full_metal_ox: A gold Chinese Metal Ox zodiac charm. (Default)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] common_nature
Taken on 28 May 2024 at 21:00 US Eastern Daylight Time:

(Warning for flashing lights and shaky camera.)

Cut. )

(Not included: the sound of passing sirens.)

Taken on 9 June 2024 at 07:21 US Eastern Daylight Time:



Taken on 27 June 2025 at 19:46 US Eastern Daylight Time:



Taken on 27 June 2025 at 19:47 US Eastern Daylight Time:



Taken on 2 July 2025 at 19:43 US Eastern Daylight Time:



This gradually took shape across the parking lot from a local Asian fusion restaurant over 2024; between recovering from Hurricane Ian and the COVID quarantine, changing hands, and changing formats (from the mid-century Cantonese-American the original owners had served for forty years to a pan-Asian combination of sushi, ramen, and Chinese), they’d spent the previous couple years uneasily gaining their bearings.

The garden’s proximity to the street, along with the lack of any obvious receptacle for offerings, makes it clear that this is an ornamental rather than devotional site. (A Web search indicates the presence of a local Buddhist temple, but the address is a private residence, and home worship services are for who they’re for, not for curiosity-gawking spiritual tourists.)

My guess is that the white-flowering shrubs are Star Jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides), aka Confederate Jasmine, Chinese Star Jessamine, and Trader’s Compass, native to warm regions in South and East Asia, and widely planted in the Southeastern U.S. The flowers’ heady indolic fragrance is prized in perfumery, but I’m afraid I haven’t the right sensory range to enjoy them.

(no subject)

Jul. 6th, 2025 10:12 am
greenstorm: (Default)
[personal profile] greenstorm
I keep trying to figure out how to write about this. My writing so far has been really dark and I haven't kept it. But very basically I'll jump in from this meme I saw this morning.

"Don't be so happy about people in Texas dying in the flooding because some of the people in Texas who died in the flood didn't vote for Trump" with my emphasis.

What I want to say is this: if we believe that every life is important and should be protected to the best of our ability, then it doesn't matter who someone voted for (or where they live, or their ethnicity, or the political status of their location) because people dying is bad for whatever reason -- I'm kind of on team John Donne for my reasoning, but also have kind of a moral sense and also an ecological sense about it, with a good measure of slippery slopeness and needing hard lines thrown in.

If we don't think that every life is important, and instead rejoice when someone who voted the wrong way, or did a bad political thing or whatever dies and think it's a moral good, then we're being morally derelict by doing so little killing. By not going to rallies and passing out poisoned coffee, buy not going door to door and shooting people with the wrong flag, our duty is being forsaken.

Note I fully and completely do not believe the latter but a lot of people seem to build the foundation for it and then just kind of ignore the ramifications. But this is of course not the time to talk to people about it. This is the time for everyone to rejoice in early and preventable death as long as it's the right people.

Miscellany

Jul. 5th, 2025 07:26 pm
mtbc: maze M (white-blue)
[personal profile] mtbc
It has been some days since I made an entry here. While R. works on making some ube (purple yam) cake, I can write up and share various tidbits. R. is pleased to have found salted duck eggs at a good price earlier today in what passes as the closest area Glasgow might have to a Chinatown.

I watched some science fiction. )

I found myself in an odd mood for more mellow electronica lately, Alexa managed to play me things like Synergy's Ancestors and Jean-Michel Jarre's Computer Weekend without getting songs mixed up.

eBay irritated me. I bought two of an item, then found it difficult to request a refund for one, then the other. )

At work it's interesting to see how I have a pattern of afternoon meetings at the moment, given that I work closely with US-based colleagues, though we do also have engineers in Pune. Back at Zilliqa my meetings tended to be in the mornings, as I worked with people in the Middle East and Asia.

I found that I have various money, and I read some science fiction. )

I am still experimenting with commuting for days that I work on-site. )

July 25, 2000

Jul. 4th, 2025 03:42 pm
asakiyume: (glowing grass)
[personal profile] asakiyume
My mood improved markedly with a visit from the tall one and his son, my grandkid, little treelet.

Wakanomori brought down a diary the tall one had kept as a kid: here is the entry from July 25, 2000, which includes our visit to Lloyd Alexander's house, where we put on a play for him and his wife Janine. Also included is a visit to the US mint in Philadelphia and commentary on the Delaware River (big!)

Horsetail Falls

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:57 am
yourlibrarian: Small Green Waterfall (NAT-Waterfall-niki_vakita)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian posting in [community profile] common_nature


Our last stop on the Historic 30 route was Horsetail Falls. If you look at the next photo you can see people sitting on the log stretching out into the pool for scale. .Read more... )

a handful of microfictions

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:35 am
asakiyume: (black crow on a red ground)
[personal profile] asakiyume
Having some feelings, so ... have some microfictions.

May 20, prompt word "serve"

Directions for serving certain abstract dishes:

--revenge is a dish best served cold
--pornography is a dish best served hot
--satire is a dish best served salty
--mockery is a dish best served bitter
--disappointment is a dish best served sour
--romance is a dish best served sweet


June 26, prompt word "kind"

"May I pay you in kind rather than currency?" the woman asked. The man was selling Dastrian funerary masks, perhaps war loot from the last conflict.

"That depends. What you got to offer?" He was suspicious--she looked Dastrian.

"These magical birds."

Impressed, the man agreed.

As he neared home that evening, the birds suddenly took flight. They plunged through the windows of his house, seizing precious objects in their talons, and flew off.

Payment in kind.

July 2, prompt word "clear"

"I'm not guilty," I insisted. It was true. Sure, I'd taken the bribe and misplaced evidence, but I did NOT betray Pereira. Yet now all I got were angry looks and curses.

"My spell will clear your name," Lady One Eye said. I believed her and didn't notice when she added, "Clear it but good."

The next day, no one knew me. I introduced myself and they looked confused. I wrote out my name, but it was like they couldn't see it.

My name had been cleared into invisibility.

4th of July Songs

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:06 am
[personal profile] writerkit
So this year I have two songs to plug for these times.  The first is my annual suggestion of Lucy Wainright Roche's "Fifth of July" which has been getting ever more relevant in these times. It's a commentary on the duality of America, and a patriotism that's about worrying about the direction of the country. ("And I'd like to just run but when all's said and done, I'm still in the business of trying.")

The other one, new for this year, is Sassafrass's "Somebody Will," which I would not normally consider a Fourth of July song. It's about the quest to form a Mars colony, after all. But what it's also about is striving for a future you are never going to live to see, and staying on track with not giving up on that future just because you won't live to see it. And the reality is that bringing the country back from this experience is going to be a generations-long project, something most of us won't live to see. I might, if I'm not killed outright by whatever comes, but I might not, and most of my friends are older than me and probably never will. But you do it anyway so other people might live to see it.

(no subject)

Jul. 3rd, 2025 06:53 am
greenstorm: (Default)
[personal profile] greenstorm
Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.
silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
[personal profile] silveradept
Let's begin this entry with One Hundred reasons Not To Die, which starts with oranges and moves through the ways that communities come together in the face of disasters and help each other. Which stands in stark contrast to the ways that having more wealth than could possibly be earned or expended in one lifetime (at least, not without seriously screwing over everyone and everything you can) has altered the way that the richest think of how they should be allowed to rule without fetters, that their ideas are always the smartest, and the rest of us should be beholden to them for everything so that we can't stop them or tell them no.

Ask most people who go through a university program where there's at least some amount of sport, and they'll tell you that the sports parts of the university are almost always the things that get the most money and what they want the fastest. A non-tenured professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder doesn't make nearly as much as the football head coach, and very little of the money that the football program makes ever finds its way back to the academics, nor does it seem that the football program (or other programs) can be decalred to be self-sufficient and their budget allocations moved over to other places that could desperately use it, like salaries for those doing the teaching. This is the perpetual issue with universities that have well-known athletics programs - they bring in a fair amount of revenue, but a lot of that revenue then gets spent improving the athletics portions and the rest of the university is left to figure out how to get their own funding. (My university was at least fairly explicit that a lot of the revenue from their "revenue-generating" sports is used to ensure scolarships and other materials for the "non-revenue-generating sports," which means that the football program often provides the operating budget for much of the women's sports available at the university, which is not a terrible thing to do with that cash. It also helps that it was a university with a fair number of alumnae who have gone on to prestigious jobs, so there's a lot of regular donations and endowments that they can use for capital and operating expenses. They still don't pay everyone on the teaching side enough, though.)

Harvard University employed someone to find descendants of slaves who had a history with Harvard's founders and prominent people. For doing the job admirably, thoroughly, and well, Harvard fired him, because he was finding far too many people with the associations than what the university wanted to acknowledge. They were willing to peek beneath the hood, but not to fully look at what was found there.

International Affairs, Domestic Fascism, and the occasional piece of good news )

Out of this post, McSweeney's says "Happy Father's Day, fools" with a post about just what it takes to be a dad.

And the need to remember that you don't know the gender of the person in front of you unless they've told you, which means a lot of habits that people have about gendering people based on things that don't actually say what their gender is need to be unlearned, both in person and in things like describing the contents of photos or other archival content.

(Materials via [personal profile] adrian_turtle, [personal profile] azurelunatic, [personal profile] boxofdelights, [personal profile] cmcmck, [personal profile] conuly, [personal profile] cosmolinguist, [personal profile] elf, [personal profile] finch, [personal profile] firecat, [personal profile] jadelennox, [personal profile] jenett, [personal profile] jjhunter, [personal profile] kaberett, [personal profile] lilysea, [personal profile] oursin, [personal profile] rydra_wong, [personal profile] snowynight, [personal profile] sonia, [personal profile] the_future_modernes, [personal profile] thewayne, [personal profile] umadoshi, [personal profile] vass, the [community profile] meta_warehouse community, [community profile] little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

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