Sorry about the funky title for this post. Feeling frivolous I guess. Saturday morning my wife, holding our granddaughter and looking out into our dooryard, beckoned me to come and see. There was some woodpecker action going on that was worth seeing. Sure enough, a large pileated woodpecker was working on the remains of a poplar tree. The upper part of this tree fell a few years back and took out the telephone AND power lines. I’d started worrying about this as soon as I noticed that the tree had died. But it was a pretty big tree, very close to the house and the power lines. It would take some courageous planning to deal with this, not just gassing up the chain saw and letting her rip. Been there, done that, had to call the power company for help afterward. Embarrassing.

Winding up for a big peck ‘o wood.

This bird and maybe some of its extended family have been working this [very tall] stump for some months now. This is the first time we’ve had the pleasure of watching. The chips really do fly. Constructed a little video with some stills and some music by Erik Satie. Gnossienne Nr. 1. For some reason videos of birds seem best set to the solo piano compositions of this turn of the century (19th to 20th) French musical genius.

This bird hung out for a good 5 minutes. Nice of it to give me time to find the camera.

Another month or two of this and the stump will be much shorter.

For the parting shot I’ve got a photo from work. Our nursing students do some of their work on dummies in a lab space filled with hospital beds. They were getting the lab space ready for the spring semester classes and had to pull all the dummies off the beds temporarily. So they had to hang out for a bit in the study lounge.

This photo belongs in this post, right?

 

Maybe you’ve already heard about this. A recent item in The Week  magazine really intrigued me. It’s a story that came out just before the arrival of 2012. You might say it “rang in” the new year. What happened was that this lady in Sweden was digging carrots in her garden. On a small carrot she was about to toss into the compost pile she noticed something shiny. It was her wedding ring, which had been missing since Christmas of 1995!

16 years ago Mrs. Paahlsson had taken the ring off to do some Christmas baking with her daughters, and they reckoned the ring got mixed in with vegetable peelings or some such.  Mrs. Paahlsson had designed this ring herself, a band of white gold with 7 small diamonds set in it.  This ring, after passing through the compost pile, or maybe even the digestive tract of a sheep, and which they’d long since given up hope of ever finding, had found its way into a garden bed, where it rested for who knows how long,  until last fall, when a carrot seed sprouted and grew right into it.  Amazing!

If you Google “wedding ring on carrot” you’ll find various treatments of this story, with commentary ranging from incredulous negativity to comical puns (carats & carrots) to sappy romantic positivity and words like kismet. As an avid digger in the soil I have never found such a thing, but neither have I ever lost such a thing. I don’t usually take off my ring, even when working in the garden.

This photo doesn’t have much to do with the topic, except for the beauty.

That crazy aloe vera plant at work is doing it again, in the middle of the winter. I’ve posted pictures of these pretty flowers here before, but it’s been a while. In the year or two since, the aloe vera plant has been lovingly repotted by one of the awesome groundskeepers crew. Thanks Jesse! And thanks Nancy for the title of this post and for your help tending to this beautiful plant.

In mid-December the flower stalk was just emerging.

Just after New Years the stalk had grown about a foot and a half.

Maybe the aloe is looking forward to the students returning to campus for the spring semester. The library, where this plant has been living for about 10 years, will soon be all abuzz with busy brains absorbing all sorts of wonderful knowledge. Nice way to show the enthusiasm aloe!

Just outside the winter has finally decided to start acting like itself. Thursday brought the first 6 inches of snow since Thanksgiving. The grounds had been bare and frozen for most of December. It’s nice to have some snow on the ground finally. Sort of.

This frozen puddle looked interesting last week.

 As a technical note, all the photos in this post were taken with the iPhone 4 that I got back in November. I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the jpegs produced by the phone’s camera. It’s only a couple of megapixels less resolution than the Canon A210 that I’ve been using for the past few years (7.1 megapixels).  Most cameras are up over 10mp now. I like how many of  the latest cameras have styled themselves after the old Leica M series in body shape, the history of which goes back to the 1920s.  Though I can’t imagine using film again, if someone gave me a nice Leica M7, I’d gladly buy some film and take the developing tank down from the attic.

A pithy quote from the book I’m reading, which has heretofore been a light comedy, but full of nice old words like heretofore.  It’s from the previously mentioned volume, Three Men In A Boat, first published in 1889, and now in the public domain.

It was a glorious night.  The moon had sunk, and left the quiet earth alone with the stars.  It seemed as if, in the silence and the hush, while we her children slept, they were talking with her, their sister—conversing of mighty mysteries in voices too vast and deep for childish human ears to catch the sound. They awe us, these strange stars, so cold, so clear. 

We are as children whose small feet have strayed into some dim-lit temple of the god they have been taught to worship but know not; and, standing where the echoing dome spans the long vista of the shadowy light, glance up, half hoping, half afraid to see some awful vision hovering there.

Jerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) (2011-03-30). Three Men in a Boat (p. 96). Kindle Edition.