I went up to Freezeout Saddle with some photo club people to pick huckleberries. As I expected, they were still ripe, and very plentiful. But the problem with huckleberries is that you can pick for an hour and still not get very much. I think I came home with maybe a pint of berries.
I brought my camera up as well to get some photos of the area and of us picking only to find out that I left my card in the card reader and my extra card in the sack that I take backpacking. oops.
First Snow, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer. On Friday, I woke up to find a light layer of white on everything. At first, I thought it was a heavy frost, but when I put my glasses on, the truth was revealed. We had our first snowfall. It wasn’t much, less than an inch, and by late afternoon, all was gone. It wasn’t the first snow of the season either, but it was the first to stick on the ground, especially at our elevation. But Sunday night, it began to snow some more, and the accumulation was greater. It still wasn’t…
I’ve come into a real conundrum lately. I’m running out of space on my hard drive. Earlier in the year when I thought my hard drive was dying, I bought an external drive which I use to move old files for storage and back up my current system. The problem is that using the external hard drive as a working drive is not an ideal solution when my primary (read: only) computer at the moment is a portable notebook. Thus, I don’t want to be using the external hard drive to store all of my music and photography, the two…
Three months ago, we had some pipes leak in our kitchen that caused some damage to the flooring and the cabinets and resulted in us basically getting a brand new kitchen. We contacted State Farm to see about getting any coverage, and thankfully, they agreed to help cover some of the damage. So, we set about getting a contractor in to look at the damage and give us an estimate. We ended up using one that works directly with State Farm, a decision that may have caused us more strife that we were hoping to avoid, but after several delays,…
Where has time gone? It’s already October, which means I missed out on September. Well, I didn’t really miss it. I was busy with a graduate school ritual known as the preliminary examination. Prelims are, without a doubt, the most stressful event for a graduate student. You might think it’s writing the dissertation or even giving your final defense. The truth is, by that time, you know your subject inside and out. Writing takes time, and the stress is making the deadlines, but overall, unless you slept through your graduate student experience, writing up the dissertation isn’t that difficult. The…
The tomato plants have fruit, but I’m awaiting them to ripen. The pepper plants are starting to produce. The strawberries are on their second round of harvest. In the mean time, the squash and zucchini are providing us with food of plenty. Yesterday I picked four zucchini, all from the same plant. This morning, I grabbed two more before leaving for work. This doesn’t include the half-dozen or so that we’ve already picked and are awaiting consumption in the kitchen. We’ve also got several variety of yellow summer squash as well as two green stripped squash/zucchini plants, both producing about…
Well, my time in Alabama has come to an end. To catch up on this thing, I spent the fall season at the McDowell Environmental Center as an educator down in northern Alabama. I enjoyed it so much that I returned for the spring season. The area is a sandstone highlands carved into canyons by the rivers. Its beautiful and biologically diverse and very interesting. I had a great birding season with 117 species this spring, lots of wildflowers, and good herping. The season ended May 19, and on Sunday the 21st, I headed north with Damascus, VA as my…