Honest Scrap: About Me

Heidi, over at Gippsland Garden, has passed on the Honest Scrap Award to me a few weeks ago now, and I'm finally getting down to it.  I think it is a very nice idea.  Many of the blogs I read regularly have a little something to them that keeps me coming, and its generally the personality behind the blog.   It's always peeking out here and there and it makes following those garden stories richer.

The whole idea is to list 10 things that readers might not know about you... honest stuff :)!  So here you are, a few things that might be hard to guess:

1)I consider myself a world traveller.  What I mean by world travel is that I have tried my best to experience different places and cultures from various angles.   You can do this across town as well as across the world and I have done a lot of both.   I have been fortunate enough to be able to do some things that no getting around it, you just have to pay for.  Going on a first class overnight train trip is something that sticks in my mind.  I had my own fancy room, but I also had a porter waiting on me, I met great eccentric people in the first class cocktail lounge and dined in fine form with a sharper than me 80 year old woman who had just gotten married for the 5th time.  What a riot she was.  It really was like Murder On The Orient Express.  Minus the murder part... I did bring the book though.  And I'm not sure my dinner partner didn't off one or two of those husbands.  On the opposite spectrum, I spent an entire 63$ for 2 weeks in Bolivia, camping in the altiplano at 17,000 feet.  I saw children working in a mine we bribed our way into (very scary) where the average age of death is 40 years old.  I saw otherworldly landscapes entirely made of salt.    I didn't take any showers and we jumped in some hotsprings to help ourselves out in this department.

2)I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I grew up.  I had acquired a whip and the hat by age 9. I was ready.

3)Before I moved to Charleston I lived and worked in Manhattan for 13 years.  I definitely had my 'Sex in the City' years (though I worked a heck of a lot more than those girls did), and I feel that that city will always be a huge chunk of me.  Yes, I was there during 9/11 and it was horribly awful. Still don't talk about it much.

4)My favorite hobby, bar NONE (even gardening) is reading.  I am a reader of all things.  Put the Cheerios box in front of me at breakfast and by the end of breakfast I will have read the back enough times to be able to recite to you the Niacin content in your spoon.

5)I am an anglophile, and can't remember a time when I wasn't.   I definitely think this has to have come from reading as a child.  Have you ever noticed how many classic children's books and tales take place in England?   I mean, they have a)princesses b)dragons and knights c)wizards and witches d)worlds inside of rabbit holes e)worlds inside of wardrobes and f)Sherlock Holmes.   They also have secret gardens, grand estates and seem to throw fabulous black tie cocktail parties at an alarming rate, at least in fiction.   Anyhow a piece of me lived there even before I ever set foot in the country.

6)I am the eldest of 6 children.

7)I rarely ever watch TV.  6.5 out of 7 nights I never even turn it on.   However, I'm not sure I would survive without my laptop.

8)I own, let say, a lot... of shoes.  As I was mentioning to Meredith, I have been known to be dressed to the nines with 4 inch heels on in the garden with my watering wand helping out a few plants that need a drink before I have my cocktails out on the town.   Not as into clothes and handbags, but the shoes thing gets me.

9)I am 100% a type A personality.  Occasionally I pull off looking like a type B person, but it takes a lot more work than just being my normal type A self!  And besides, only a type A person would even try something like that.

10)I have won the NCAA basketball pool I've been in for the past 2 years straight, picking the champion.  I've won another NCAA pool, and have also won an NFL perpetuity pool, 2 Superbowl pools and an Oscar pool.   I do not watch sports.  I just get lucky. That said, I haven't won a round of Texas Rummy with my family in 4 years.

Now, a lot of people have already gotten this award, so I won't list new requests here, but if any of my readers who have blogs are up for it and haven't done it before, let me know right here and post some Honest Scrap yourself!

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A Tree By Any Other Name.... I Still Call A Tree

I grew up primarily in rural southern Virginia, in a place where even today they don't lock their doors.   The biggest crime around there, though heinous, consists of throwing Budweiser beer cans on the gravel country roads.

My brothers and I would often decide at night that we were camping out under the stars. It was okay by our parents seeing as we weren't all that close to the road so the likelihood of being bonked by a beer can was pretty low, mad-cows didn't exist yet, and the deer, while incredibly vicious to the hosta population, were found to leave children more or less intact.  We'd grab our flashlights and our sleeping bags,  put fireflies in jars (sorry buddies I didn't know any better then), and tell ghost stories under the large oak trees which grow like weeds in that State.    Invariably someone would end up being the 'outsider' for the night and there was a 50/50 chance the shunning would result in his return to his own bed inside in the wee hours of the night.  Which at that age meant 11:30pm.  And who am I kidding, it was always Russ that we picked on (the littlest, we had no shame).

Sometimes those remaining would go to the old cabin, which had become the pool house, throw on our damp bathing suits and jump in the pool in the dark.  It was nightswimming at its illicit best, because 'nobody' knew we were out there.  (Of course except our parents who I'm sure were watching the entire time now that I realize how not sneaky we really were).    We would all be as still as possible for a while and sooner or later the bats would come down and skim the water,  drinking and looking for others trying to do the same, I'd guess.  That entire pool area was surrounded by 3 large old apple trees and more likely than not we'd all bring some not quite ripe apples, found floating in the pool, back to our sleeping bags.  If Russ was still with us we'd tell him that eating not ripe apples could kill you.

Other times instead of the pool, we'd go out to the front yard and push each other on the tire swing tied up high in one of the huge black walnut trees.   The tree sat on the top of the embankment that led down to the road and if you got a push hard enough you could swing over the road tarzan-style.  Sigh.

The point of this little journey down memory lane is that the trees of my childhood I can recognize in an instant, I spent so much time with them.  In the dark, by the bark, by the leaves.  I know them like the freckles on my arms.  I think I could identify a white pine by feel alone.   But move 6 hours south and to the coast?  If its not a palm, magnolia or live oak, I HAVE NO IDEA.   I literally wouldn't know a sweetgum tree if it fell on me.     I have 3 trees on my property, one of which must be 70+ feet high, all of which I have no earthly clue as to what they are called.   They have acquired nicknames: the evergreen one, the flowery one, and the big one.     The one thing I can tell you, if you add the other three trees I have (a sabel palm, a crape myrtle and a live oak), NONE of the six of them grew where I grew up, which isn't all that far away.  Granted, Europeans can be 2 countries away in 6 hours, but for many of us... we haven't even left the general vicinity.  And heck, in NYC, you could still be on the George Washington Bridge stuck in traffic in a measly 6 hours.    It is quite a wonder how nature, left to itself, tailors itself exactly to the spot. 

Anyhow, as a self proclaimed nature person, I really gotta get on this tree identification thing.   How insane is it that I know the names of 50 plants in my backyard, 30 types of weeds, but don't know the names of the biggest plants around?

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Come on Spring!

I was thinking a lot about Spring today, as the last warm day for a little while is on my doorstep.  Is there anybody out there who isn't ready for Spring? Okay, besides the southern-hemispherians?

"I'm Ready"

Then I was musing (totally off topic again)... what really makes spring come anyhow?  What makes Spring spring?   Why won't it get here already?!!! Some of you from Pennsylvania will tell me it has to do with a groundhog, and some who remember 6th grade reasonably well will say it has to do with our rotation around the sun.  And there are those who might add Spring happens because the days get longer, allowing the sun to heat us up a little more.   All of these are sort of correct (well, maybe not the Phil thing), but then again, not exactly.   The Earth could rotate until it spun off its axis and it wouldn't change the temperature without one key ingredient.  The days wouldn't get longer or shorter save for this ingredient either.   And despite popular myth it is NOT correct that the seasons change because we are closer to the sun.

It is, of course, the tilt of the earth.  The fact that we spin on our own axis cocked sideways in comparison to our orbit around the sun (the "orbital plane" in Scientific American speak) is what creates the seasons.  Without that tilt, everyone would have a temperature and daylight very similar to everyone else, making room for differences in altitude and weather patterns.  How crazy and random is that when you think about it?  And think about what it would mean if we shifted our tilt? Talk about climate change, and melting polar icecaps!    Some more food for thought, the tilt is changing!  It varies every 41,000 years or so by about 2.5 degrees.

Okay, getting off track here in my thinking out loud.   Here's a picture to illustrate from Wikipedia:

"The North Is Getting Shafted"

So, the orbital tilt.. exactly what does it change that causes these seasons?   First, as is probably obvious, the tilt causes one side, either north or south, to have significantly less sunlight then the other side as we rotate daily along the equator.  When it comes to the poles, we are talking TOTALLY less light.  More light, means more sun baked radiation, which means more warmth (and more skin cancer).    The other major contributing factor though is the obliquity of the sun to the spot you are standing.  On the 'far side' (i.e. winter), the larger angle of obliquity (less directness) translates also into less radiation for the light we do get.  That's why summer sun seems stronger than winter sun, and Florida sun seems hotter than Maine sun.  Because it is. This is also why there is ice at the poles even in Summer.  The sun is always oblique to a large degree at the poles.

Well, I'm glad I got that all cleared up :).   I could go on about solar altitude and radiation lag.. but this is already nerdy enough, and way totally off topic again.

And really this is all to say, of course:  Hurry up Earth, I'm sick to death of the dark side!  Give it back to Australia and Argentina already.

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All About El Nino / The Weather Rant

Not completely garden related but sort of, right?   The weather is my number one obsession of which I have absolutely no control over.   I love the weather, I hate the weather, and for the past 8 months or so I've been asking myself "What the heck is up with this weather?!"

Since this past summer Charleston and other areas has had extreme weather, seemingly all of the time.  This summer we went 3 months without a inch of rain.  This is in a time period where we usually have strong afternoon thunderstorms, and rain totals are typical 6-7 inches a month, or more.  The temperatures went up in May into the 90s, a full month before they should, and stayed there unfailingly until Oct 1.   It was brutal: for humans, plants, dogs, cats you name it.

Then this December came and according to my rain meter, we got 17 inches of rain.  This in a month where we normally get 2.  January, we got 8 inches (also vs 2), and so far in the new month of February we have had an inch with a storm brewing in the sky as we speak.  The city of Charleston has been flooded nearly every third day.    The temperatures here have been on average 10 degrees below normal (as of today this area should regularly be seeing highs in the  low 60s, but nope), and in January the southern sea-board saw 13 straight days of freezing temperatures, most of which were below 26 here.  Again normally we see about 1 day a year that is considered a hard freeze...and maybe a few more right around 32.

What the heck!?  Is this global warming and I can expect insane weather for the rest of my life?  Say nay to tropical plants forever?

Fear not, it isn't.  Or maybe it is, but it is mostly the effects of a strong El Nino weather system.   In a lot of the USA it isn't that noticeable until winter, then smack: i.e.  Virginia has had 3 major snowstorms as of today, and a few minor ones.... they sometimes go years without a dusting of snow.

So what is El Nino, and how is it affecting us so drastically?   I find this part amazing: El Nino is a slight changing of the temperature of the water in the South Pacific.  Thats it.    Looking back at the ocean temperatures from the last major El Nino (97-98) you can see what I mean here. That white stuff shouldn't be there:

That 4 degree (on average) rise in temperatures off the coast of Indonesia is thought to affect weather worldwide.   Its basically like a zillion bathtubs all with hot water in them steaming up all the air out there in the ocean.  The steamy air needs someplace to go - so it comes here. Okay, technically it comes to Peru first, which is how it got its name.   This current El Nino was considered official in July 09, and they usually last about 12 months.   And here is NOAAs predicted weather patterns as of October 09:

Hmmm.  Despite my suspicion that all weather people are just paid models waving their hands in front of a blue screen, maybe they do know what they are talking about after all.

So everyone, in general we can blame El Nino, the little son of Mother Nature for all this weather craziness.     But don't be too hard on him, he was also, after all, responsible for the fact that the Eastern coastline didn't see a single hurricane all season long.   And for that, I guess I can take a few more inches of rain, and keep my begonias in a few more weeks.

Crap...its raining.

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