A Persistant Little Lovely Flower

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Photo #316: LilypadLocation Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

You know, the lilypads in my Mom’s pond seem to survive better than most of the other flora and fauna she’s put in.

Mind you, she doesn’t take them in for the winter, and we do get cold enough to freeze the pond water at least a few inches down.

And this is the pond that has a slow leak that resists all the attempts at patching Mom has tried. It usually sits only half-filled, at best. Well, unless it’s rained recently, then it fills up a little.

Plus Mom’s health fluctuates a lot, and a lot of the past few years, she hasn’t felt up to much pond maintenance aside from a yearly mucking out and the occasional attempt to patch the leak. And that mucking out is mostly getting the massive amounts of fall leaves from the oak tree above the pond out of there, and she usually does it in the spring, so that pile of leaves spends upwards of six months sitting and soaking and getting really heavy.

The fish Mom adds tend to vanish over time, most likely with the assistance of the neighborhood cats. There’s a reason she doesn’t do fancy fish. She only got frogs once, and they’ve all hopped away. The snails vanished as well, at a slower pace. The water hyacinth is a virulent (but pretty) water weed, and that couldn’t handle the neglect. The cattails frequently come back, but are ragged and have to regrow from scratch anyway.

And then there’s the lilypads. We don’t always get flowers, mind you, but every spring a few curled leaves poke their way up through the water’s surface, facing the year bravely once again.

And when the flowers bloom, they bloom beautifully.

  

Have you ever been too tired to sleep?

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Photo #315: Yellowstone SunsetLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012

Bleh. I hate having a broken Circadian rhythm sometimes.

I get stuck in these really awkward sleep patterns sometimes, usually because I’ve got something that I must be awake for that interferes with the normal shifting of which time I need to sleep.

Bah, “normal”, like occasionally being naturally nocturnal and other times fully diurnal and all the variations in between is anywhere near normal.

I’m currently stuck on one of the most awkward patterns I can fall into, a non-24-hour two-nap cycle. Aka I’m getting sleepy twice a day (but fully waking up before I get a full 8 hours of sleep), but which times of day I’m asleep are shifting around.

Which, alas, means I’m running tired. I always feel a bit groggy for an hour after I wake up, and I have trouble falling asleep unless I’m tired enough, which means being tired for at least an hour or two. And, alas, if I’m in a two-nap cycle, the fact that I’m sleeping twice a day just means I’ve got those two hours of sleepiness doubled each day.

Add in that I’m trying to do one of the few ways I’ve found to shift myself out of this cycle, which is staying up long past that point when I’m sleepy enough to actually sleep. I don’t do anything productive during those hours because my brain has already shut down, and it only works about 30% of the time. I did that today, and still woke up at an awkward time, partly because I knew I still needed to write today’s post.

So here, have a sunset photo, I’m going back to bed and trying to get more sleep. We’ll see if it works.

  

The Coincidence of the Tides

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Photo #314: Tidal BoreLocation Taken: Truro, Nova Scotia
Time Taken: July 2012

Have you ever heard of a tidal bore?

You only find them in a few very specific places in the world, where the land around a bay or river just happens to have a funnel-shape that’s pointed in the right direction AND it’s an area with a rather large difference between high and low tide.

Essentially what happens is the river flows upstream when the tide comes in, with a visible wave and everything.

All the water on the planet is getting pulled by the moon’s gravity as it circles the planet, forming a bulge of water moving around the planet as well (it’s actually an oval interposed on Earth’s sphere, since there’s actually a bulge on the other side of the planet from the moon as well as on the side facing the moon, thanks to how gravity works.) In those spots with those specific conditions I listed, the water rushes in so fast and with just so much water that even the liquid state of water can’t equalize it fully. So yeah, wave.

This particular bore is found on the Salmon River going through Truro, Nova Scotia, a town located on the tip of the Minas Basin portion of the Bay of Fundy, home of the most extreme tidal differences on the planet. It was at one spot in the Minas Basin where they measured a difference of 55.8 feet, which just gets more and more impressive the more you think about it.

I actually hadn’t expected to see the tidal bore. We were merely passing through Nova Scotia on our way to Newfoundland, with no plans to do anything more than drive past Truro on the highway, and the tidal bore only happens twice a day. It would take a rather large coincidence for us to be passing by at just the right time to stop and see it happen.

I love it when those types of coincidences actually happen.

Due to another coincidence, there had been rain the night before and we stopped at a hotel rather than camp. And well, the hotel had internet, and I decided to look up the tidal data for the Bay of Fundy for the next day, just to see what stages of the tide we’d see the next day. That’s where I found the info on the tidal bore on the Salmon River, which has a great viewing spot right off the highway we were about to travel on. And it was within the range of time that we might be passing by.

Sure enough, despite all the random delays and lighthouse tours and miniature horse shows we happened across earlier that day, we just happened to come up to that exit off the highway just five minutes before the projected time for the bore.

Which was a good amount of time for us to find the viewing area (it was well-labeled), find parking, and join the large crowd already waiting for the bore. And sure enough, just a few minutes after the projected time (there’s a margin of error), there was that rather impressive wave coming upstream towards us.

It was irritatingly hard to photograph.

I mean, it’s a muddy wave! Most of the impressive stuff comes from realizing that the wave is coming upstream (which actually makes it pretty noisy), and in watching the large sandbar in front of you vanish under the water as the tide level rises. And this bore moves rather quickly, so I didn’t get too many chances at photos, especially since I wanted to, say, actually look at the wave rather than the camera.

It’s much better in video. Luckily I found one that someone else put on Youtube. Also coincidentally, it was taken from pretty much the exact same spot that I took this photo.

That one’s only a small coincidence, though. It WAS one of the best viewing spots for spotting the wave first thing as it came in, and it was far enough from the crowd that you don’t catch the crowd noise.  Great spot for photography and video, really.

  

Ancient Plants of Great Power (Generation)

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Photo #313: HorsetailLocation Taken: Frankfort, Michigan
Time Taken: June 2012

I love horsetails. They’re such interestingly spiky plants, found mostly in sandy spots by water. There’s none by my house in Maryland (the soil tends towards clay here), but there’s a lot near my Grandparent’s place in Michigan, in sand dune country.

They’re a primitive looking plant, quite different from most of the plants around them. They’re one of the “living fossils”, a category of plants and animals that are pretty much identical to ones found in the fossil record, and in the horsetail’s case, they were actually far more common back a few hundred million years ago, before these newfangled “leaf” things came along.

In certain fossil eras, like the Carboniferous, horsetails are EVERYWHERE. That’s the era that produced much of our coal deposits, by the way, since the geography of the time favored large wet swamps and marshes, which just pack that organic material into perfect coal, once it sits around for long enough. So I guess that means there’s a pretty good chance your house is being heated by ancient horsetails right now!

  

Amazing how the snow and the waterfall are the same color…

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Photo #312: Niagara SunLocation Taken: Niagara Falls, New York side
Time Taken: December 2009

Ahhh, nothing quite as pretty as a beautiful low sun behind the vapor from a magnificent waterfall.

Well, except for certain mountains.  And fjords.  And columnar basalt.  And puppies.  And bamboo forests.  And-

Ok, so there’s a lot of pretty things out there.

But this is rather high up there in the prettiness listing.