Cloudy skies and a growing garden

It’s hot again this week, and I didn’t think rain was forecast for a few more days, so I thought I’d need to water my vegetable garden when I got back from my evening walk. I was surprised to see on my phone (kept handy during walks to take pictures) that rain was expected in the next five minutes. Yes, there were some clouds, but I thought I had time for a twenty-minute walk.

Halfway around the first block, I got a notice on my phone of a special weather alert, thunderstorms expected for the next hour. Hmm, the sky was getting darker, and not just because it was nearly sunset. But while behind me the sky was getting to be a solid gray, ahead were clouds in rather interesting shapes. I don’t know whether the first one looks to you like one dragon preparing to bite another dragon’s head, or the second one like a man and woman playing cards, but that’s how they looked to me, at least for a few moments before the increasingly blustery wind reshaped them.

Fortunately the first raindrops did not hit until I was about ten feet from the back door. So I didn’t get wet, but my garden did. This is the first time I have tried growing bell peppers, and I wasn’t too sure they would grow well for me, since the one other time I tried growing peppers (I forget what kind but I think my son had picked some kind of hot peppers), I got plenty of flowers but never even the slightest hint of an actual pepper. But so far they seem to be doing well.

Warmish weather

As soon as I stepped outside for my afternoon walk I could tell I not only didn’t need gloves, I didn’t even need to zip my jacket. I hadn’t taken a walk in several days, after having my hands get so cold even inside my gloves that it was hard to enjoy being outside. But today it was 51°F even with the sun having just set.

I thought I would try to capture an image of the welcome warm – well, warmish – weather for this blog. But how do you take a picture of warm? The no-longer-snow-covered lawn? Dead grass just doesn’t have a very warm look to it. The muddy car tracks where more than one car has cut the the corner a bit too close to our (corner) property? Clear evidence of warming weather but not exactly visually appealing either. My own unzipped jacket? No, I don’t do selfies.

Coming back home, I walked past my car in the driveway. Lately it’s been looking dingy, between the usual dirt that cars always pick up and the salt from driving on wintry roads. But after several times having driven by the drive-thru automated car wash only to see it closed due to cold weather, today I found it open (and a line of cars waiting), so my car is freshly washed and shiny. Perhaps it’s not the typical image of warming weather, but for today it works.

Bookworm’s snow forecast

A friend at work messaged me with this graphic this evening, from the Normal Public Library’s Facebook page. They credited the idea to the Falmouth Memorial Library in Maine, who published a similar forecast last week (but with more books!).

It looks like I’m only in the 1 book area, and I don’t expect we’ll get enough snow here to give me any extra time for reading, but I like the idea. It looks like my son’s college is in the 3+ books region, so maybe he’ll get some extra time to read. (Though with three philosophy classes this semester, I imagine he’s spending most of his time reading anyway.)

Birds and buds

I realized as I took a walk this afternoon that I have not usually taken walks in the winter. (At least not since I was twenty and lived next to a forested area where I enjoyed hiking even in the winter. The following year I spent in Spain and never enjoyed the cold as much after that.) I had not realized how many birds I would hear. Most were at the tops of trees (at least those I could see – some must have been in nearby trees that I couldn’t see), so I couldn’t get a good look at them.

This pdf tells which Iowa birds stick around for the winter, and how they manage to survive the cold weather. I had always known that some birds were around all winter and others were not, but never gave much thought to what made the difference. The pdf explains that birds that eat insects have to migrate, but those that eat seeds or meat can still find food in cold weather. I occasionally see birds of prey when driving on the highway, but these neighborhood birds must be seed-eaters.

I also had never realized that trees have buds during the winter. Last week I was looking for a website to help me identify one of the trees I had seen, and I came across a site for identifying trees in winter based on bark and buds. I thought maybe it was showing a few trees that could be identified by having buds in winter, and wasn’t expecting that it would help me any. But as I walked today, I noticed that most of the trees that had branches close enough for me to see them clearly had buds (others may have had only dead branches down where I could see them). It turns out these “terminal buds” are formed in the fall, and they protect the tree during the freezing temperatures of winter.

Icy branches

All those bare-branched trees had a special beauty this morning. A few miles before we got to church, I started noticing trees that looked white, instead of dark, against the blue sky. It wasn’t snow sitting on the branches, but that they were covered in ice. From a distance they looked all white – and so many of them! I would have liked to get a picture there, a few miles out of town, but we were already running late, both from the time it took to scrape the ice off the car, and the snow-covered roads being worse here than near our home. So I settled for the trees right next to the church. Not quite as impressive, but still very lovely.

Snow Day

For me, one good thing that came out of the pandemic is being able to “go to work” without leaving the house. It used to be I’d drive to work even knowing there was snow coming and that it would likely be much more than my usual 45 minute commute coming home. If it was expected to be really bad I could take a personal day, but those are limited, so I hardly ever did. I was just grateful that most winters, here in eastern Iowa, there weren’t more than a few days when the road conditions made me feel feel so nervous I wished I could stay home.

Now I can choose to simply work from home, if the winter weather advisory warns about hazardous road conditions. I don’t stay home if it just says to take extra time driving, but that word “hazardous” makes me much more cautious than it did when I was younger – and when I didn’t think I really had much choice about it. Now I can enjoy not setting my alarm in the morning (I’ll always wake up in time to get ready for work when the “commute” is walking down the hall). I can turn on my work laptop, log in, and work just about the same as I would in the office. And I can enjoy watching the snow fall, knowing I don’t have to go out in it.

I didn’t even have to go outside to take this picture, just stick my phone out the back door and snap a picture. (The air really was full of snow, but the flakes aren’t big enough to show up in this photo.)

Sundogs

It’s been almost ten years since I last noticed sundogs while driving to work and tried to get a picture of them. This time I have a better cell phone and was able to get a pretty decent picture of one of them.

They’re certainly not as spectacular to see as a full rainbow, but – for me, at least – more unusual, and more curiosity-inducing. Why two of them? Why are the colors reversed from the normal rainbow pattern (red on the inside instead of the outside)? What makes them stick around long enough for me to get to work, get out of my car, and take pictures? (Rainbows rarely last that long.)

You can read about the science of sundogs if you’re interested. But this time I was more focused on enjoying the novelty of them, the fact that I could actually take a good picture this time, and that I remembered what they were called. Sometimes just having interesting questions to think about is as enjoyable as finding all the answers.

Sundog seen from Moline, IL 1/6/2022

Ready or not (for a tornado)

If I had grown up in the Midwest, I suppose I would already know answers to questions like the ones I’ve been wondering about. But I grew up on the East coast, and tornadoes weren’t something I remember ever hearing anyone talk about.

When we moved to Michigan fifteen years ago, during new employee orientation at my new job I learned about “severe weather” alarms. I didn’t even know what the phrase meant, let alone why it meant I needed to go to the nearest restroom.

As far as I can remember, we never heard one of those alarms during the five years I worked there. But here in eastern Iowa, we’ve heard quite a number of them in the past eight years.

Not your average Easter bunny

Most Easter bunnies are made of chocolate. Some are plush. But this weekend’s wintry weather has produced some snowy Easter bunnies.

And while we’re on the subject of unusual Easter bunnies, check out these unfortunate Easter bunny costumes.

Sundogs

I don’t normally use my cell phone while driving, but Friday morning it was the only way I could think of to get a photo of what I was seeing. Unfortunately, the camera on my phone is not very good, so the photo didn’t come out well enough to be worth saving.

This morning at church I described what I had seen – two short columns of “rainbow” light, each topped with bright white light – and someone identified them as sundogs. I had also seen one at sunset Thursday afternoon, while driving home, and wondered what it was. They normally appear on either side of the sun, so perhaps I saw two on Thursday and didn’t realize it that sometimes I was seeing one and sometimes the other. Or perhaps they were not both easily visible from the road in the direction I was driving.

When I looked at various web pages about sundogs, most of the photos do not look all that much like what I saw. A lot of them are higher up in the sky, whereas what I saw was at the horizon. But then, the sundogs are always at the same level as the sun, and I saw them when the sun was near the horizon either rising or setting. A lot of the photos also show very bright light, with little of the rainbow range of colored light visible. But then, perhaps that is difficult to capture in a photo – my camera phone photo only showed bright light in the center and everything else rather dark.

Since I wondered if what I had seen really was sundogs, I googled “sundogs” and “Quad Cities” and sure enough, here are better photos than mine of what I saw Friday. The first one is the closest to what I saw – I did not see the full circle as shown in the last photos of the slideshow.

Next time we’ve been having such cold weather – from what I read this is probably why I saw them when I did – I’ll try to take my good camera with me. And maybe find a good place to pull over and take a good picture.