As I’m out and about walking the dog or mowing the lawn or peering out a window or whatever, I’m keeping an eye on nature. I’m not sure if that makes me a naturalist or a phenologist or just curious about what’s going on around me, but I especially enjoy plants and birds. This year, a pair of woodpeckers built a nest in one of our oak trees. I had noticed that woodpeckers had made…
I have got a backlog of blog posts that need writing, but I haven’t had time to write them. Which isn’t completely true. After working all day, doing the heavy mental lifting of writing and budgeting for a federal grant this past week, my brain has been so fried in the evening that I fritter away my time on Twitter, getting caught up in the day’s news. Now that I’ve got some time to blog,…
Have you heard of Dr. Bronner’s Pure-Castile Soap? It’s liquid soap that can be used for pretty much anything, whether as a body wash and shampoo or as a household cleaner. We prefer the Hemp Peppermint variety. The soap is all organic, with Certified Fair Trade ingredients. The funkiest thing about this soap is the packaging, specifically the label. When you purchase a bottle, you get a spiritual/philosophical tome of very tiny print that covers…
A couple of months ago, I received a Farmer Seed and Nursery spring catalog in the mail. Having never received one of these before, I can only surmise that the Arbor Day Foundation shared my information with the company. I became a member of the Arbor Day Foundation in November 2019 and when I got my membership materials, something in them indicated they would sell my info for marketing purposes. Let me just say, aside…
As we settle into the stay-at-home routine necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a map I have been obsessively checking every day. It’s a map of the State of Minnesota that is part of the MN Department of Health’s Situation Update for Coronavirus Disease 2019. It shows the number of positive cases by county of residence. Here are the maps that I have taken screenshots of since March 31, 2020. I live in…