Nature lessons

It was a good year for balsams--look at all the new growth on the tips of the boughs of this one.












This hemlock had a good year too.


















There aren't many wildflowers blooming right now--here's one:False Solomon's seal. It's sort of pretty. There is no wildflower called "Real" Solomon's seal, just something called Hairy Solomon's seal.



















And these are the domestic flowers that are blooming right now: a couple of very soggy irises. I don't know where I got them or when I planted them, they just show up every year.


This is what the Holt's house looks like now. I think they're making very slow progress because of the weather.

It's still raining today. It's supposed to rain all weekend. I'm not pretending I'll be motivated to do much of anything for the next two days. I have two movies to watch, so maybe at least I won't watch dumb tv (although The Dog Whisperer is usually on some time on Saturday, I just have to surf around to find it). I will vacuum, this I promise myself. I hope to go to the memorial service of an old man who was a staple of the Silver Lake neighborhood for decades. He was a dentist in AuSable Forks in the early days of his career. His first name was Adolph, if you can imagine anyone naming a son that (though he was born pre-WWII, he died in his 90's). I worked with him for several years on the newsletter of the shoreowners' association. At first he was a pain in the neck and would edit the articles I wrote, making changes that drove me crazy, but in later years he was incredibly sweet and did the publishing work that I didn't want to do, leaving the writing to me. He was a very nice man in his elder years. His daughter now lives in the family camp year round, though I can't imagine it's very warm. It's over "behind the island," in the area we on the north shore of the lake consider to be an undesireable location because it's so densely populated and the camps are close together. The trend over there right now is for camps to be sold, torn down and huge $300,000 year-round houses to be built on the site. There's a brand new one just being finished directly across from Linda's camp. It's really an eyesore. This trend is bad for the health of the lake because winter is a time the lake rests and the water is cleansed. If people live on the lake in the winter, sewage inevitably seeps into the water and the lake never has a chance to rest. She said self-righteously. Although it takes a very long time and very little of it actually does, my sewage eventually seeps into the lake.

And that concludes our nature/ecology lesson for the day.

I will now catalog a 15-volume set of 1955 Nancy Drew's for the Peru library.