Sunday in the South Bethany wetlands

After breakfast at George and Margaret's, we took a walk around their neighborhood.

The surrounding area is wetlands, the upper reaches of tidal creeks flowing into Little Assawoman Bay on the Maryland/Delaware border.

Saturday at Rehoboth Beach

It's been a few years since we were there.  Met friends George and Margaret for lunch at a Mexican restaurant on the main drag.

Nice seeing the ocean again.

Signs that Spring is coming...

Crocuses in the back yard.

A dusting of snow in the park

Although we haven't yet had a major snow this winter, we've had about four dustings like this.



Here are two stands of bamboo which I often pass on my walks:

My favorite dead tree in winter:






The pond's mostly frozen.

The snow dusting in the yard

A view of the side yard I don't usually photograph:

My usual view of the side yard:

And the front yard:

Not everything changes for the worse...

With the increasing urbanization around me, it's easy to bemoan the diminishing of outdoor recreation.  Certainly fishing is under constant threat from deterioration of water quality, and hunters largely must travel to rural parts of Maryland.  However, some things have improved.

When I was a young man, the land adjoining the Patuxent River just below and above where it becomes tidal was private and much of it was devoted to sand and gravel operations.  Yesterday I visited one of these former sites which has been restored by the park service and returned to its natural environment.

I scouted out a canoe/kayak launch which I plan to use this spring to fish the river.  The park also features an 8 acre lake for bass and panfish fishing.

I see geese everyday, but these were wilder and spookier than the geese near my house 

Apparently, there are beavers among the park residents.






I suspect these ornamental grasses were planted along the trails.

It's a pretty place, and I plan to return.

Smoked Brisket

After a decade or so of not using my electric smoker, I'm getting back to smoking meat on it.  Today for the first time I tried beef, about 3 1/4 pounds of brisket that I bought yesterday at a nearby kosher market.

I let the meat soak overnight in my regular brine and today smoked it with hickory for almost six hours.  It measured well done on my meat thermometer at that point.

Winter with slushy snow

This year's tree

Plus Lucy:

Evolution of Life and Environment on Planet Earth (and Beyond)

As I have done after my previous three semesters in the Golden ID program, I have been reviewing my lecture notes and the text book for Geology 124.  The amount of material relating to both the physical and the biological sciences was significant but it was not all heavy.  How to cook rice, for example, was discussed (don’t stir it) as was the formation of soap bubbles and that shower curtains are a good environment for cyanobacteria.

For me, the course was ultimately about the growth of human knowledge about the universe around us.  The daily expansion of that knowledge was demonstrated by the discussions of the discoveries by the MSL Rover on Mars.  The class featured hands- on participation in observing and describing rocks on a field trip around campus and also by the collection of our hair samples for isotopic analysis.  From that data, students were required to create a hypothesis concerning “you are what you eat.”

Also stressed was the importance of the continued questioning of scientific hypotheses by identifying past hypotheses that took many years before general acceptance (such as continental drift) or a hypothesis that was recently created (such as snowball earth) which is now doubted by many.  A possible flaw in the most important biological hypothesis in history, evolution, was identified by its creator, Charles Darwin.  That possible flaw was eventually resolved by technical advances in microscopes, but Darwin had the intellectual honesty to first raise the question himself.

As someone whose last previous college course in science was during the Lyndon Johnson administration, I sometimes looked around at the young students and wondered what they would remember 45 years from now about Geology 124.  My bet would be that they will remember a lot.

 

"They're all our children"

"...we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.  This is our first task — caring for our children.  It’s our first job.  If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right.  That’s how, as a society, we will be judged. 

And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations?  Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children — all of them — safe from harm?  Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know that they are loved, and teaching them to love in return?  Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?..."

I kind of like this dead tree

I walk by it almost every day and each time I tell myself I should photograph it...




...and today I did.

It's on the shallow west end of the pond, shown not prominently in the center of the picture below.

Another warm winter?

Early December and the weather is in the 60s.  Tomorrow the 70's.

Are mild winters like last year's and the seemingly increasing numbers of violent storms indications that warnings of global climate change are correct?  Not necessarily.  These are short term weather variances in one geographic area while climate is longer term and global climate is, well, global.  It's not those of us experiencing weather changes, but the climate scientists who look at all the data and draw their conclusions about global climate change.  An overwhelming number believe that it is changing and that this change has been especially drastic since the Industrial Revolution.  They could be wrong, and I hope they are but they're probably not.  Industrialization in the US and everywhere else is not going to be reversed, so I have no idea how this trend would be corrected.

Late season fishing summary

In the past few weeks I've made a couple of trips to the pond and caught bream both times.  The first time I caught about three and the latest trip, Monday, I caught one.

I've also done out for trout twice.  The first trip was to the Little Patuxent where I caught a couple of fallfish.  On the other trip to Morgan Run on Tuesday, I caught nothing.  My waders were leaking when I found some rising fish, and I was getting somewhat uncomfortable by the time I realized there was a hatch of small, black stoneflies.  I have some patching to do of the leak.

Conference of the Birds

Yesterday afternoon I attended an excellent jazz concert at the University of Maryland which featured performances by two of the professors in their jazz program within the music department. The concert was appropriately titled "The Jazz Professors" and was as educational as it was entertaining.

Before each number, one of the professors would give a short talk about the piece, the composer, and the significance to the history of the music. The pieces were performed in more or less chronological sequence beginning with Jelly Roll Morton's "Dead Man Blues", a song probably about a hundred years old.

One of the last songs on the program was composed by bassist Dave Holland in 1972, and I listened to that album often in those years. Although until yesterday I probably haven't heard it in 30 years, I always found the melody of "Conference of the Birds" so haunting I can summon it into my mind's ear anytime. It was a real treat to hear it live.

Link to listen to the original.