a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • June Rose

    June rose

    A family member needed a home for a small rose plant years ago. We planted it in a spot tucked away. Last year I pruned it heavily. I just happened to look its way yesterday and went running to get a scissors to bring these massive, pink, sweet-scented flowers indoors to enjoy.

    June rose
    June rose

    It’s time to get back to maintaining this site. During this long hiatus, I have been deep into programming a commercial WordPress site. I won’t bore you with the details, but “less is more” is the key to making a responsive, nimble, easy-to-use site.

    Among programmers, a maxim attributed to Robert C. Martin is, “The fastest code is the code that never runs.” As I was whittling away at the plugins and code used on this commercial site, I hit an “ah-ha” moment when I discovered that an often-used plugin to speed up websites was actually making each page load 100 milliseconds longer. I’d optimized the site so much that the plugin to speed things up no longer made sense.

    Another moment of clarity came when I looked at the substantial SEO (search engine optimization) plugin the site used. It promises to do a lot, and it makes it sound like search engines will ignore your site if you don’t use it. But when I discovered that all search engines look for are a few bits of descriptive information in your output, and that it takes just a few lines of code to insert those into all your pages, I chucked the massive SEO plugin and instantly sped up every page.

    Now I have the wherewithal to devote time to this site again—to share the beauty of nature that surrounds me. It’s so easy to take it for granted. Out my window, all I see is nature. I can step out of the house and be in the woods, where I and our two dogs are the only visitors on the paths that meander through the trees.

    There is too much beauty and wonder not to share.

    So, it is back to posting and applying what I’ve learned to this site.

  • Mid-May

    Herb robert, buttercup, thimble berry

    It is mid-May. Spring is in full force. Buttercup, thimble berry, herb robert bloom. This is a cloudy, drizzly week, with intermittent sunshine. Perfect for working the garden. Potatoes and onions grow vigorously. I’m clearing a patch for American Giant sunflowers and corn. However, the packet of American Giant sunflower seeds warms me that they can reach 16 feet. “A perfect living wall,” the packet says.

    “Cut the fresh flowers in the morning, just after they open,” the packet instructs. But if the flowers are up there, 16 feet high in the sky, that will be a feat to perform. But that will be a mid-August problem, not a mid-May one.

    Herb Robert – a rather poetic name for a plant. Geranium robertianum, a species of wild geranium with small pink flowers and a strong, somewhat unpleasant odor. My name for it is stink weed.

    Some say the name comes from Robert of Molesme (1028-1111), a French abbot and founder of the Cistercian order. He had extensive herbal knowledge and healing, and many thought the plant had medicinal properties, particularly for wounds and infections.

    Some say it is from the Latin ruber which means red.

    I’ll go with the Robert of Molesme version.

    Molesme Abbey

    Here is the Molesme Abbey in Molesme, France. Founded in 1075 by Saint Robert of Molesme. When I looked up the name of the little purple flowers I call stink weed, the last thing I expected to be looking up is an abbey in a small town in eastern France.

    Thimble berry blossoms

    I do love thimble berries. The bushes can take over, but the white flowers are worth it. The pink, fragile berries divine, a July delight to look forward on this day in mid-May.

  • A First Frost History About to be Made

    Verdant hydrangea leaves in November

    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.

    Cherry blossoms in November

    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.

    Hen with newborn chick

    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.

    Hen with chick in the brush

    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.

  • The Swans are Back

    Swans on field

    The swans have returned to the valley. It’s always comforting to see them back for the winter and to watch them fly by when I’m out running errands.

    It’s unusual now not to see them fly overhead in twos, threes, and more. Though never in the vast quantities like the snow geese.

    First snow on Lyman Hill

    Fresh snow covered the top of Lyman Hill yesterday. First snow on the foothils and first frost here are later than usual this year. It’s already mid November and we have yet to have a frost. We usually have frosty mornings in late October.

    My Baker November 2024

    We may not have had frost yet here in the lowlands, but the peak of Mt. Baker is already in the midst of Winter.

    I’m back to posting pictures of what is happening in this lovely corner of the earth. For now, drop by from time to time. Eventually I will have the mailings working too.

  • The Meaning of Life

    Cherry blossoms in April

    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.

    White tulips.

    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.

    Skulls lined up on the side of the road.

    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.

    Buttercups

    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.