We spent Mother’s Day at my grandma’s house, cooking out burgers and helping her to get some work done around her yard. Brian and I hung birdhouses and planted flowers. My cousin Markus found a turtle, and we waited patiently for it to come out of its shell and say hey, but it never did.
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The lilies that grow under our crepe myrtles are this beautiful, beautiful shade of red, and they bloomed this week. Lilies of all kinds are my favorite flowers, and I love photographing them, as they have so much going on visually - the brightly colored stamens and the pistils that look like coffee beans, the neat little dots and markings on the petals, their beautiful shape. I got a lot of great shots and was able to do cool stuff with them in photoshop - including a site banner for next month that kicks ass - but my favorite photo that I got was this one above, which I didn’t touch at all in post because I wanted to share the color of these flowers with you. But here’s one more, which I did work with in post and which I am really thinking might get hung up in my dining room:
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The Longest Way 1.0
This dude walked across China, and though I’m relatively certain he could’ve come up with something more interesting to document, this video of his beard growth as he walked is pretty impressive.
Fake Whisky And Nuclear Bombs
"Bottles of vintage whisky can sell for thousands of pounds each, but industry experts claim the market has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit that was made just a few years ago. Scientists have found, however, that minute levels of radioactive carbon absorbed by the barley as it grew before it was harvested to make the whisky can betray how old it is."
A Conservative Christian Case for (Civil) Gay Marriage
"We often think being a witness for Christ means doing some extraordinary thing. But sometimes the best witness to the gospel is as simple as being civil enough to respect people’s legitimate freedoms, and being decent enough to put aside the name-calling and treat people like human beings. Supporting the civil liberties of homosexual American citizens is decent, civil and, yes, loving. Loving at least in a way that gays and lesbians are more likely to understand."
Your NPR Name
Mine is Nadthan Corinth. What’s yours?
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There’s a giant iron Camrasaurus out in front of the Cimarron Heritage Museum. I’m glad it wasn’t there when I was six years old, because I would have been bugging my parents to take me up there EVERY WEEKEND.
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This quasi-creepy lady was in the Bruce Goff-designed Cimarron Heritage Museum in Boise City, OK. The building itself and many of its accoutrements - including the GIANT DINOSAUR out front - were very cool, and then, in a very, very low-ceilinged room, there’s her, looking like her husband left her at the altar just to run out for some cigarettes and here she is, 50 years later, still awaiting his return.
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A part of one of the collapsed pergolas at the Lake Optima Recreation Area. Seriously, if you’re like me, and desolation and decay kind of fascinate you, that place is a photographer’s dreamland. Next time I go it’s going to be sometime when I know the sun will be out, and when I can be there until the Magic Hour just happily snapping away, sort of at nothing. You’ll see. It’ll be great. Who wants to come?
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Check that out. The garden is off and rolling like crazy. Currently there are 20 tomato plants in three different varieties, and a row each of two different kind of hot peppers. I had a lot of trouble with hot peppers last year; you may recall that I ended up with only one real plant. This year all the seedlings I’ve put down have survived a great deal, including incursions into the plot by birds and the stupid, stupid cats who roam wild in my yard because the across-the-street neighbor feeds them. The cats have taken to using my seeding mounts as litter boxes, so every day for a couple weeks I came out to find huge mounds of dirt flung up to cover their turds, which I had to then dig out. The neighbor and I are going to need to have a talk about the cats, as they’ve gone from being cute ragamuffins whom she’s feeding to now actually harming my garden. So Brian did a little research, and in addition to using blood meal to fertilize, which apparently repels cats, we also have this:
That red powder is cayenne pepper, with which I lined the entire bed and which is supposed to keep the cats away. So far it’s working; two nights and no new cat turds, no dug-up or buried seedlings. It’s raining like a mother today and washing the whole thing away, so I may have to redo it every few days. I’m also considering erecting a very rudimentary electric fence if that doesn’t work.
You might not be able to tell it in this photo, but the hot peppers are doing great. They’re all still small but really thriving, adding new growth, slowly, and so far the birds are avoiding them. This is a nice change, as last year I only had one pepper plant that reached maturity because the birds had so much fun snipping off the seedlings. The other day after we got back from the Mesa I had just enough daylight left to take some more of the pepper seedlings off the grow shelf and put them in the ground:
That’s an Aurora pepper, one of the two types of hot peppers I’m doing this year. It seems to be very similar to the Bolivian Rainbow Peppers I did last year, which started off purple, then ripened through yellow, white, and into orange and then, finally, red. They were beautiful; they looked like this:
But the Aurora Peppers are already notably a better breed, mostly in that they’ve germinated with much more gusto than the Bolivians did - it took two plantings before the Bolivians did anything at all, and as I mentioned before, the birds seem to be ignoring the Auroras, which they definitely did not do with the Bolivians. Also if the SeedSavers website is to be believed the Auroras will produce a bigger fruit that will be a little less hot than the Bolivians were, which is great, as they were so hot as to be almost inedible. "Bolivian Insanity Peppers," we called them.
This is a Rooster Spur Pepper, the other kind I’m growing. They took longer to germinate but have really gone crazy on the grow shelf. I put a whole bunch of these down on Sunday afternoon:
The row of these sorta weave in and out of my spinach, which has been in the ground since February and has recently started to do really well.
These leaves are about as long as my thumb and almost twice as wide, so nowhere near ready to pick yet. There about four other plants about this big, plus six or seven more that I seeded much later. There are hot peppers all around them, weaving in and out of the row. God, I can’t wait until all this gets bigger. My tomatoes are already well on the way, as this flower and future golden jubilee tomato will witness:
I’m excited to see this guy, because we also have a bunch of these guys:
The smaller of the two trees in our backyard is LOADED with bees this year, which is always good to see when you worry about Colony Collapse Disorder as much as I do (which is a lot, I have to tell you. I worry about Colony Collapse Disorder WAAAAAY more than any well-adjusted person should). Of course, all is not going smoothly for the tomatoes. The birds did get to a couple of the plants, chewing off entire stems and leaves JUST FOR FUN. Some of that has started to grow back now, though, which is encouraging:
Seriously, if between the birds, the cats and the rain, this garden manages to survive, it’s going to be tough as nails. The squash has been the cats’ main target, but so far it’s doing fine:
So who wants to speak for a grocery bag of zucchini, tomatoes and peppers? There’s going to be so much of it, you guys.
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I think I became a lichen enthusiast on this trip to the Panhandle. It was everywhere, and it was beautiful.
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We took another weekend trip out to the Oklahoma Panhandle, stopping for almost half an hour at the empty, creepy and very, very deserted Lake Optima recreation area, which was fully equipped with campsites, boat ramps, bathrooms, lodges, fire pits and roads before the lake sorta didn’t fill up at all. The place is so deserted and forgotten that there’s not even any vandalism to speak of, just collapsed pergolas over crumbling cement picnic tables. Anyway, I got a lot of great photos out there, but this one is my favorite, a sign outside the very eerie bathroom where you walk around just wondering when you’re going to come across a stash of murdered corpses dressed in their killer’s mother’s clothing.
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Confessions of a TARP Wife
The kept women, the trophy wives who marry Wall Street CEOs, are the last people anyone should be feeling sorry for in these financially troubling times, but this article is fascinating nonetheless.
The 50 States Project
"Each photographer lives in one of the 50 States and during the year long project each photographer will represent the State where they currently live. Every two months each photographer will be sent an assignment by e-mail, they then have two months to produce one image in response. The images must represent both their style and their State."
Bluebird Nestbox
Flickr user lucycat has a fascinating set of photos of the bluebirds who next in her backyard yearly, from the pristine blue eggs to the wormlike, needy little hatchlings.
Gutter Gardens
Lifehacker once again comes to the rescue of space-strapped would-be urban farmers by showing them how to grow plants in gutter piping planters. I’d be tempted to try this if I didn’t already have a full garden on my hands.
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