday: Science (my career was as a university scientist) and health (personal experience with diabetes, breast cancer, and stroke)

I do have a page (right sidebar or listed at the top of this page) of SheWrites blogs, culled from “What Did You Blog About Today?), “WordPress Bloggers” and “Blooming Late.” If you want to be on this rather haphazard list and you’re not, leave a comment.

(Click on the books to get back.

Thermometers in Fairbanks

I have a new thermometer.

Now there is nothing new about having a thermometer. As an atmospheric scientist, I have several. The big one out in the old dog pen seems fine in the winter, though it is useless when the summer sun is shining on its back. (I know it doesn’t get to 120° F up here, even in summer!) The one next to the front door reads suspiciously high in the winter, and I suspect it is influenced by heat leakage from the house wall.

I had an indoor outdoor pair, with one outdoor sensor, well located on an outside corner on the north side of the house, and two indoor stations, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom, but the two receivers did not agree on temperature. (I don’t mean a degree or two; I mean they could be off by 20°, reading the temperature from the same sensor.) They needed replacing, I thought. What’s more, the outdoor sensor was battery-operated, and batteries don’t work very well at sub-zero temperatures. Even when they worked, the indoor stations quit even trying to show outdoor temperature at -20°F, which could mean for weeks at a time.

Then about a week ago I was idly checking the thermometers at Fred Meyers. They’re generally good for a laugh — who in their right mind would buy an outdoor thermometer that only reads to 40 below (let alone to only 20 below) in Fairbanks? They had the battery-operated indoor-outdoor sets as well, and for the first time I noticed that while they had an alleged range from -40°F to 158°F, the alkaline batteries I’d been using were only good to -4F. Lithiums were supposedly good to -40°F. (There’s a lot of difference between -20°F and -40°F, or for that matter between -40°F and -60°F, but below -40°F I just stay indoors.)

Old and new outdoor temperature sensors. Outside NE corner, N side, under roof overhang.

The sets, indoor display unit and outdoor sensor, were on sale for under $10, and I decided to get two — at that price, I could just keep one sensor in reserve. Of course to use them, I had to get them out of their plastic bubble packaging.

When possible, I try to recycle. It’s not easy up here, and until recently about the only things you could recycle were aluminum cans, but it is now possible to recycle #1 and #2 plastics (soft drink bottles and milk bottles.)

Not the stuff they use to package electronics. At least it does not have a recycle symbol – I looked. After I had just about cut my fingers off trying to open the blasted thing. Why is it that you have to carry the equivalent of a box cutter and pliers to get anything open nowadays? Even airline snacks (if you can find an airline that still has them.) And then you have all that plastic cluttering up the landfill.

Well, I did finally get the new stations and sensor out of their hermetically sealed plastic coffins and talking to each other. I used lithium batteries in the sensor, and let the sensor and both stations sit side by side overnight, verifying that all four of the temperatures displayed were within a couple of degrees of each other. Then I hung the new sensor (which had a hanging loop) from the old sensor with a piece of string. Now I have base stations in the kitchen and bedroom again, and – surprise, the old stations are showing outdoor temperatures within a degree of the new ones. Guess they just needed the competition.

And lithium batteries come in AAA size, which is what the old sensor needs.  I could have base stations all over the house!

Jarn’s Journal Day 353

This is another (fictional) excerpt from the journal of the alien supposedly behind the modern human race (at least in my science fiction!) He was stranded in Africa about 125,000 years ago when his ship crashed, and has just rescued a child of the early human tribe he has found. For the earlier parts of his Journal, see my Author Website.

Day 353

It’s a good thing I have spied on the sentients enough to have learned a little of their language, as the child seems unable to learn mine. Hers is a pretty simple one: specific sounds for specific objects, more specific sounds for specific actions, various other sounds that describe objects and actions. R’il’nian might have been that simple, early in our evolution, but her brain does not seem wired to understand R’il’nian as it exists today.

They do have individual names, and her only difficulty in understanding me when I tapped my chest and repeated “Jarn” seemed to be that the particular sound meant nothing to her. Her own name is also the sound her people use to designate a small bird, dull colored but a beautiful singer. I find myself thinking of her as “Songbird.”

In some ways she is remarkably quick. She rapidly grasped that I did not understand her language very well and set about teaching it to me, and demanding that I give her the names for things strange to her in the shelter. Rather a turnaround from what I expected, but a surprisingly pleasant turnaround! In the day and a half since she awoke, we have established far better communication than I have with Patches.

Oh, Patches.She was afraid of Patches at first, but once she understood that Patches was friendly to me and willing to be friends with her, she managed to tell me that her own people now and then tamed young animals from the wild. In fact, they seem to have a religion of sorts, and the shamans always have some kind of tamed animal – or claim to. I must confess I have my doubts about invisible animals no one but the shamans can see!

Physically the leg appears to be knitting rapidly, and all signs of infection are gone. In fact, once she was convinced that my splints would hold, it was impossible to keep her lying down. I have managed plumbing, although rather primitive, in my shelter, and a system for disposing of bodily waste. I have to say she is far more fascinated by these than by the recorder or the computer!

So far I have managed to avoid asking why her people left her to die, telling myself it is because I still do not understand her language well enough. This is an excuse, and tomorrow I will ask her.

Or perhaps the next day.

You’re It? Ten Random Facts About Myself.

I just got tagged by Samanatha Stacia to tell ten things about myself, and tag three other people. Well the ten things are fine, but have you any idea how many people that kind of tripling every day would involve?

Just for the heck of it (and because it’s a good example of what a regular doubling (or tripling, in this case) can do, I calculated how many bloggers would be affected if each one tagged actually tagged three others, and if those tagged posted their blogs the next day. Ready? Here’s what it does:

day	number
1	1
2	3
3	9
4	27
5	81
6	243
7	729
8	2,187
9	6,561
10	19,683
11	59,049
12	177,147
13	531,441
14	1,594,323
15	4,782,969
16	14,348,907
17	43,046,721
18	129,140,163
19	387,420,489
20	1,162,261,467
21	3,486,784,401
22	10,460,353,203
23	31,381,059,609
24	94,143,178,827
25	282,429,536,481
26	847,288,609,443
27	2,541,865,828,329
28	7,625,597,484,987
29	22,876,792,454,961
30	68,630,377,364,883
31	205,891,132,094,649

That’s over 200 trillion people in the first month! (The population of the Earth is only about 7 billion, which would be exceeded by day 22.)

Obviously many people who are tagged do not respond, people rather quickly start getting tagged twice (or more) and the whole thing breaks apart from its own weight. So I’ll play the game as a blog-publicizing exercise, but anyone I tag should not respond if they’ve already been tagged once. Regard it as advertizing for your blog.

1. I started talking before I could walk. (And I still like birthday cake.) I still also talk better than I walk.

2. I’ve loved horses ever since I can remember. (My parents claimed they had to pry me off the pony, which belonged to an itinerant photographer.

3. While still in grade school, I discovered my father’s subscription to Astounding Science Fiction, and later, his back issues to the late 30’s and read them all.

4. I’ve been telling myself stories (mostly about horses to start with) in third person past tense since grade school.

5. My first attempt at publication was in high school or thereabouts. I sent a werewolf story to John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding. He wrote back saying it was too much a fantasy story for Astounding, but I could write. (The story has since been totally rewritten at novelette length and I’m thinking of e-publishing it on Amazon.)

6. I took a poetry writing class at Harvard, even though my major was physics. (Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately? I’ve lost those poems.)

7. I bred and showed Shetland Sheepdogs for over 25 years, and my first dog, Derry, became the first dog of any breed from north of the Alaska Range to earn an AKC tracking title. (He was also the canine telepath who inspired the pocket herders, a breed of dog that is important in my unpublished trilogy.)

8. At one time I developed and programmed scientific models in FORTRAN on punched cards, and later learned to make web pages with HTML and Netscape 1.

Dot

9. Although none of my Shelties after Derry had much herding instinct, I had three Shetland sheep and competed in herding trials with my Border Collie, Dot.

10. At one time, some 20 years ago, I was lead writer for The Alaska Science Forum, a weekly popular science column that went to media outlets all over Alaska.

And to my surprise, I find myself 70 years old.

My picks (the three latest in the WordPress group on SheWrites because quite a few I read already have been tagged) are:

Colleen Crinion

Pat Nance

Costa Jill

Quotes from Mercedes Lackey

This week it’s all Mercedes Lackey (except mine), all from the first two books of the Mage Winds series. Shin’a’in and Tayledras proverbs make for good Twitter-length quotes!

“There is nothing quite like being able to legitimately pass the responsibility.” Mercedes Lackey, Winds of Fate. Quentin’s thoughts when he realizes he must send Elspeth to another Mage for training.

“He’ll have to know when not to use his power.” Mercedes Lackey, Winds of Fate. Elspeth, considering what kind of mage Valdamar needs.

“That which does not overcome us, strengthens us.” Mercedes Lackey, Winds of Fate. Shin’a’in proverb, quoted by Kra’heera when he sends Elspeth and Skif to the plains without guarding them.

“It doesn’t matter what she is. What matters is what she does.” Mercedes Lackey, Winds of Change. A Heraldic saying, quoted to himself by Skif as he seeks Nyara.

“If it gets caught, it deserves to get eaten.” Mercedes Lackey, Winds of Change. Tayledras saying, quoted by Nyara. This has a double meaning: something caught deserves to be eaten and appreciated, not merely treated as a trophy. (As I tell myself each September when my Mac guru goes off to get a moose for his freezer when my computer is misbehaving.)

“No one has lived who has not been a fool at least once.” Mercedes Lackey, Winds of Change. A Shin’a’in proverb, quoted by Darkwind as he apologizes to Elspeth.

“People misunderstand us pretty often. They don’t often apologize.” Sue Ann Bowling, Tourist Trap. Penny apologizes to Flame for misinterpreting her slipping into Roi’s bunk at night (he has nightmares sleeping alone), and that’s Flame’s answer.

A Concert for New York, As Seen in Alaska

Very short entry today, I’m not much of a music reviewer. I do know what I like, and Mahler’s 2^nd Symphony, “The Resurrection Symphony,” is definitely in the “like” category.

When I watch TV, it’s generally PBS, and Performance Today is one of my must-watches.

Sunday night they had A Concert for New York, actually performed and taped at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center on Saturday, but shown on 9/11. I don’t think I can actually put it up on the blog, but it is available online.

This is one of those symphonies that has not only the orchestra, but solo voices and a chorus. They sang in German, but with a translation on the screen. All that is created dies. All that dies is resurrected. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Fairbanks Weather 9/12/11

Sunrise was at 7:04 this morning and sunset at 8:29 this evening, for a daylength of 13 hours 25 minutes. We’re losing 6 minutes 39 seconds a day. The sun at its highest is a little more than 29° above the horizon, and now dips more than 18° below the horizon — astronomical night. At the same time the full moon, which of course is opposite the sun in the sky, is getting higher in the sky — almost 25° tonight. The last quarter will be higher yet.

Amur maple in my yard. It has some anthocayanins, but as an exotic is slow to turn color.

I put the plastic covers over the beans and squash last night, and brought in the geraniums. The late-planted green beans are almost ready to pick, and as this is a new variety for me, I at least want to find out what they taste like! Turned out it wasn’t necessary, though, as the temperature at sunrise was 36F.

The trees are at that stage where some are green with just a few yellow leaves, some are about half turned, some are all gold, and some are already turning tan and losing their leaves. Yellow leaves sprinkle my lawn. There are even a few clumps of red-orange on the hillsides.

Clumps? Yes. Aspens, like birch, normally turn yellow in the fall, not orange. But a few mutant aspen do show a lot more red than usual in their foliage. Single trees would be hard to spot, but aspens spread by growing new shoots from their roots. This is decidedly problematic when you have a lawn bordered by aspens; trees are constantly poking themselves through the grass. But it also means that a stand of aspen is often actually a clone, each tree identical to its neighbors genetically. If one of the mutant trees with more red than usual in its fall coloring starts forming a spreading clone, the result is a red patch on the hillside.

The photo, looking ENE from a parking lot on the north side of Fairbanks, shows two such clones on Birch Hill. The more obvious is on the right side of the picture, just below the horizon. The other, smaller clone, is above and to the left of the Home Depot sign. More than likely, the uniform light green areas are other clones, ones that turn color late.