English Ivy, on a not-so-English tree

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: April 2010

I really like English Ivy. It’s such a pretty plant, one that really shows the beauty of a simple leaf. It doesn’t have ostentatious flowers and stays green all year long, so it’s great for keeping a consistent color in the place you plant it. It comes in a small variety of colors, all fine shades of green, including many of my favorite dark greens. It has a lot of history, and lends a certain dignity to any building it’s growing on. The best schools in the US are known as Ivy League for a reason: many of them are old schools with plenty of ivy on the buildings. It’s easy to grow, and easier to care for.

And yet, I shall never plant it in any garden.

It’s invasive, you see.

We do actually have some English Ivy in my Mom’s garden. My sister also likes the plant, and got a small hanging pot of the ivy when she was young. Mom eventually planted it by the deck on the side of our house. It’s still growing quite happily all over the bottom area of the deck, much larger than it was when it started. I think Mom’s tried to eradicate it a few times, but it hasn’t worked so far.

It’s the very qualities that make it so easy to care for that make it so likely to get out of hand. It grows well in all light levels, and in poor soil. It can handle droughts and frost. I’ve never seen a single bug-bitten ivy leaf. All the standard things that wipe out plants, it just shakes off. In some ways, I’d like a non-invasive variety, but that would mean more care and maintenance would be needed. It’s a bit of a conundrum.

It’s rough on what it grows on, too. It may look really pretty growing up the brickwork of a house all the way to the eaves, or winding its way up a tree as in the photo, but it’s not just sticking to the wall by magic. It has small roots it digs into whatever it is climbing up. This can cause problems for brick houses, since brick is actually fairly fragile to such damage. A large ivy infestation will slowly pry apart the bricks, leading to it failing far earlier than it should have. Kudzu does the same thing. At least it means abandoned buildings don’t sit around being eyesores for too long, since nature is so good at bringing down buildings. But it does mean the owners of unabandoned buildings have to be careful about what they let grow on their houses.

  

Tim’s Place

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Location Taken: Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

I was happily surprised to see a Tim Horton’s in Toledo, Ohio while driving through there yesterday. Then I saw signs pointing towards two other ones not too far from the first. They’re invading! The Canadians are invading!

Tim Horton’s is a Canadian institution, you see. Or a Canadian religion, one of the two. Well, at least as much of a religion as Starbucks is in America (people certainly visit their local coffee shop far more often than their local church…). In a list of things that are quinissentially Canadian, Tim Horton’s ranks up there with hockey and poutine. It was even started by a hockey play, not surprisingly named Tim Horton, who decided to spend his money on starting up a chain of coffee and donut shops rather than spending it on, say, large cars and chocolate fountains for every room in a massive mansion. It spread across the nation, since it does have good donuts and (I suppose) good coffee. I only tried the donuts once, and the coffee never. Donut-and-coffee shops lose a lot of their glamour when you don’t really like donuts and are allergic to the caffeine in coffee. At least Tim Horton’s is better than Starbucks. I once went into a Starbucks for a meeting with a teacher, and tried to find something to order so I wouldn’t just be rudely taking up a table while waiting for the teacher to arrive (I was early). I failed to find anything. It was all either caffeinated or far too sweet for me. I haven’t been to a Starbucks since then.

I might visit a Tim Horton’s again, though.

  

Constructing a Stormy Trip

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Location Taken: Pennsylvania
Time Taken: June 2010

I have an odd fascination with road construction. There’s something really nifty about seeing the bones of the road and the earth, laid out before you. Before they were covered, and they will soon be covered again. But for a moment in time, a traffic-delaying months-long moment, they are revealed.

Well, I suppose it’s not too odd. I come by it legitimately. My Grandpa was a civil engineer, and three of his kids followed in his footsteps. My mom wasn’t one of them, but she did inherit a love of roads, earth, and construction that she passed on to me. Which is why I write about geology and travel so often.

I’d have not a clue where this picture was taken if it wasn’t for that milemarker sign. Even then, I had to half-guess. Road construction, as intricate and fascinating as it is, still largely looks the same aside from vaguarities of local geography. I couldn’t have taken this photo in Kansas, for instance.

Not that I’ve been to Kansas since long before I started taken photos. I mainly recall flatness. Well, that and weather. Kansas seems to delight in tossing… interesting… weather at us. First time I went through there, while on a road trip to Colorado helping a friend move (I was 8 or so), we ran into snow. Lots of snow. In March. We got snowed in in a tiny hotel (luckily with a connected restaurant) for a day or two, completely unplanned. On a later trip, we largely avoided Kansas, merely coming close to it – and encountered heavy hail, with tornadoes nearby, just over the border in Kansas. Much later, we flew over Kansas – and encountered thunderstorms and heavy turbulance while we were above it. Mom jokingly says Kansas hates her.

Admittedly, incliment weather is one of the things Kansas is good at. It’s located right on the line where the dry cold air coming from Canada meets the warm wet air from the Gulf of Mexico for most of the year. Thunderstorms (and other storms) are caused by such mixing of air temperatures and moisture. It’s why there are so many tornadoes in this area too, though the major outbreaks seem to form further to the east. Kansas gets them quite frequently, though.

Ah, a post diverting from road construction to tornadoes. Two things I’m rather fond of, both of which cause great delays when they come to visit.

  

Off-leash Puppies of Doom!

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Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

My family is rather fond of road trips. I’m writing this early because I’m about to head off on one. By car, mind you. I’ve only taken a bare handful of plane trips (five planes, four of them on one round trip to Seattle) in my life. I do like traveling by train, but the US Amtrak system goes to a rather limited number of places, and usually would require a car on the other end of the travel as well. Cars, on the other hand, let us go where we want when we want, and take the dogs along as well.

I know a lot of people will kennel their dogs for the duration of their trips. It does make sense, let someone else take care of them so you don’t have to worry about it at all while you’re having fun. My family, though, prefer to let the dogs have fun as well. Most of the places we visit are rural enough that we can let the dogs run around leashless, and boy do they run! It’s the only chances they get to really stretch their legs. We’ve got a yard at home, but it’s a small suburban yard, and our dogs can cross it in five seconds, three if there’s something really exciting on the other side.

Still, we do have to take some precautions before just kicking the dogs out the door to go get in trouble. First, you have to make sure they’ll come back. This means you’ve got to finish bonding (which for my mom and her dogs, doesn’t take long). Teaching them to come when called really helps, too. For the first bit when we’re off-leash training our new dogs, they spend most of their time on leash. We let them off in safer areas, away from busy roads or interesting people, and where you can watch where they go. Places like deserted frozen beaches work really well. After a few times of this, if done right, the trust will build up and you’ll know it’s safe to let them out of your sight. Certain dogs do require a little more, though. Revel (the black dog in the photo) loved chasing cars at first, and it took a year or so to break him of the habit (though if a really large and rare catch comes by, all bets are off. He managed to corner a snow plow once). He also likes wandering largely out of sight when we go walking in the woods, which can get a bit worrying, so he has a bell on his collar now. It’s oddly fun to listen to the jingling go back and forth, stopping when he finds something to sniff, speeding up when there’s something to chase.

Now I just need to figure out how to hook up the dogs to my bike so they can get up to the speed they want while we’re in areas with leash laws…

  

A Moment in Time

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Time Drawn: Fall 2006

I always have liked adding a touch of drama to my pictures. It’s a bit tough, for a few reasons.

For one thing, I am working in a static media. This picture isn’t going to move, you know. All I can do is capture a moment in time, and choosing the right moment is tough.

For another, I’ve long had a problem drawing people. One of the odd effects of being both asocial and asexual is how it’s affected my art. I’ve never just stared at people, seen how they move. Well, I do it some now, since I know it’s useful. Means I don’t naturally get how other people move. And I’m a very solid person, both physically and mentally. This means I tend to draw people just as solid and stable as I am, since that’s the way I know best. My people just aren’t fluid and dynamic, and you need that to add drama.

I know what you’re thinking, just avoid drawing people. Draw highly dramatic chipmunks instead. Or rocks, since I like them so. Isn’t so simple as that.

We humans are geared to respond best to human forms. It’s a basic survival instinct, after all. If you know what looks and acts like you, and you gravitate towards it, things just go better than if you, say, gravitated towards something with four legs and big sharp teeth. And socializing’s got a whole heap of subtle clues that we humans developed as we became civilized. Gotta know what’s standard before you can catch the subtle differences.

What this all means is that the best way by far to add drama and interest is to add a human. Even a tiny silhouette in a corner helps, adding a sense of scale and the hint of a story. And we humans like story, since stories are how we learn. Even the most boring class you had in school was a story, if a long, dull one with little sense of plot or rhythm. Remove the human element, and things blur together. There’s a reason we anthropomorphize everything, from humanoid foxes walking on two legs to a sun with a big smile.

This all is why I still like this picture, even six or so years after I drew it. Sure, I’ve learned a very large amount about art since then, this was one of my earlier pieces, after all. There’s a whole heap of things I would do differently if I made this concept today. Still, it tells a story, a moment in time. And it works with my overly stable human form, too.

I think it took half a sharpie to color all that black on the page, though.