a man and his hoe

You wouldn’t know it was the very end of November from the verdant hydrangea leaves. History is about to be made. The latest recorded first frost I could find for our area ranges from November 23 in Bellingham, 15 miles north, to November 29 in Everett, 40 miles south of us.

Today is November 27, and there is no frost in sight, even through December 6, when the high is forecast to be 57ºF and the low 47ºF. It looks like mid-December or later will bring our first frost.

Typically, we see our first frost in mid to late October. When it finally happens this year, it will shatter records—a stark reminder that we need to act. But the time to act was 50 years ago when we already understood what we were doing to this planet.

The cherry tree that blooms through the winter is in bloom. It’s an odd little tree, with small clusters of blossoms on and off year round, but mostly in winter.

This hen decided to hatch a chick in one of the doghouses next to the house. There are two doghouses nearby, and the dogs used the other one while she sat on her clutch of six eggs. Different hens had laid the eggs at different times, and after the first two hatched, she stopped brooding. Only one of the chicks survived.

She chose to keep using the doghouse through September, October, and November. Two nights ago, I managed to trick them into going into the coop with the other chickens. When it got dark, I went in to check on them, and they were both on the roost. Now, they’ve decided to roost with the other chickens. The dogs finally have their second house back.

But they are still together and come running for handouts whenever I go outside.

This was a good spring for cherry blossoms. We had many sunny days when the trees were in bloom in April. On a day like that it’s easy to think the meaning of life is beauty and calm and love and peace. Yes, that is nice.

The same when the white lilacs are in bloom. Though lilacs do make poor cut flowers. They don’t last long. So maybe the meaning of life is impermanence.

But this was a shocking scene a month ago. While on a run, just a short distance from home, someone had lined up these skulls and jaw bones on the side of the road. The last I looked they are still there though some have been crushed by a passing car or two.

Mysterious. Who went out of their way to place these on the side of the road? A troubled soul? A demented person? Or a mischievous child on their way home from school? Coyote skulls and jaw bones perhaps? If so, maybe a bobcat or cougar placed them there to mark their territory.

Whatever their origin and story, seeing them every so often is jarring.

On to the future

Well, on to bringing this blog back to life. I set up a mirror site of this blog in a virtual machine on my MacBook so I can add back in the ability to get an email each time I post something. In that virtual machine I have the entire site running on the same WordPress – php – Nginx – MariaDB environment this site uses. And with that I can add and test the features needed to revive the regular mailings.

But why not just use existing software to do the same thing? All the existing solutions gather emails and information from the mailings, and I don’t want to contribute to readers getting more spam. By coding everything myself, I keep readers’ emails private from email harvesters. And coding such features is an interesting puzzle.

Not too long ago I worked on a commercial site that used a commercial plugin to limit the size of and amount of carts. I discovered that a 100 lines of code worked better than the commercial plugin. And we were able to chuck the commercial plugin which used 47 files and thousands of lines code.

The sun is out today. The daffodils are in bloom. Spring is here. It’s been an odd winter, very warm until a hard freeze in January where it got down to 6ºF, -14ºC. It was a dry freeze, followed by a week of very cold weather.
And yet we had just a single snow until the end of February and the beginning of March. But those are fading memories already and it is time to get ready to garden.

This morning a momentous event happened. I have been following the Japanese runner, Iino Wataru, 飯野航. He started running on June 7th on the Arctic coast in Barrow, Alaska. On August 24 he ran near our place and we were able to visit with him along the side of the road. Yesterday he made it to Panama City, Panama. And this morning he finished the last bit of his run spanning the entire length of North America.

He ran a total of 14,000km, 8,700 miles, through the US, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. During the run he used three pairs of shoes. The first pair he used from Barrow, Alaska, to Vancouver, BC.

In Vancouver he purchased two pairs of shoes, a trail running shoe and a road shoe. He ran wearing a different shoe on each foot. After running 5,000 miles in those two pairs, this is what they looked like when he finished.

He said he will buy a new pair of shoes in Panama.

Wataru had many adventures along the way, curious bears coming up to him in The Yukon, changing his route due to forest fires in Oregon, a 100 mile race around Big Bear Lake in California, truck drivers in Mexico who stopped to give him cold drinks, two dogs in Guatemala who ran with him for 20 kilometers, and meeting hundreds of friendly people everywhere. He says the people in Central America were especially kind and welcoming.

From Panama he goes back to Japan for a spell. On May 1, he will fly to Columbia and begin his run from the northern tip of South America to the southern tip in Argentina.

I doubt you will read or see about this incredible feat, but it goes to show that every day people around the world are doing amazing things all the time.

It’s been a while since I have posted. Sorry about that. Previously, I was using a commercial plugin to send new posts as emails to those of you signed up. However, I wasn’t pleased with that plugin, and have privacy concerns about the major plugins such as MailChimp that offer such features.

But, I am working on a solution. Thanks to ChatGPT, my programming skills when it comes to WordPress (which this site runs on) and the programming language WordPress uses for its backend, php, have improved to the point that I am ready to create my own solution. So before too long, I will be back to emailing new posts to you.

January’s warm spell came to an abrupt end with a week of sub freezing weather. Then it started to snow Tuesday evening, January 16. By Wednesday morning we were blanketed with snow. So this winter will not be a snowless winter after all.

An alien seeing a rabbit footprint in the snow is liable to go looking for a three legged creature. You could almost say that rabbits draw pictures of their heads and ears each time they hop in the snow.

For as pretty as this snow looked, it wasn’t a very nice snow. I like snow that is light and powdery. Snow that blows away at the touch of a finger. This snow was wet and clingy and as stubborn as concrete on trees and branches.

It lay on the ground for three days which seemed like three weeks. And by Saturday it was pretty much gone. And now we are back to a very warm winter. And rain, and rain, and rain, and rain, and rain, and rain. I’m not complaining, mind you. Just stating a fact.

So Winter hopped by for a short stay. Those are the best visits, short and sweet.

For those of you used to getting new posts as an email, I turned that feature off for a while. It is time to rethink and rework how to enable that feature. To maybe dig into the code and write the functionality myself. In the meantime, drop by to see new meanderings.