I spent most of a day last week thinning apples from our two apple trees. These poor things had struggled in the shade of the boulevard trees for most of their lives, but as we’ve lost most of our boulevard trees in the last few years, these apple trees have come into the sun and finally started producing fruit. This year one of them in particular set a ton of fruit, so while I bagged apples, I also thinned, at least where I could easily reach.

In the end I bagged around 150 apples, and probably thinned off at least twice that in little baby apples. Now we wait for a wonderful crop of nummy apples in the fall!

In quasi-related news, this afternoon Thomas and I embark on a monster road trip through New England. The purpose of this adventure is college visits, and we’ll visit 11 colleges in 30 days: Kalamazoo (Michigan), Ithaca (NY), Hamilton (NY), Bates (Maine), Hampshire (Massachusetts), Marlboro (Vermont), Vassar (NY), Drew (New Jersey), Swarthmore (Pennsylvania), Yale (Connecticut), and Brown (Rhode Island). Whew!

This will be the last college tour, so hopefully he’ll have a pretty good idea of where he wants to apply after we get home.

The real reason for the trip, though, is to allow me to catch several states I’ve never visited (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine). After this trip I will have visited all but two of the 50 states: Hawaii and South Carolina. South Carolina is annoying because I’ve driving within 20-30 miles of South Carolina at least twice, but never actually made it. Hmph.

The trip might provide some photo opportunities, so I might actually post a little in July :-)

photo credit: maessive

First, let’s set the stage:

• I really don’t like the traditional suburban lawn. Tons of chemical, energy, and effort to create and maintain a biologically unstable mono culture so that I can … putt … or something. So, so silly.
• I’m also a big non-fan of petrol powered lawnmowers. They’re noisy, smelly, polluting beasts that beat the crap out of the grass, ripping it instead of actually cutting it.

As a consequence we’ve explored a bunch of alternatives, but none have really worked terribly well. We really liked the idea of reel mowers, but our experience with several of them makes it clear that our lawn is way too uneven and bumpy for a reel mower. Sigh.

What would be perfect would be a solar powered Roomba-like robot mower. WeatherGirl correctly pointed out that this is frequently known as a “goat”; sadly, the city classifies goats as livestock rather than lawn tools, and we aren’t allowed keep livestock in town. Damn.

So, anyone have any ideas for an interesting alternative to buying a stinky petrol powered monster?

Thanks in advance!

Today we spent a wonderful, exhausting day at the Alhambra in Granada, and it’s every bit as cool as the books, etc., made out. Which is good, since that’s a key reason for this entire trip to Spain! I frankly don’t have any idea where to begin. I took over 800 photographs, plus there’s all those from WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy).

It’s like several really cool forts and castles, some spectacular gardens, archeological digs, museums, (Christian) churches, and a complete course in Muslim architecture and culture (complete with some of the finest examples on the planet), all in one (big) place. I’m both physically and mentally exhausted (and exhilarated!).

This shot is from the justly famous "Patio of the Lions" (Patio de los Leones). The lions themselves (part of a fountain in the middle of the space) were missing as they’re undergoing extensive restoration at the moment. Still, the space, the columns, the carving, and the light were enough to take my breath away. And that was after already seeing room after space after room of exquisite work.

I’m going to go sleep now.

Later.

Just before we came up to Preston for the holidays I was able to spend some time taking photos in the beautiful frost we’d been having in Colchester. This is one of the results of that little adventure.

Happy Xmas Eve!

I’ve joked for several years that we were going to take advantage of global warming by starting a banana plantation in Minnesota to support us in our retirement. Apparently a fellow in Devon (here in the UK) is doing it for real, but with olives instead of bananas.

And so now we wait and see…

Thanks to [OP] for the cool photo.

At the end, however, he has this brilliant bit:

Bill Thompson has a vivid way of expressing this: no child entering primary school this year will ever buy a television set, he predicts.

Wow – doesn’t that just nail it? I shared this with WeatherGirl (who was probably being productive instead of just surfing the net for random crap), and she pointed out that our family may well have purchased our last TV several years ago. We’ll certainly buy video display systems in the future, but probably not TVs in the classic tuner+display form.

The world record weight for a pumpkin in 1980 was apparently around 500 pounds, but they’ve been smashing those records, with Joe Jutras setting a new record a few weeks ago of 1,689 pounds! That’s a serious piece of fruit. These are apparently large enough that they cut some of them in half to make kayaks and then have races with them.

I definitely recommend the interview, and I’m guessing that the book is probably good as well. The photo is from BigPumpkins.com.

The Wivenhoe house was also home (right at the end of our stay there) to this nifty spider. One evening I just noticed it hanging there near the ceiling in the kitchen, so I of course took a ton of pictures of it. (Conveniently, it just sat there posing through the entire session.) It disappeared a day or two later, but WeatherGirl found that it had moved (for inscrutably arachnid reasons) over to the front of the clothes washing machine.

Given that I have no real history of photographing spiders, I rather assumed I was done with the whole spidie thing for the moment, but ’twas not to be true. In one of my first walks around our apartment complex, I ran across another spider, with a large, complex web that quite obviously successful at trapping meals. There were several “finished” critters in evidence, and the unfortunate fellow to the right still struggling weakly (and I assume futilely) against its bonds. There was a light breeze, which made it harder to photograph up close than it had been in the kitchen. At one point I accidentally bumped the web, and the spider scurried from its throne in the center of the web up to the top, where it adopted a ball-like post and watched over its domain. Not sure whether it thought I was lunch or a Bad Guy, but it never did come down again while I was there.

In fairness, however, as cool as our monsters have been, they don’t hold a candle to the amazing sightings of Cory and Mrs. Q among their many adventures in these fair isles. They have some really excellent photos from their trip, and a visit is definitely recommended!

Lots of it is well covered (but still important) ground – eat less overall, get more exercise, favor salad over fries. An amazing bit, though, is that since 1980,

Calories available per capita in the national food supply (that produced by American farmers, plus imports, less exports) rose from 3,200 a day in 1980 to 3,900 a day two decades later.

Yikes! That means that for each of us in the U.S., there are nearly twice as many calories per person out there waiting to be eaten than we actually need.

She’s quick to point out that not all these calories are actually being consumed, i.e., we’re not as obese as we could be. But, as she also points out, the structure of the current financial markets strongly reward growth, which in the food industry typically means selling more of those surplus calories than your competitors, all of which tends to favor pushing buckets of empty calories like soda rather than fresh tomatoes. And, of course, from an environmental standpoint, the idea of producing nearly twice as many calories as we need is enormously wasteful, for our choices are either to consume them (and turn into monstrous butterballs in the process) or throw them away (ensuring we have some of the best fed landfills in all of human history). What a frightful mess.

(Composting, of course would be a preferable destination for those calories than either obesity or landfilling them, but even that doesn’t make it “right” or “desirable”, just slightly less stupid.)

It’s also interesting that the food industry’s massive marketing machine has chosen to shove crates of processed junk our way. They could, of course, simply encourage us to exercise like Lance Armstrong in training; those fellows can pack away nearly 6K calories a day because they burn it right off. It’s a shame that PepsiCo isn’t pushing bikes and community fitness programs instead of chips and fizzy pop, although I suspect it’s easier to convince Joe and Jane Couch Potatoe to relax and enjoy a beer and some chips during the big game than it is to get them to go actually play.

The other interesting bit was that apparently for the first time junk food is now cheaper per calorie than good fruit and veg. Back home we make an effort to buy a lot of locally grown organics from our local co-op and (in the summer) the Easy Bean Farm, but all that wondrous grub isn’t cheap. There’s lots of nice organic stuff on offer over here, but with 60% salary and the exchange rate smacking us about the head and shoulders 24/7, it’s pretty tough to pay that premium.

Unfortunately, buying healthy, environmentally responsible food has become to a significant degree a privilege not so readily available for those in financially difficult circumstances. (A major change from 100 years ago, where the cheap stuff would have been the local produce.) It’s clear that any plan to save the world really needs to include plans to reduce financial inequities, and probably changes in the farming and food distribution incentives as well.