Mist on the Web

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

Do you know how tough it is to get the focus perfect when taking a picture of a spider web?

Obnoxiously tough, of course.

I’d thought I’d managed it, too. On the smaller screen of my camera, the fine filaments of the web seemed to be about right, and anyway, of course it looks a little blurry. It’s covered in water droplets, you know!

This one is solidly in the “Loved the composition, too bad about the focus” subcategory of my “Almost” category. It’s a strong composition, with good lines that guide the eye around the image. There’s a dynamic range of colors as well, between the reds of the flag and the greens of the planter box. And it has the right mix of unusual and everyday, bringing interest to things we’re familiar with.

I’m fond of spider webs, and spiders in general. Now, this doesn’t stop me from killing them or jumping at larger ones. We’ve got some pretty big wolf spiders infesting the area, and a few rather large web-weaving ones as well, and I keep my distance. I know they’re not poisonous, but that still doesn’t stop the instinctual dislike. And it is instinctual, since intellectually I’m fine with spiders. They’re useful critters, catching much more annoying insects like flies and mosquitoes. The cellar spiders that I occasionally find in the corners of a room I’ll frequently leave along, but I’ll kill every brown marmorated stink bug I can catch, and they’re both really easy to catch and far too common (and they’re quite solidly an invasive species). I seem to not be able to smell their scent, so killing them is not a problem for me. If nothing else, I can feed them to one of our dogs, Revel. He’ll eat them.

I’ve got a bit of a live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to insects. If they’re performing a useful job, like spiders, I may even let them stay in the house (though I will clean up the webs when they get messy). Others, like crickets, I’ll try to chase out of the house. And then there’s the annoying bugs that keep invading the house, like the stink bugs, which I kill. I don’t need to kill things that invade my territory, but if it is a full invasion, I will defend my areas.

And the spiders that live outside do leave pretty webs, which gather mist quite beautifully. Now if only I could find another one in the right spot at the right time, so I can get another chance at actually getting it in focus.

  

Pretty Plants, so Perniciously Prevalent

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

Pretty, isn’t it?

Don’t touch it, though.

This is either a giant hogweed or a cow parsnip. If this picture included more of the plant than just the flowers, I’d be able to tell. Neither is a pleasant plant to encounter, though hogweed is by far worse. Both are phototoxic. If you get their sap on your skin and then expose it to ultraviolet light, you develop a rash. For cow parsnip, it’s an annoyance, sort of like poison ivy. It itches for a few days, and the skin darkens some for a bit, with a possibility of lasting for a few months and blisters if you’re overly sensitive. Not too big a deal, and parts of it are edible.

Giant hogweed, on the other hand, is an invasive weed to be feared. Its rash is not a matter of a few days. Instead, it’s a major rash with blisters and burns. And when I say burns, I mean third-degree. Your skin darkens majorly, perhaps permanently, and the burns can leave scars. If you get it in your eyes, you can go blind. It’s not a plant to mess with. Which is why I’m glad I’ve got a tendency not to mess with plants I don’t recognize, since I hadn’t heard about giant hogweed until a while after I took this photo. It hasn’t hit Maryland, so there aren’t warnings out there about avoiding it.

Like many invasive species, giant hogweed was imported for decorative reasons. It is a pretty flower, after all. And 19th century gardeners seemed to be particularly stupid when it came to what plants they brought over, since that’s when many of the worst invasive species were released into the wild. There’s multiflora roses all over the woods behind my house, thick enough that you can’t really pass through them. They’re native to China, Japan, and Korea, and were brought over in the late 1800’s. Water Hyacinths, introduced to the US at about the same time, are from South America, and are both very lovely and the worst invasive water weed in the world. They grow very fast, clogging up waterways around the world, and are very difficult to fully eradicate since they can grow back from fragments. Admittedly, the ones my mom bought for her ponds seem to have all died over the years. Either they were a less resilient variant or the fact that the ponds have a slight leak and go dry every so often was a bit too much for them. Kudzu, The Vine That Ate The South, was introduced later, in the early 1900’s, as erosion control. Somehow I doubt erosion’s the primary problem in areas it was introduced anymore, what with the plant growing up to a foot a day.

Our modern ecosystems are full of plants that don’t belong. We keep bringing over tasty or pretty plants and animals, and they get out. In some cases, the escapee finds itself better than the competition, and it takes over, faster than the local plants can manage. It’s one of the reasons we’re currently in the middle of a major extinction event. Technically, we humans are an invasive species too. We’re doing best in the parts of the world we aren’t native to, and nothing there can stand up to us. At least we can also fight back against other invasions, even if we caused just about all of them to happen.

  

Why do all the Family Restaurants I’ve encountered serve the same sort of food? There’s more than one type of family…

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Location Taken: Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

This is another one I can’t fully place. It was where we had breakfast the morning after we left Thunder Bay (we stayed in a random hotel somewhere to the west of it along the Trans-Canada), and we had lunch in Kenora, which is even further west. Those are the only two data points I can fully place on the map, and they’re nearly 300 miles apart. In between is lightly populated forest lands, the land a bit too full of lakes for a heavy farming population. I could theoretically search all along the 300 miles of road until I find this restaurant, but that would take far longer than I’m willing to for a feature I’m not sure anyone else uses.

There’s always a bit of an internal debate about whether to eat at a chain restaurant or a local restaurant on trips. The chain ones have a lot of advantages, with the biggest one being knowing what to expect. You can go in there, order, and have the exact same food you could get at the franchise by your house, hundreds of miles away. The problem, of course, is that you get the exact same food as you could by home. Local restaurants, on the other hand, are much more varied. Some have iffy food, some have marvelous food, most are in between. You might have an idea of what they serve based on how they present their cuisine out front, but there’s a good chance for something oddball to show up on the menu. I had my first taste of poutine, the classic Canadian dish of french fries, gravy, and cheese curds, at a Chinese restaurant in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. Either that, or the one in Moose Jaw, but I’m pretty sure it was Maple Creek.

This particular restaurant was one of those roadside stops in the middle of nowhere. Hence the name “Family Restaurant” and the associated gas station. There’s no other restaurant around, so there’s no real reason to distinguish yourself any further. Like most “Family Restaurants” I’ve encountered, they served a standard American (and presumably Canadian) breakfast. Eggs, pancakes, bacon, ham, that sort of thing. I had the oatmeal. It was really good oatmeal.

I think I’ve found most of the best meals I have on long trips at the small local restaurants, but I still tend to eat at the chain ones. Why? Well, some of it is the whole knowing what you’re getting thing. It makes it easier to say if everyone in the car will find something to eat there. Mom doesn’t care much for Mexican and has trouble with a lot of other cuisines, I can’t stand burgers and find most Italian places boring, and Dad doesn’t care so long as it’s cheap. The chain restaurants let me say “Oh, I suppose it’s an Italian place, but they have that really good soup” or the like. Chain restaurants also are much more likely to advertise their food on the side of the highway, and have much more prominent signs in general, so we can debate about eating there sooner (so we can make the turn-off in time), and then actually find the place, which is not always the case with local restaurants. Local restaurants also tend to be situated where the locals can get to them easiest, on main streets and near working areas, while the chains are better situated for visitors, hanging out near the highways.

Still, there’s nothing quite like taking a gamble on a small local restaurant and discovering that your dinner is solidly delicious.

  

Lonely Road

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Location Taken: Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

I find myself oddly defeated by my attempt to locate where this picture was taken. I suppose it is rather generic, just like the last time this happened. But this does seem like a place I could locate using Google maps and streetview like I usually do. But it’s in a rather rural area, on the Trans-Canada heading north out of Sault Ste. Marie, and neither the satellite pictures nor the streetview are adequate for the job. The satellite pictures are low-res, which is common for rural areas, and the streetview car went through in winter, so all the trees looked very different. And I’m nearly too sleepy to write, so I’m having to give up locating it.

I have a fondness for rural highways. I suspect it’s a side effect of my wanderlust. There aren’t really anything that you could call a rural highway around here, where it’s too packed with people to get long stretches of empty road. So any time I encounter such roads, I’m on a trip.

I really do get wanderlust, it’s not just a turn of speech. It’s an odd feeling inside me that demands to see something I haven’t seen before, places far from the paths I normally tread. I get bored with the routine and yearn for the new. Or at least the rarely seen. At least I can usually assuage it with exploring something new in a video game, so I’m not spending every cent I have on road trips. Still, that only holds me so long.

I’ve got an odd relation with vacations. My family very rarely goes to see something. Instead, we go to see someone. Our trips are to visit friends and relatives, so we usually tread the same general paths. Still, with a family full of map nerds, we do stop at some of the nifty things along the way at times. Well, that and my Mom can’t stand stop-and-go traffic, so we get off the main road at the next exit when we encounter such an annoyance. I’ve had to do emergency navigation more times than I can count. Which means pulling the relevant book of maps out of the large stack of maps we keep in the car and finding a new route between where we are and where we’re heading. It can get a little hectic at times, since we don’t usually bother stopping anywhere and they may have passed the best routes already. That’s not too common, though, since there are clear visual differences between roads that connect towns and those that just head off to random houses. Signage, traffic, even how the road is paved tell a story of what type of traffic goes along the road. If you can catch the clues, it’s possible to navigate your way through an area you don’t have a map for without too many missteps. I’ve done it.

When I hear of people who follow their GPS to stupid extremes, it boggles my mind. I can understand intellectually that very few people have anywhere close to my sense of location and mapping, but it just doesn’t really sink in fully. I’ve been called a “Living GPS” and “Better than GPS” by people I’ve navigated for. Really. There’s a part of me that just doesn’t understand that not everyone is constantly watching and analyzing the world around them. Oh, and before you think I’m just bragging (which I am), there are a lot of equally important things I just can’t wrap my head around, mainly just about anything social. Or involving government and politics. And I can’t whistle at all, despite trying on and off for years!

  

Lost Treasures of the Modern Era

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Time Taken: May 2012

I’ve been a bit mopey this week. I discovered that the awesome art store down in Laurel (the town south of here), the appropriately named Laurel Art Center, has closed. According to the internet, it was a combination of aging owners and dwindling profits. It might reopen in some artistic form at some point, but it won’t be the store I grew up with, where I went to get my art supplies all through high school.

If you’ve never been to a dedicated art store, you’re missing out. I’m not talking about Jo-Ann’s, Hobby Lobby or any of the big box stores that could count as “art” stores, but the small, hole in the wall places. I’ve been in a goodly number and all of them, even the chain ones like Utrecht feel rather similar. The aisles are narrow, the shelves are full, and you can find the most unusual things there. Even if you do start wondering why or how anyone would use that odd shaped palette, or what the difference is between those two nearly identical paints that causes one to cost twice as much. But then, that’s part of the joy.

I wonder if there will be any of those stores left before long.

Well, I’m sure some will stay. There is a certain something about them that will attract artists. They are places that speak of the joy of art with every shelf. But I suspect a lot of them will fade away. And there aren’t too many of them out there now.

Why? The internet, of course.

When I was reading that article I linked to above on why the Laurel Art Center was closing, I realized I hadn’t been there in months. It closed in February, you see. It’s got to be at least 8 months since I last visited there. I just haven’t needed to, since I’m ordering my art supplies online these days. Mostly because I’ve started working with very specific materials that the Art Center didn’t stock, but partly because it’s easier to just click a few buttons than it is to drive down to Laurel, battle Laurel traffic, and then find parking on Main Street (parallel parking only, on a busy road). Even if it’s only 3 miles away. When I’ve needed more common art supplies, I’ve been tending to go to the Hobby Lobby that opened in Columbia (the town to the north) instead, because it’s close to places I visit fairly often. There’s little reason for me to visit Laurel these days, since all of the specialty shops and tasty little restaurants I used to visit didn’t survive this economic downturn, and all of the big box stores I could visit there are also in Columbia. Add in the awful traffic (I usually see two stupid driving tricks per visit, things that would have gotten them killed if the drivers around here weren’t used to such things), and it’s not worth my time to head south to Laurel.

I’m looking forward to the outcome of the societal changes the internet is bringing. For one thing, I wouldn’t have been able to find a lot of the art supplies I use if I had to rely on local stores alone (though I can get a much larger amount than you’d expect. Hobby Lobby has a rather nice Chinese painting section). But still, I am sad about the casualties along the way, the small specialty stores with more love of the product than profits that all of a sudden have far more competition than they can handle. It’s tough to beat pressing a button, after all.

I might have to head to the Utrecht in Baltimore at some point, though. You can’t get that same all encompassing sense of belonging from a webpage, after all.