On this day... now and 9 years ago

9 years ago, the periodical cicadas were buzzing, the fireflies bleeping, and we got married. PP,  thanks for the fantastic dinner at Brothers Moon tonight.  (If you haven't eaten there, you should, if you have the opportunity.)  Local, well-made food, and their Caesar salad with extra anchovies are to die for.

Other things that happened today:

The high school had to be evacuated after a bomb scare.  No bomb was found, but all kids were sent home at 2 PM.  Yesterday Princeton University got evacuated for the same reason.  Prank, lunatic, or what?  This is not funny. Neither was it funny when the two old couples sitting next to us in the restaurant talked about the bomb threat in Princeton and one of the elderly men at their table said 'well, I wish the bomb threat had been true and all the liberal professors had been killed off'.  Sigh.

In New York City two window washers got stuck at the 44th floor (about 600 feet, 200 m above ground) on the outside of the building.  They were eventually rescued by firemen cutting holes in windows so they could reach them and bring them back inside.  This was only one block from where AREA works right now.

The fireflies are out!  Blink, blink, blink! Special photo for KV with fireflies from Japan.

The bull frogs are croaking in the dark, right now.  And big black crickets are cricketing.

We are waiting for another giant weather event.  This one isn't named (yet), but we are expecting 4 inches (100 mm) rain tomorrow, storm-level winds, maybe tornados and hail and definitely big thunderstorms.  We haven't even dried up after the most recent storm, and our rivers are so flooded already that roads and bridges are closed.  Not good, the ground can't soak up any more.  But we are prepared, with pumps, generator (if the power goes out), charged cell phones, lots of food, and playing cards and candles. And while we get soaked, Colorado burns. There doesn't seem to be any 'normal' in the weather anymore.

Finally, our cat Smokey believes that the way to get of loose undercoat wooly fur is to lick it off, get it stuck in your teeth and then have it hanging from your lips like if you were an old goat.  Sorry, no photos yet, we are working on it.  She isn't the most cooperative cat when it comes to photography or brushing.

Back again! Periodical cicadas in NJ

In 2004, during our wedding here in New Jersey, was one of the outbursts of the periodical cicadas, which has a 17-year life cycle. They were everywhere!  They were part of the "Great Eastern Brood", the largest of the populations.

This year another brood of these noisy insects are back, and we have just started to hear a few in the forests this passed week.  It doesn't seem to matter if it is daytime, dusk, dawn, or night - they go on making noise on and off regardless of light or not.  They sound like this. This is called the 'East Coast Brood', and these insects have been living underground on tree roots since 1996. Amazing!

 

 They are easy to tell apart from the regular cicadas because they are black with red eyes, the regular cicadas here are green, and the periodical cicadas hatch earlier in the season. 

When in Maine, this is the Main dish...

A lobster roll, a fantastic invention.  Cooked lobster meat stuffed into a bread roll (like hot dog roll, but split on the top, not the side), with some mayonnaise and some dusting of paprika.  Eat.  Simple. Good. Amazing.


We had our only lobster rolls at the Lobster Shack at Two Lights, near Cape Elizabeth south of Portland on a dead end road that ends in a parking lot that immediately becomes too full and too crowded on summer days.  But it is worth it.


 It is a little restaurant perched on the cliffs near the sea, and the closest building houses a fog horn (with appropriate signs to watch out for the sound, but how can you do that?  Doesn't it hit you when it hits you, without warning? Or does it sound a warning before, heh!?). The fog horn was on the day we were there, sounding its eerie warnings out in the fuzzy fog of the ocean.


There are other warnings too, near the shack itself, since it is surrounded with highly adapted ferocsiouly behaving seagulls that have mastered the feats of 'getting the lobster before the human'.  Hold on to your food, or someone else will.


The best thing with Maine are the rocks and the coastline.  Granite and shale cliffs, rounded by the ice ages' massively thick glacier covers, and now with lichens and seaweeds as the only plant cover.  The feel is very similar to parts of Norway (without the mountains) and the west coast of Sweden (Bohuslän).  I love it.


This yellow lichen (Xanthoria) are typical for these coasts, and if I ever would be a painter I would paint giant closeups of imagined lichen macro images. 


And out there in this direction, are Scandinavia and England.  Far away from Cape Elizabeth, Cape Cod, Nantucket and Cape May, but certainly, Europe is there. Even if it is invisible.  Don't you ever wonder how we can be convinced of such things before we have experienced them?  We have to believe the invisible until we have sailed, flown, or swum there.

The land of opportunity

Good soil is brown gold.  Out of such a dirty mess you can get delicious beets, crispy salad and juicy tomatoes, gorgeous flowers, and heavenly basil.  This spring we have made some improvements to our vegetable garden, some highly visible (a new deer fence with new bamboo poles) and some not (such as added lime [kalk] to prevent blossom end rot of the tomatoes).  So here is a photo update on the current state of affairs in our vegetable garden [or 'köksträdgård', as we say in Swedish, look, all three umlaut vowels in the same word!).

We have young peaches, pears, gooseberries, and red currants and in another month or two (three?) we hope to sink our teeth into these. A new grape arbor (designed and made by PP) with a white Niagara grape and a blue Concord grape is the new home for our two grape plants that were taking over the garden with there vigorous growth.  And this is the time for columbines (Aquilegia, akleja), we have blue, red, white, and yellow ones, three different species.

The chives are flowering too (see above), but the severe weather this winter killed off a lot of the lavender and thyme.  I think they will come back from the root stock, at least some of them. Our experiment with the "deer-proofed" (=unfenced) flower beds planted with mint varieties, sage [salvia], chives [gräslök], lamb's ears [lammöron], lavender [lavendel], and thyme [timjan] has gone far beyond expectations.  The deers refuse to even take a small bite of these herbs, so these flower borders that were grazed down to nothing are now filling in with a real herb garden.  OK, so it isn't the same as tall irises and other gorgeous flowers, but at least it is green and not chewed to death, and it smells amazing.  And the mint is spreading like wildfire, but that is OK, it is surrounded by lawn so it won't get into the vegetable garden. It is truly a wonderful time to get your hands dirty...

Click on images to see larger versions, and click here for more garden photos by Vilseskogen (me).

Easy-open oysters

Incredible! From Gourmet magazine October 2007, which is not available on-line... (which also has an oyster primer)

.... when the volcano blew in A.D. 79, millions of shellfish in the coastal waters around Pompeii were forced open by shock waves from the explosion. This idea sent León back to the laboratory, where he came up with a device for opening oysters by means of low-frequency sound waves. The oysters are placed in a bain-marie six at a time, and at the touch of a button their shells loosen their iron grip. No more digging about with knives is required; no nasty bits of shell are left in your oyster.

Sitting in the dark..

...in our garden right now, at 10 PM at night, is a little Northern Saw-whet owl. How do I know? It says 'poh-poh-poh' now and then. Welcome back, we had one last spring too. Maybe it is the same?

Virtual hairdo

Want a haircut without getting a new hairdo? You'll get an demonstration of binaural recording at the same time by listening to the link below. You MUST use headphones for it to work.

So, go and get your headphones now and listen to this!

/O.K