On capital punishment

Capital punishment yet remains a contentious topic, even while we’ve found comfortable positions on many of the moral issues we struggled with for centuries – slavery and racism, women’s rights, legal adulthood, and so on. Perhaps the biggest reason behind this is, there are too many factors that motivate a response, most of them emotional, and most of those have been read more

More precipitation

Near sunset yesterday the thunderstorms rolled in, with conditions too bright to do any time exposures, and after two hailstorms, the rains came again. It’s only been a week since the last, but with sweltering weather that’s causing the plants to wilt in between, and watching the level in the rain barrel declining drastically, it’s something I pay attention to. However, read more

Report from the field, part three

And so, we conclude our photo tour of Juneau Alaska, courtesy of Jim Kramer, unless he complains that I didn’t feature a particular image that he thought I should (you’ve seen fewer than half of what he sent me – I’m playing the editor game here.) It was a business trip with only three days of photo opportunities, so he accomplished a lot, despite the weather.

Seen here, a read more

Well, I still don’t know


After making the previous post, I went out to water the plants (yes, at 2 am, don’t judge me, I’m not judging you) and was able to creep up on the frog in the pond with the use of the headlamp. The bright light doesn’t register as a danger to them, so even though this one was the wariest I’ve seen in a while, I could do a nice portrait – despite read more

Report from the field, part two: The catchupening

I had actually planned to have a post regarding the summer solstice pop up Sunday, nothing elaborate, but at least containing current photos, but then life happened in the form of emergency surgery. No, not for me, but for The Girlfriend’s Sprog who, in a fit of impetuous infection, callously threw away her plans to retain her appendix throughout her life. She’s fine, but we have confirmed read more

Monday color 20

Since it is now ‘officially’ summer, we will perversely jump back to almost the only color to be found in wintertime, holly berries in full fruit against the brilliant green of the leaves and a rich blue sky. I will admit to being quite pleased that we can find skies like this throughout North Carolina winters having grown up in central New York, the winters there spelled read more

Report from the field, part one


As hinted at earlier this week, we feature the first set of images from the blog’s official, um, Noncontiguous Correspondent, Jim Kramer, and his trip to Juneau, Alaska. We can’t really use the term “foreign” since it’s still the US, and even the continental part – I had opted for “discontiguous” but Merriam Webster tells me that’s read more

Call it a plus

And then, the rains did come.

After making that last post early in the morning and going to bed, I was awoken by another storm, this one centered right overhead – at least, if the explosion of thunder that loosened my fillings was any indication. This one brought rain with it, a good soaking, so I’m no longer conflicted.

I have not been neglecting my arthropod subjects, even though I’m read more

Plus or minus


The weather here has been rather oppressive, since we’ve been having temperatures into the thirties (or the nineties if you’re still using Fahrenheit) with no rain for over a week, and the plants are struggling, to say nothing of humans doing anything outside. Last night, we finally got the conditions for a thunderstorm, and I unceremoniously dumped a phone call with read more

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