Darkoshi

I'm sitting outside in the sunshine, working. Every once in a while I see a round white fluffy thing floating by on the breeze. ( Tiny seeds with a ball of white hairs spread out around them - they look like these thistle seeds but are more likely from some nearby tree. Cottonwood, maybe. )

I look up, and up there, many many of these fluffy things are drifting by, glowing even brighter in the sunlight as they pass near the sun.

My camera does not pick them up well against the sky.

I chase a few, and catch one, and take it inside to get some close-up photos of it. Then I release it back outside, and it floats away.

What to call them? "Parachute seed" doesn't seem to do them justice, these delicate light floaty spheres.

Lying back on the porch, looking up at the pine trees. I start counting the pine cones on one tree limb and estimate... probably a hundred on just that one limb.

It's quite possible the tree has more than a thousand pine cones on it! And therefore it's quite possible the other trees have that many too.

Occasionally I pick up pine cones when I'm cleaning up the yard. But I never pick up *that* many.
Do thousands of pine cones fall in the back yard each year, I wonder?

.

The pine cones are just shrapnel when they fall.
The trees are missiles.

Taken while on a walk last month.

The last part of the popsicle, licking it off the stick, doesn't taste so good. I wonder if it is the taste of the wood itself that is unpleasant, or if the wood is coated with any kind of chemical.

It didn't occur to me to be curious about the whole process of making the sticks, but that is what I found:

Ice Cream Sticks whole production line
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAihwkV8TgE

So many different machines, just to make a popsicle stick (or to make millions of them). No doubt unpleasantly loud thumping thumping thumping machines, though the videos replace the noise with music. Big trees being cut up just for this. Now I feel bad about buying popsicles with these wooden sticks that are made just to be thrown away. Although I use so many other disposable wood products too, and how could you have a popsicle without a stick? And even though I mostly don't throw them away; they accumulate in the drawer waiting for that time when they are just what I need for whatever little task.

lalalalalalalala nevermind, don't need to write about that.

Little frogs all over Qiao's back yard. Big ones too; there were two on the back steps last night. Had to shoo them away last night before the dogs saw them. I'm surprised but glad that the dogs haven't been going after the little ones. I worry I might accidentally step on them as they are hard to see when they're not moving. They jump away and then I see them from the motion.

I found a nice plant with grape tomatoes growing in the yard. We didn't plant it. How could it have gotten there? I don't like raw tomatoes; when Qiao sometimes brings me a take-out meal that includes them, I give the tomatoes to the dogs as they like them. The plant is growing in the area where I bury the dog p**p. So that must be where it came from.

Dandelion trees... Weeds that look like dandelions from their leaves, but grow tall with a thick steam. I was watching one such plant grow tall at my house. It finally got even taller than me, and only then did little flowers start blooming at the top. There was one in Qiao's yard too, similar but different; also taller than me.

There's a sassafras sapling growing out back too. I tasted a couple of its leaves; they didn't taste much like root beer, but they were very mucilaginous. From what I read it is actually dangerous to eat, and so they don't use real sassafras as a flavoring any more.

I came across this term while flipping through my dictionary. It is quite an interesting tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hura_crepitans
(also known as possumwood, jabillo, or dynamite tree)
...smooth brown bark covered in many dark, pointed spines which have led to its being nicknamed monkey no-climb.
...The sandbox tree's fruiting bodies are large capsules which can explode when ripe, splitting into segments and launching seeds at 70 metres per second (160 mph)... far as 45 metres (148 ft) away...
...The Caribs made arrow poison from its sap.

As for the name, "Before more modern forms of pens were invented, the trees' unripe seed capsules were sawn in half to make decorative pen sandboxes (also called pounce pots), hence the name 'sandbox tree'. "
I'm not sure why it's also called possumwood, but 3 different trees are called that, one of which is a persimmon tree. So I guess in this case "possum" is a variation on "persimmon" rather than "oppossum".

Pictures:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22sandbox+tree%22&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

Video with a clip of a fruit exploding, although staged in a laboratory(?) setting.
The Incredibly Strange Exploding Fruit Tree

Whew, is it hot outside. Upper 90s, but with the humidity and in the direct sun it feels like in the 100s.

Qiao hired tree cutters to take care of the fallen tree as well as another dead tree that hadn't fallen. They finished it all, including grinding the stumps and removing the debris, in under 5 hours. It's a good thing they started early when it was still overcast and not as hot.

I will need to do some more fence repair before I can let the dogs loose again. But it's too hot now; maybe this evening. Although the forecast says it will still be 90 degrees, feeling like 96, at 9pm.

My mom is going to a free outdoor concert this evening. Phew. Hot, hot, hot.

Apparently Fort Jackson doesn't do their annual 4th of July Torchlight Tattoo and Fireworks anymore*. I didn't go often... I'm not into patriotic stuff, but the cannon blasts and fireworks, and cheering for the states and territories in the union was fun. Except for the parts where I worried that the fireworks would misfire and hurt someone.

I am still doing my work-work for the day. Learning to write JUnit tests, using Mockito. I feel somewhat ambivalent about their usefulness. In my experience, they only test what you already know works, and when they break it's not usually because the code got broken, but rather because the test code or test data became outdated.

Qiao's back yard now smells like my mom's oil paints used to. Or rather, the turpentine she used to clean the paint off the brushes. I like the scent, knowing that it is only pine.

I had a small set of oil paints when I was younger. And a small bottle of orange-scented turpentine. The orange didn't mask the turpentine smell at all; it just morphed it into a different strong overpowering and astringent scent.

Oil paints didn't appeal to me much. Too long to dry. Too hard to clean. Too messy. Not very suited to my style of abstract art. Me, not talented enough to paint realistic images very well. Although one time I copy-painted a portrait of my mom and brother from two photographs, and it turned out fairly well.

Turpentine smell makes me think of the Mediterranean too.

Whaddya know: orange terpene is made from orange trees and can be used as a substitute for turpentine. But I still think that the one I had back then was orange-scented pine turpentine. One made from orange tree extracts would probably have smelled better, like one of those citrus-based cleaners.

..

*A web search shows that 2017's Torchlight Tattoo event was cancelled due to the year-long centennial celebration that finished up that year. 2018's event was cancelled due to the "Victory Week" celebration in June of that year. But nothing at all is mentioned anywhere about it this year, which seems odd to me, considering that per those pages, "The Torchlight Tattoo is typically one of the most popular July Fourth events in the Midlands. Before last year, Fort Jackson hosted July Fourth celebrations each year in recent memory".
Per a family friend, Fort Jackson is not doing the July event at all anymore, instead having fireworks as part of their annual June celebration, the aforementioned "Victory Week".

A goose is on the nest by the picnic area again. I walk towards my usual table, coming around from the back side rather than walking right by the nest.

As I start to sit down, a Swoosh sound as the other goose comes flying out of nowhere at me. (Whoa, I haven't had one do that before.) It lands a few feet away and hisses.

Me: What? I can't sit here?

Goose: HISS! HISSSSSS!!!!

Me: Really? You're not going to let me sit here?

Goose: HISSSS!!

Me: Oh, okay. ::grumble:: I'll go sit somewhere else then. You scared me away.

I walk to one of the other tables further away.

..

A tree branch hangs over the walkway. Sometimes I have to duck to avoid it smacking into my face. But I always enjoy watching its leaf buds as they develop.

Why is it that when I post photos to DW, they always display as larger than actual size? I have to add a parameter like width="80%" to make them look the same size as they do in my image editor, when I'm displaying them actual size there.

Before I had thought it was browser specific, but now it seems to be happening in all browsers. And I can't tell if other people see the images large or actual sized.

It must be due to me having Windows configured to display things at 125%.

Tapeten (German) - wallpaper

Tapetenwechsel (German) - literally, a change of wallpaper. Figuratively, a change of scenery or surroundings.

daffadilly (chiefly British) - daffodil

daffadowndilly (chiefly British) - daffodil (the link is a nice poem)

Annett Louisan - Ich brauch Tapetenwechsel


The above song is originally by someone else, but I like this cover of it. The song is both cute and sad, about a birch tree which wanted a change of scenery, and went looking for it.
German lyrics
English translation of lyrics



Mark Knopfler - Redbud Tree


The vocal notes/key/whatever you call it in part of this song reminds me of kd lang's Ingénue album. I need to check out more of his music. Mark Knopfler's name isn't familiar to me, but he used to be in the Dire Straits.