...imaginary ticks crawling on your skin has started in New Jersey. Only problem is, some are not imaginary. Our garden are full of ticks, brought there by deers and then caught in cat fur and pant legs and, for some reason, my long dark hair. So you go out in the garden, stuff your pants into socks (well, not always...), and then you go inside and an hour or two later you feel something crawling on your neck or arm, and it might be a tick. The problem is that it isn't always one, often it is an imaginary feeling, a mirage from your brain. Few ticks actually get stuck on us, but on the cats they love the area around their neck and we have probably pulled of 50 ticks from them in the last few weeks. We put them in a plastic bottle with water and soap to kill them. The ones we found on ourselves we usually just put between two pieces of tape and throw in the garbage. Did I mention how hard it is to kill ticks? I honestly can't see any good ecological feature of ticks. Do they have any positive use at all in an ecosystem? I think they are just plain bad parasites, and annoying such as well. I think it is time to buy Best Yet for the cats.
Today Google celebrates the 226-year birthday of John James Audubon, a famous painter of birds and other wildlife and wild plants in the USA. I love the random 226 - not just the expected 100, 200, 250... Here is today's Google logo if you missed it. It is kind of hard to see the letters for all the birds.
A full-page ad in the most recent Saveur food magazine advertises the 'hand-grown' avocados of a company in California. Now, last I checked, plants grow by themselves, and they don't add cell walls and have cell divisions because a machine or human make those... the plant is growing independently. The company also states that all trees were 'hand-planted'. Now, does that mean that each hole was hand-dug? Or that each tree was lowered by hand into the hole? Or that each tree got a nice hug after being put in the soil? Handmade is one thing, that is something made by hand. But hand-grown? What is that really? Just a new buzzword to fool us into buying their fruits because they sound more natural, local, and true to nature? You know, the fruits could also be hand-sprayed with pesticides. Who knows. The only thing I know is that for a company to afford a full-page ad in Saveur it can't be a little family farm where each fruit tree gets individual attention, by hand or otherwise.
Those were my own hand-thought thoughts of the day. Now I am going to go and sleep by hand. No machines involved at all. And soon my hands will be all hands-off this computer and I will be reading partly hands-free in bed.
Haha - just found this. Handgrown in California is an ad campaign from the California Avocado Association. And in 2009, over 440 000 pounds (that is about 200 000 kg) pesticides were used on California-grown avocados (see link here).
Grasp the luxurious opportunities when you can take them, time-wise and financially. It might be one piece of chocolate, a sunny spot in the park, a lonely afternoon in the sofa with a book, digging a hole for a new plant, or splurging on a memorable fancy meal, even if alone in a foreign town. The last thing is what I did the last night in Chicago, while it stormed, thundered and rained near-horizontally outside. The restaurant is called Mercat a la Planxa, and is a Catalonian tapas restaurant in the old historic Blackstone Hotel on S Michigan Avenue. (Sidenote to the restaurant here - please remove your annoying intro page with music on your home page.)
And happy birthday to LA too, of course. News of the day: LA's little ant colony survived the winter, despite being housed just in a little plastic box without protection. We were sure they were dead, but they were just sleeping and now 4-5 months later they are awake again. Do ants have anti-freeze in their veins? It is time to build them a real home.
The only day during my Chicago trip with acceptable weather was the day I had free from work, so I took the train on the old Union Pacific (I believe, it said UP), trainline with the METRA commuter train north to the suburbs to visit the Chicago Botanic Garden. More about the garden later, but the trainride was an experience in itself.
The double-decker traincars were something else. You walk in at the end of the car, and then climb up or down - up to the second floor which are just two narrow strips of floor with a line of seats along each window wall, and open to the level below in the center. Below there were two rows of seats as on a normal train car. It was all tiny and low above, but the openness to the level below made you feel not so claustrophobic. The conductor didn't even bother walking upstairs, he just stretched out his hand from below up to us at our ankle-level to get our tickets. They sure do things different in Chicago. Maybe their bridges are too low for a regular double-decker commuter train car?
So, I sat on the top floor, looked out through greenish tinted and dirty train windows, and saw the city go by, through old industry areas, nice little neighborhoods, and they all looked so much cleaner than in the East, even if poor. I started taking photos of watertanks and smokestacks, one after another. Old smokestacks used as advertising space, or cell phone towers high or low, and so on. Old water tanks, which I think are so American because I never see them in any other cities of the world, of various shapes and placement, and sometimes also with advertisement on them. One had fallen down.
We passed the Morton Salt factory, where they make (made?) the table salt that 'when it rains it pours', so you don't have to deal with clumps in your salt. I have bought Morton salt many times and it still has the same old nice design on its containers in the supermarket.
And there were train tracks of course, and old and new train things next to them. Old flat cars and smaller things. Two diesel engines, one yellow and another red, but very blurry on the photos so not included here. It was an interesting experience, a real trip through history from a higher point than usual.
Click on the little thumbnails to see the photos larger if you like - there are so many that I added them as thumbnails this time. I apologize for the grittiness of the photos but they were taken through a train window and most at rather high speed.
In the taxi van at the airport and on my way to downtown Chicago, a Norwegian couple enter the van, with the man furiously angry at his wife because she had no small dollar bills available as a tip to the guy carrying their luggage. I turned around, said, in Swedish - "you can pay later, he is our driver ", and the man cheered up and the wife smiled. Then the man said - "I know, I get so angry and frustrated when I shouldn't" - in Norwegian of course.
They had just landed after a long trip from Stockholm and the next day a rental car would be dropped off at their hotel for their 14-day trip driving old Route 66, from Chicago to Los Angeles. Route 66 is the old classic route across America that many people drove in the 1950s... it is lined with classic but rundown hotels, scenery, and has become popular in recent years as something to do on vacation, apparently especially in the Nordic countries, said the Norwegian, who also said the REAL way to do it was on a Harley-Davidson, but he was too old for that. Plus he had no license for a motorcycle, he told me regretfully.
... and maybe only in Chicago, Illinois, the home of the old, large slaughterhouses, can there be a Baconfest... and there was, last weekend. A few weeks ago the organizers noted:
... soppatorsk... (literally meaning 'soup-cod', cod like the fish cod). The meaning is: when you run out of gasoline while driving a car or boat.
...slå en sjua... (literally meaning 'dial a seven'). This is the same for a man as in 'go and pee'. I have never heard a woman say it.
...skitstövel.... (literally meaning a 'boot filled with shit') . Used about a person who is doing something really mean.
And then there are words that make sense but are kind of funny in their fantastic logical construction:
...slickepott... (literally meaning 'lick-the-pot'). Used for a silicon or rubber spatula used in the kitchen to scrape out the last of the dough from a bowl.
...svartsjuk... (literally meaning 'black-sick'). This means envy or envious. Can't you see a person becoming black in his or her face of envy?
....grönsaker.... (literally meaning 'green things'. This is of course vegetables, what else could it have been?
Enjoy!
"People may doodle as a strategy to help themselves concentrate," said study co-author Jackie Andrade, a University of Plymouth psychologist. "We might not be aware that we’re doing it, but it could be a trick that people develop because it helps them from wandering off into a daydream." Read more here.
I was looking around today for some information on how weeds came to the US, and did some little googling and then I got stuck oogling the scanned copies of Hardwicke's Science-Gossip from the late 1800s (late 1872-1885 to be exact) on Google Books. Here you can find anything scientific, curious, and worth reporting, from the small to the large. Here is an excerpt on how some weeds showed up in the US, including butter-and-eggs/yellow toadflax (Linaria, called 'gulsporre' in Swedish). The culprit might have been a Mr. Ranstead in Pennsylvania.
Recent research results:
Who creates the new leaders and visionaries for our world?
Well, not today's schools, media, and institutions, argues William Deresiewicz in a great article named Solitude and Leadership recently published in the UTNE reader. I read it this morning, in the sofa with a cup of tea next to me, and there are so many things in it I agree with and would like to quote it. But I am afraid this post would be too long then, so it is better you just click on the link.
Take the time to read this article. Don't get distracted, just read it, it is important. I promise.
The center pieces of his thoughts are that:
In honor of our new machine in the kitchen! Swedish stamps of Italian espressos. Yummy!
It is a little over a month since my beloved uncle, Olle, died. He was a contributor to this family blog, he and I had discussions on everything from Swedish politics to scientific policy and history, and we all miss him terribly. What a wonderful person he was. In his memory, I am here posting one of his gorgeous photos, and you can see more of them on his photo gallery here. Thanks for everything, Olle.
Sweden is changing its kronor (kr) bills in a few years and no, it won't be to euros, but to newly designed bills. To find out what the Swedes wanted, the National Bank of Sweden arranged a way for the public to vote on their favorite Swedes. Today they announced the winners of who will be on the new bills. No more kings on our bills! These are the winners (final designs to be developed soon):
20 kr: författarinnan Astrid Lindgren och naturmotiv från Småland. (The author Astrid Lindgren [Emil, Ronia, Pippi Longstocking, etc.] with nature scenes from Småland where she was from and wrote about. She got the most votes from the public, we love her!)
50 kr: sångaren Evert Taube och naturmotiv från Bohuslän (The singer, poet, author and songwriter Evert Taube and nature from the west coast province of Bohuslän, a place depicted in many of this songs.)
100 kr: skådespelerskan Greta Garbo och naturmotiv från Stockholm. (The moviestar Greta Garbo and scenes from Stockholm.)
200 kr: regissören Ingmar Bergman och naturmotiv från Gotland. (The movie director Ingmar Bergman and nature from Gotland, the big island in the Baltic Sea where he lived the last part of his life.)
500 kr: sångerskan Birgit Nilsson och naturmotiv från Skåne. (The opera singer Birgit Nilsson and nature scenes from Skåne, the southernmost province.)
1 000 kr: diplomaten Dag Hammarskjöld och naturmotiv från Lappland. (The WWII diplomat and UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld and scenes from Lapland, the northernmost province.)
I think this is amazing and wonderful. First, there are 3 women and 3 men, none are royalty or nobelmen (well, Hammarskjöld was by ancestry...), all are part of the current Swedish heritage and culture, and they will include nature elements from all parts of Sweden, showing the strong connection Swedes have with nature, landscape and wild places. And, how is this for wonderful logic - Astrid Lindgren will be on the smallest bill because that one is the one kids will see the most! I love it.
The National Bank said that they 'didn't include any currently living people because nobody should be able to pay with themselves'. Ha! True, and funny. The coins will change too, except for the 10 kr coin. If you can read Swedish, the whole report from the National Bank is here, 5 pages, in easy to read Swedish with clear nice formatting, just like government reports should be but rarely are, except in Sweden.
I wish more governments in the world did more reasonable and democratic things like this.
