On the Joy of Books

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Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: December 2007

I suppose there’s no real secret to how to get kids to read. It’s pretty simple, really. If you want kids to read, give them books they’ll enjoy.

One of the key ways to do it is just to have books around that they can access. When I was growing up, I’d just wander over to my parents bookshelves, scan it, and grab a book that looked interesting. This might be a bit more difficult as we progress to eBooks, but I suppose just making sure the kids have an eReader with access to a large selection might work.

My parents have lots of books. They clutter corners in every room of the house (and I’m not exaggerating there). And my Mom’s parents have a lot too, also well-read. They tend more towards non-fiction (that’s what’s on this shelf here) for my Grandpa, and Westerns and Romances for my Grandma, as compared to the Science Fiction and Fantasy my parents enjoy. Me, I like the SF&F plus a heavy dose of non-fiction (particularly science and geography based ones). My other Grandma has a much smaller collection, but then, I spent less time with her growing up so she’s not as big of an influence. But she does have some excellent children’s books.

Libraries are also great. That’s where the kid can explore books you don’t own and find the ways their taste differs from yours. My parents used to regularly drag us to the library along with them, and I devoured the kids literature. I was fond of fantasy books and the mythology section in the kid’s non-fiction. That’s how I discovered one of my favorite authors, Tamora Pierce, an excellent Young Adult Fantasy author. It was all because of font choice, really. I was scanning titles, and spotted one with a Blackletter font, which is much more likely to be used for Fantasy books. So I pulled it off the shelf, read the blurb, decided to check it out, and really liked it.

That book was her first book, “Alanna: The First Adventure”. She’s written a lot since then. I’ve been spending the past month or two re-reading her work, averaging about four books a week. They’re short books, but still, that’s a lot of great reading.

  

Green and White, Speckles and Spikes

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Location Taken: Garfield Park Conservatory
Time Taken: April 2008

I love succulents. If you don’t know, those are the plants with the thick fleshy water-filled leaves, like aloes and the plants above. They have those thick leaves to store water, since they tend to live in dry or arid climates. Many of them are desert plants, while others live in the canopies of trees, where there is nothing else to keep the water in place.

This means they tend to be pretty hardy plants. If you forget to water them one day, or one week, they’ll do just fine. This also makes them great for window boxes and potted plants, both of which don’t have much soil around them to hold in the moisture.

I’ve had some succulents decorating my place before, in college. I really like how they look, and I’m not the best about remembering to water plants anyway. I’ve mostly had aloes, including one with the white speckles like you see on this plant (which isn’t an aloe, by the way). I don’t have any of them any more, alas. While they can manage one week without water, two is pushing it, and my college had two week long winter and spring breaks. The plants could usually manage one or two of such breaks, they’d eventually fade and die.

Though it probably didn’t help that I keep my room dark, so they weren’t even getting as much sunlight as they would like… Ah well, that’s why I only buy highly resilient plants, and why my current pair are outside, getting some sunlight…

  

Jewels of the Sea

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Location Taken: Beach at Olympic National Park, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008

The tidal pools along the Washington Pacific coastline are filled with life. Sea anemones, starfish, crabs, and lots and lots of rock-clinging shellfish.

The latter provide food for the starfish, who cling to them, slowly prying out their dinners, even as the water comes and goes. There’s not much motion when there’s no water, but the animals are fine, they’re used to such vagaries in their homes.

These Pacific starfish are very different from the ones I’m used to. I am not much of a beach person, and this part of the Atlantic coast doesn’t have much in the way of tidal pools anyway, so I only really encountered them in aquariums. Usually in the touch pools, where you can reach in and feel the animals.

Which means a very careful selection of which species are put in the pools, and color is not high on the list. Durability and lack of aggressiveness are pretty high, I’d say. But this means most of the starfish I’ve seen are browns and tans and not the brilliant colors of the ones in this picture.

I was a bit startled to see these wild starfish, just hanging out looking for food, glitter like gems. And they are beautiful. I’m quite fond of the colors, both the dusty rose and the muted violet, and the white tracing looks a lot like lace. If you put these on the wall, people would mistake it for art.

Which may be another reason why the touch pools at the aquariums use boring colored animals. If they used the pretty ones, people might grab them to take home, and not just for dinner.

I might just want to use this coloration in some of my art, though… Hmm… Starfish jewelry…

  

A Bridge to the Misty Falls of Multnomah

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Location Taken: Multnomah Falls, Oregon
Time Taken: June 2008

This is Multnomah Falls, one of the tallest falls in the United States!

Or not.

It used to be listed as one of the tallest falls, back when such lists first became popular, but that was just lazy research. Didn’t stop them from putting a sign up by the falls listing it as the second tallest in the USA. But if you go to the World Waterfall Database (and did you know THAT existed?), and look at their list of Tallest US Waterfalls, Multnomah isn’t in the top 10. Or even the top 100. It’s on the fourth page of that list, and near the bottom too. And each page has 35 entries, if you want to do the math.

Heck, on that list, even Yosemite Falls is downgraded. And that one does still make the occasional top ten highest waterfalls list, but is sixth on the World Waterfall Database. It still rightly makes a lot of the ten most awesome waterfalls lists, but it’s not the top in height in the US.

That honor goes to a small cascade of water known as Olo’upena Falls that just happens to go down the tallest sea cliffs in the world on Molokai Island in Hawaii. Those formed when the volcanic island literally sheared in half, creating a massive landslide that left the massive vertical cliffs that are around today – and even then, the modern cliffs are nicely eroded. This is actually pretty common in the Hawaiian islands. The Hawaiian hotspot volcanoes produce a rock that erodes rather easily, and shears off quite nicely. All eight islands in the chain have massive underwater landslide debris fields associated with them, which is probably the reason there are only eight islands left in this chain – the remnants of past islands go back to the edge of the Pacific Plate that the hotspot is currently in the center of, with only a tiny fraction of the islands managing to stay above water.

Still, Olo’upena Falls has one major problem: it’s tough to go see. Yosemite Falls and Multnomah Falls are much easier to reach. One’s in a major National Park, and the other is literally just off the highway going through the Columbia Gorge.

Which is why Multnomah has well established paths, including this bridge, and a gift shop and restaurant and all the other standard tourist trap features. It’s really easy to just pull over on your drive, see the waterfall, and maybe grab a bite to eat or a souvenir while you’re there. And a lot of people do so.

  

Strolling In the Sandy Lands

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Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

The land near my Grandparents, along the northwestern coast of the lower peninsula of Michigan, is dune country.

The winds coming over Lake Michigan pick up the sand on the beach and push them inland until the trees and landscape slow down the wind enough that it drops its load of finely ground rock. It piles up over the centuries, sometimes becoming locked down by vegetation, other times piling up so much that any more sand (or seeds) that land on it just slide down the slope. It’s pretty easy to see that in the background of this photo, the triangular shape of bare sand on a hill, surrounded by trees.

Well, actually, it’s not triangular. It’s an upside-down filled in U shape, aka a parabola shape. It just looks triangular since it’s at an angle to us, which scrunches the shape.

This type of sand dune is called a Parabolic Dune because it has that shape, for obvious reasons. They only form in more humid and vegetation rich climates like those found alone a coast line. They also require frequent strong winds from one direction. If the winds aren’t strong or frequent, they don’t pick up much sand, and if it comes from multiple directions, the sand doesn’t pile up in one spot. Winds of this type are actually pretty common along shore lines, since land and water lose and gain heat at different rates, leading to daily cycles of heat imbalances – which is what forms wind.

If there were these strong, frequent unidirectional winds in a sandy area, but it wasn’t humid enough for vegetation, you’d get a different type of dune. Barchan dunes are common in deserts, and look pretty similar to parabolic dunes, a U-shaped or crescent shape of sand, except for one key difference – the U goes the other direction. Without vegetation to lock down the sand, the dune shifts with the wind even as it gets added to. The edges of the dune get spread out much easier than the center, since there’s less of a wall effect going on to block the wind from going where it wants, so both edges of the pile of sand that is a dune head away from the wind more than the center does, forming a crescent with the round part of the U pointing in to the wind.

Parabolic dunes have the opposite orientation because of vegetation. Vegetation grows where there’s enough water to trigger the plant growth and enough nutrients in the soil to feed the plants as they grow. Different plants have different requirements, which is why you find a layered look to the vegetation along the shore, with trees in the far back, then bushes and small plants, and then, at the edge of the sand, grass. The grass doesn’t need much stability to its ground while it’s growing, nor does it need much in the way of nutrients. In fact, it provides stability and nutrients. In further back areas, where the small bushes are, they are growing based on the remnants of former dune grass, the roots locking down the soil, the decayed grass matter providing nutrients the sand lacks. Still, the dune grass has limits. If there is no water, it cannot grow, and moving sand is not a great source of water. Neither is a steep slope, as the water that falls on it will flow downhill a bit too fast for the plants to catch. So the area right by the beach, where the sand moves all the time, stays bare, and the tall dune faces do as well.

Even the snow can’t stay on the steep slopes too well, and it shifts constantly on the beach. The ice does lock down the sand, but when there is ice, the plants cannot grow anyway.