Au Naturale (10/18/2019)

The nice thing about teleworking or telecommuting is that it allows me to go for long morning walks with my dog Jake (I wrote a long post about it here). As I mentioned in my previous posts, we have cold mornings again, which knocks down the chigger, tick and mosquito population, and I can go out back into the woods again. One of my walks is about a mile and a half (2.4 km) long. It brings me through our neighborhood and then into the National Park which runs in the City Park. The City Park or Newport News Park is the woods I write about in my blog all the time. 

The look back after just entering the National Park from our neighborhood.  Don't tell anyone, but here is when Jake is off the leash and allowed to go his own pace and forest bathe as well.  He is too old to get in trouble and just enjoys smelling and looking around as much as I do. 

I noticed today during my walk that the second that I stepped over the boundary between our neighborhood and the National Park that my gate slowed down, my shoulders relaxed and even my breathing calmed down. I felt that my jaw did not clench and the space between my eyebrows relaxed. It was actually amazing. I was suddenly going for a stroll. 

Now when we walk our dog(s) (our other dog died almost a year ago now) in our neighborhood, we go with a purpose: to walk the dog, and/or to get some exercise, get our steps, raise our heart rate. In the woods, I go forest bathing, experience nature, enjoy myself and let nature come over me. I realize, when I walk through our neighborhood things have gotten slower. Jake has gotten older, and my knee has not been very happy lately. 

But it is somewhat boring walking in our development, you have seen that front yard only so many times; you meet the same people (dog walkers). Only once in the nearly 20 years that I have lived here have I been met with excitement; well actually three times, counting the other two times that I was almost run off the road, once actually breaking my ankle. The really exciting time was when I saw a well-proportioned nude lady walking through her living room. This happened about 15 years ago, so who knows, since I have been living here 20 years, maybe within the next 10 years I will be confronted with such a delightful view again (no nude guys please). I wonder if this is why I am somewhat tight when walking through our neighborhood, full of anticipation?  I just hope my poor old heart can take it when I get my next view to a nude lady in a window and that this millisecond exposure is not the end of me. While this may be the ultimate existentialist experience as I describe in a previous post <here>, I don’t want to go into cardiac arrest for something minor as that. I want to go out in a big way. 

However, it is those strolls in the woods that keep me going. Every day, I am just amazed by how the sun comes through the trees. What leaves have fallen off the trees. Yesterday, I was greeted by the call of a hawk; actually, it was probably warning me to stay away, or warning others of my presence. Today, I heard the call of birds that mimic the call of the hawk: blue jays. There was a caterpillar hanging by a thread from a leaf of a wax myrtle. There is always something to see or to explore. 

One of my favorite (small) forest trees, the sassafras is shedding its leaves.  Stay tuned, I am planning to write a post about this species one of these days.

Sunrise in the woods, I love the way the sun comes through the canopy and plays with the fallen leaves on the forest floor.

Folks it is really true, nature is not scary; it actually is good for you to go out there. Nature is good for your health and a one-time exposure can last you a week to two weeks. Just be safe and when you are a newbie to nature, go with someone you who has experience and who you trust. Lastly, enjoy and stroll, don’t be in a hurry.

Remember nature? (10/8/2019)

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus is believed to have said “It is not possible to step twice into the same river.” The reason being that even seconds later conditions in that river have changed. Different water molecules would be running by and touching your legs, aquatic organisms have moved and even particles of sand and sediment have been washed away, down stream. You yourself have aged and you are not the same as a split second ago. This may be scary when you think about it, but on the other hand it could also be comforting.

I was thinking about this when I finally dared to venture out into the woods behind our home again. The night-time temperatures finally dropped below 60° F (15.5° C), which means the chiggers go into hibernation and it gets less uncomfortable to venture into the woods. 

The woods have definitely changed over the past half year. For one when we last walked outback (as we call it) is was very wet and we had to dodge puddles. However, we have been in a drought, lately. I do not think it has rained for at least a month and instead of coloring, the leaves are shriveling. I am just hoping we don’t get a forest fire back there. While it would be good to have a good ground fire in the woods behind our home as I discuss in some of my posts, it is so dry that I fear for a crown fire and our homes.  It has really become a climate of extremes.

It has been so dry that the ponds have dried up, and even the puddles in the road which usually stay wet throughout the year are dried up. The largest pond behind our home has just a little pool left in the middle.  I am not sure if it has fish in it, but it usually has a healthy turtle population and I wonder how they are faring.  All ponds behind our home are ephemeral (with the possible exception of the large one) and they are fed or reflection of the groundwater levels.  This means that the levels usually fluctuate 5 to 6 feet every year; however, this year they seem to have dropped more than that.  Surprisingly, some of the grass along the trail was still green, while the grasses in the lawns in the yards of our subdivision are browning up. The entire south-eastern U.S. appears to be drought stricken this year, and the temperatures are way above average for the year. 

This is a picture that I took two weeks ago of the large pond and the water has dropped even more.

During our car ride back from our Century bike ride on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (which was fun, by the way), we were listening to NPR’s Weekend Morning Edition Sunday. They interviewed Larch Hanson, a seaweed harvester in Maine. Larch quoted Wendell Berry from one of his essays in “What are People for?” Berry wrote: “People are for preserving memory of place!” I guess that is what I have been doing with my blog posts over the years; trying to document the subtle changes in the woods behind my home. However, at times, while blogging, I can’t help myself and I also try to document the changes in my thinking and the society and of course in the politics around me.

A photo of my wife and I taken by fellow cyclists during the century ride this past weekend on the eastern shore of Maryland.  We had a lot of fun.  It was cold and very windy (first cold day, hence the packed in look).

Hanson said in his interview: “The water remembers us!” I would like to make an argument that nature remembers us, as well. Whatever we do to her will come back to haunt us, as we are currently experiencing with global warming. Yes, what we are seeing will likely accelerate, and Heraclitus’ philosophical outlook on life will become more and more apparent. Nature around us will start changing faster and faster and not for the better, and soon we can talk about the good old days. This is why, as Wendell Berry mentioned, we better preserve the memories of how nice it was back then (read now) by documenting it in our writing and photography while there is still time.  This is what I try to do in my writing and I hope you do that too in your form of communication with your friends and loved ones.

Fall is in the air (9/4/2019)

It is September.  Fall is definitively in the air.  A little early maybr, but our two chrysanthemums (or mums) that we have overwintered for years now, are about to bloom.  So are the goldenrod in our back yard.  I am sure that the bees are looking forward to it and to other fall flowers.  Our first major hurricane (Dorian) has devastated the Bahamas and is on its way up the eastern seaboard.  My wife and I are training intensively for another century (bicycle) ride.  We took a long bike ride last evening and it was wonderful to chase our own shadows down the road and to look over the fields in the national park behind our home while the sun was starting to set.  It was gorgeous.  Wow, the rites of fall (not of spring).

This picture was taken recently during one of our training rides.  This is in the Colonial National Park in York County.

At work it is time to plan for next year's workshops, while preparing one more full day class and working on at least two more webinars.  Crazy as it may sound, every time I step in front of a class I have to fend of questions like: "Hey Jan, when are you retiring?" or remarks like "Hope you are not retiring soon!"  Guess I am starting to look old and acting my age.

Honestly, I do have retirement on the brain.  It would be nice hang it up and relax, work on my trees, sail, travel, hike, and just hobby.  However, it would also involve admitting that I am getting old and that the decline is setting in.  I wrote about that in a somewhat rambling post <here>.   But I do enjoy teaching and working with these folks.  I am still hoping that my love and interest for the environment will rub off on some of them and that they will follow in my footsteps and help to protect the environment or at least understand the need and the urgency to do so. 

We ask the folks that attend the workshops to do a review of the class and these are just two of the latest reviews I got in August.  I took a photos because they made a comment specifically about my teaching.

Another point for not retiring is financial.  The stock market did not fair well in August and with the political uncertainty it is difficult to rely on the savings right now.  The stock market rises or declines one or two percent with every tweet or twist and turn by the current occupant of the White House.  It feels like he is just doing it for kicks; just because he can!  There is talk about a recession.  In other words, I am not sure if this is the right time to call it quits, or just to hold on until we finally get rid of him and things stabilize.  That is, if things will ever be the same, or stable, again.  Oh god, here we go again, into my favorite subject of late, politics.  Stop it!

I really like fall or autumn as some call it, except for the annoyances of the storms (which according to statistics are getting more severe thanks to global warming).  It is getting cooler, the air gets crisp, the leaves are coloring and the shadows are getting longer.  I have written about my love of autumn every year except last year (check the keyword or label: fall colors).  

Animals, plants and yes, we people are all preparing for the coming cold season.  The squirrel are digging in my bonsai pots and I think they are hiding oak acorns in them.  All the moss has been dug up and thrown out of the pots, and next spring it will be weeding time.  Of course, they are hiding acorns elsewhere in the yard, as well.  Plants are translocating nutrients to the roots and trunks in anticipation of the winter.  I teach my students that this is the time that weed control may work best.  Even we humans are preparing for winter.  Some of us fatten up in fall, for the cold winter.  We have stored our firewood and are ready to light the stove when it gets cold at night.  Bring it on!

Winter in the woods (2/6/2018)

It has been a cold January this year. In the newspaper this week people are complaining about their electricity bills; their heat pumps worked overtime. Our utility bills were not that bad, since we partially heat with wood and have gas heat.

The cold weather provides great opportunities to go walking out back in the woods or as we call it “the outbacks.” We had good snow (especially for our area) and we are still talking about investing in some cross country skis, but we already have so many hobbies.

Jake is ready to go for another walk in the snowy woods behind our home.  I took this picture sometime in mid-January after another snowy day.

From the looks of it, I am sure that almost all but the weakest trees in the woods behind our home will have had no problem surviving the cold spell. They are well prepared for events like this. For one, it is not that this has never happened before, temperatures around 4 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Many of the trees are well over 50 years old, so they have seen this before. Moreover, it has been cold over evolutionary time, and the parents or grandparents of these trees went through cold spells like this, survived it and were able to reproduce. In other word, “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.” It is what Darwin called “survival of the fittest.” The plants that survived historic cold spells survived, and produced offspring and they just went through this year’s wimpy cold spell.

Another good thing was that the cold snap happened in January, just when you would expect something like this to happen. The plants were in full dormancy. It might be a different story when this happens in November, March or April. Plants prepare themself for this by dropping their leaves and raising the sugar content in the cells. By doing so, the sugar acts like an antifreeze. Water in the space outside the cells does not have any sugar and freezes. When this water freezes it draws water out of the cells lowering the freezing point of the cell content even further. A pretty nifty system. But even if the content of the cells freeze, in preparation for winter, many plants move their DNA to the center of the cell and wrap it in fat, very much like things we wrap in bubble wrap, further insulating and protecting the most important parts from freezing and sharp ice crystals.

Even the small pine saplings seem to tolerate the cold and the weight of the freshly fallen snow.

Plants that keep their leaves, like the pines, cedars and the hollys, fill their leaves with chemicals like anthocyanins and vitamin C. Anthocyanins are also known as flavonoids which act like antioxidants. They turn the leaves dark, sometimes purplelish and as we’ll see that allows plants to do some photosynthesis when it is cold. Other plants that stay green in the winter increase their vitamin C content. Vitamin C also functions as an antioxidant. Antioxidants are important in winter since the chlorophyll in leaves will keep on capturing sunlight to make sugar, but the cold temperatures has slowed the sugar making process down to a crawl. The cells are loaded with electrons (oxidants) and plants need the antioxidants anthocyanins and vitamin C to neutralize them off. If they don’t do that, plants would be in trouble (if we humans get too many oxidants we get inflammation or worse, cancer).  Anthocyanins are important for us as well, they make blueberries purple, and they are also found in grapes, strawberries, red cabbage and other colorful vegetables.  In the plant world, anthocyanins have another function as well, it makes leaves look either unpalatable (purple) to insects or to others insects the leaves look like they are dead (not green). A good way to protect yourself from bugs.

But it has finally warmed up a bit, although it is all relative (night times around freezing and day times in the 40s and 50s). It was a great weekend to go out and explore. We just walked along the trail and decided to get off the trail at one point and bushwack over to the other side. Hoping to find something new and exciting. Somehow we are never disappointed when we do that. It was interesting to start out in an area covered with leaves of beech and swamp chestnut oak trees, going over to an area that was dominated by a mixture of loblolly pine, overcup oak, white oak and some red oak. This last area had a lot of ephemeral ponds in them as well. I never really studied the difference, or why these two areas are so different; I have to put it on my to do list.

Some interesting pictures from trees.  Not sure what happened here.  Maybe a branch that fell off and scarred over, maybe a gall, whatever, it looked like a nose to us with an eye above it.  Never a boring day in the woods. 

I have not the slightest idea what happened here but it is absolutely bizarre.  It looks like there were two branched growing on top of each other which is somewhat unnatural.  the top one was really heavy and seemed to have bent down.  Crazy.    

No, Jake is not marking the tree, just turning and coming to me.  He was fascinated by the smells around this tree.  I want to bet this hole is the home for a critter and that is what he was reacting to.

Finally, this weekend I attended a writing class at my church and we had to write haikus. I had never written one in my life, but felt inspired by my walk in the woods that morning. Moreover, my regular readers know my interest in forest bathing. No it is not a masterwork, but anyway I had fun doing it. So here I go:

I walk in the woods

A spy in the house of deer

Nature bathe over me

-

I breath forest air

Therefore I am a human

Walking in the woods

Leaves, leaves everywhere (12/8/2017)

Fall is almost over, and winter is about to start. Our neighborhood has all the icons of late fall mixed in with the signs of early winter.  The inflatable turkeys are being replaced by inflatable Santa’s, but worse, all over the side of the roads we see stacks and stacks of plastics bags filled with leaves.  People that live along the wood line in our neighborhood blow or dump the leaves in in the woods.  I guess they don’t realize that they create a fire trap for themselves.  They have piled up this huge layer of incendiary biomass that if it ever catches fire would create a spectacle with embers that would definitively fly everywhere (read their roofs).  Interestingly, I was teaching the people who maintain the trails back in the woods and I told them where I live. The first question they asked me was: “Are you one of those leaf dumpers?”  My emphatic answer was: “NO!”

It's all in a day's work!  Kids could really have fun with this, building forts, except they are a favorite target of many of the male dogs in our neighborhood.

During one of my workshops I teach a course on soil amendments where I talk about plant nutrition and compost.  I always get a few laughs and definitely a few smiles when I tell my students that plants are different than us bipeds or animals in general.  We humans need hamburgers and French-fries to sustain our selves (unless you are a vegetarian or a health nut, of course); but, I tell my students, plants make their own hamburger and French-fries.  All they need is sunshine, water and some boring minerals.  I pop up a list of all these boring minerals and discuss the three most important ones: Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium.  I tell my eager students what the function of these three elements is in the plants.  Nitrogen for leaf growth and protein production; Phosphorus for (root) growth, DNA and energy; and Potassium for flowering, and energy.  If you are a biologist, I know, this is very a very simplistic and rudimentary explanation, but so be it.

If plants needed to hamburgers and French-fries to survive they would need to look like this carnivorous mushroom.  Naturally this is completely fictitious!  Happy they don't exist, although meat eating plants or carnivorous plants do exist.

Maybe difficult to see, but these are pitcher plants hidden under the grass.  These plants are carnivorous and capture bugs.  I took this picture in June in Newfoundland, Canada.  

I tell the folks under my tutelage that in the fall trees shed a lot of Phosphorus in their leaves.  Leaves are full of DNA, RNA, Chlorophyll, Mitochondria, and ATP which all have their fair share of Phosphorus, and a lot of this Phosphorus rains down in the fall with the leaves.  Subsequently, a lot of people rake the leaves up and dispose them in a landfill (as I tell my students, their dumb neighbors do that, and I am sure they don’t).  The only way the trees get that phosphorus back in the leaves next spring, is by pulling it out of the soil (if there is still some left after all those years of carting leaves off to the landfill or dumping it in the woods somewhere).  In fact, people that bag their leaves, mine phosphorus out of their soil and the only way they could get it back is by paying the fertilizer companies or start a seagull colony in their backyard, but who wants to do that.  Alternatively, they could use a mulching mower and grind the leaves into small pieces so that the leaves can decompose and the Phosphorus can leach back into the soil.  Folks could also compost their own leaves and turn them in to black gold; use them as mulch; or send them to a composting facility.  However, they still would be mining Phosphorus when they send them to a composting facility, unless they buy compost and put it back in their yard.

In addition to returning the nutrients back to the soil (organically), the leaves in the flower beds provide habitat to the animals in the yard, especially the birds.  In my yard, the towhees, fox sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, juncos (in the winter) and the brown thrashers are running around the leaves and are scratching for bugs like chicken.  Whatever goes for a lawn in my yard has a lot of mole, vole or maybe even shrew tunnels.  I don't know if it is true but they say that chipping your leaves gives you a lot of soil insects, such as grubs, which attracts these critters.  Oh well, I rather have this than poisoning my environment.  We are harming our planet enough already that I think that all small things help, and we try to keep all poisons and chemical fertilizers out of our yard if we can.  I use chemical fertilizers on my bonsais but I use soapy water to fight off any bug infestation in my miniature trees.

We really should try to do our part for the environment even if it is a little bit.  A small steps help.  Thinking that your use of fertilizers or pesticides do not contribute much to the whole picture is erroneous; damage is cumulative, it all adds up.  All those small positive things add up too, and while we may not notice it in our life time, our kids or grand kids surely will.  We only have one blue marble to live on.

So let's not bury our leaves in landfills and mine nutrients from property to replenish them with artificial nutrients.  However, let's recycle, compost and reuse them.

Yorktown (11/11/2015)

The leaves are falling!

The leaf of a sassafras tree/shrub; one of my favorite species.  I just love the trident shaped leaves and while I do not like the taste of root beer, I love the smell of the crushed leaves which smell like root beer.  Old folklore tells me that in the south people would crush the roots and make tea from the roots claiming that the tea would make them better able to deal with the heat and the humidity of the summers.

Fall is definitively here.  It always seems to hit hard in November (see my post from around this time last year).  It is around Thanksgiving that I rake, blow or mulch for the last time.  The roads in our neighborhood are beginning to be lined with clear bags with leaves that are going to be carted off to the county's composting facilities (I hope), and maybe next spring these same people will bring some of the leaves back in a different form to fertilize and mulch their yard; although I would not bet on it.

Many of these people mine their yards for nutrients.  In one of the classes that I teach I surprise my student with the little factoid that fall leaves contain a lot of phosphorus and by us carting leaves of to the dump or to the composting facility we are really mining phosphorus and depleting our soil.  This forces us to go buy fertilizer at our landscaping stores and put artificial fertilizer on our lawns and gardens which we basically cart off again next fall.  The fertilizer companies  (and the garden stores) love us, don't they?

Our neighborhood has them all, there is this one guy, I swear, he gets the blower out when he sees one leaf on his lawn or driveway (he's obviously OCD).  My wife and I call him "Jack the Blower".  He has the leaf blower going for at least two hours every Friday, Saturday and Sunday (we are not home the other days so we don't know if he blows those days as well); one wonders what else he does in life, or if he has a life.  I feel sorry for his neighbors; who have told me that they actually caught him blowing leaves into their yard.  When we lived in Cincinnati 20 years ago, we knew an equally OCD guy (an ex FBI agent) and when we walked by his property we made sure to bring a leaf and  place one leaf on his lawn, just to tease him.  Boy, we were mean in our younger years.

But leaves are important, as I mentioned, they recycle nutrients and organic matter, but they also are the home to a lot of insects and other critters.  It is a lot of fun to see towhees and brown thrashers going after bugs in the leaves in my yard.  They do it just like chickens scratching away in the leaves, throwing them all over.

I took this photo a couple of days ago behind our home and titled it: "Fall massacre in full swing" 

But there is more, all the mushrooms that are out there are fed by the decaying leaves and rotting plant materials, salamanders lizards, frogs and a lot of other critters need them.  The fallen leaves serve as natural litter that keep  the weeds from growing; although, in some cases to much litter may be a bad thing as I complained about in an earlier post.  There is too much litter in the woods behind our home, which in my eyes has suppressed the native weeds and forbs.  The only way to remedy that would be with a controlled burn and good luck in getting that approved.

But again, it is important to mulch the leaves back into the lawn and back into the flower beds.  The organic matter, nutrients, weed control, and habitat for our wildlife provided by those leaves is so valuable!

Newport News Park (11/18/2014)

Have not written much lately and not sure how long I'll be able to keep this up without making it sound like too much of a diary.  Moreover, I've been asked to write a (text) book and I assume that when you start writing for a living your armature writing languish.  We'll see.

Fall is definitively here.  Tonight we get a major frost (early for this time of the year) courtesy of another year with a polar vortex.  I expect that all or most of the leaves will start raining down tomorrow after a night time temperature in the mid 20s.  Taking the dogs for a walk this morning I was struck (as most falls) by the variety of leaves on the forest floor and all the different colors.  An absolute gorgeous sight, made even better by the fact that I don't have the rake these leaves.  Leaves that I saw included those of the sassafras, sour wood, maple, sweet gun and some of the oaks (all shown in the picture below) on top of pine needles.  Further down the trail you see black gum leaves, persimmon and the sycamore.  Naturally in the woods behind our home there are a great number of oaks: red, white, water, post, laurel, overcup, and swamp chestnut oak.  I probably miss a few.  To me a great publication is booklet by the Virginia Department of Forestry on our common Virginia trees (click here for the link).

Of all these trees I mention I have a sweet spot in my heart for the sassafras and the overcup oak.  I like the trident leaves of the sassafras, it delicate yellow flowers in spring and its yellow leaves in the fall.  On top of that, when crushed, the leaves smell like root beer.  Not my favorite drink, but the smell is indicative of the plant's assumed medicinal value.  I've read somewhere that, in the deep south, the roots were ground up and drank as a tea.  Tradition tells us that the tea makes it easier for you to tolerate the southern heat and humidity.  The leaves are also used in Creole cooking.  I like the overcup oak just because the acorn is almost completely covered by the cup, and because it grows in the wettest locations.  They have been fruiting copiously, and I am sure the deer just love it.

Bath County (11/02/2014)

It was an interesting weekend to spend in the high country of Virginia.  We stayed in Highland County but also visited Bath County for dinner, visit with friends and for a hike in Hidden Valley.

Hidden valley is a great place for a hike.  The trail we took straddles the Jackson River, which is one of the headwaters of the James River.  We hiked it in late afternoon; the weather was cold (it snowed in Monterrey), most of the trees had lost their leaves, with the exception of the red oaks.  The trail is great; it is an easy walk with the exception of crossing the suspension bridge over the river with dogs.  one of our dogs freaked out when the bridge moved.

Bath County is famous for the small towns of Warm Springs and Hot Springs, which are aptly named after the springs (and associated bath houses) found in the area.  Unlike Highland County, which seems depressed, Bath County is opulent, with resorts and a wonderful restaurant in Warm Springs that is part of the Grist Mill.  Hidden Valley also has a wonderful looking B&B associated with it.

Attached are a few photos from our trip to Warm Springs and Hidden Valley.

The Inn at Grist Mill

Newport News Park (10/26/2014)

Some fall we are having; blue skies and delightful temperatures.  Who needs more reasons for a nice walk in Newport News Park around our drinking water reservoir.  The reservoir is an interesting place.  It is a dammed off section of the Warwick River, and it actually has a lot of significance.  Picture more than 100 years ago this area was the site of a civil war battle between the Union and Confederate Forces.  They were dug in on both sides of the river and gunning for each other.  I understand there were much fewer trees around and it must have been an interesting sight; not something I would want to experience.  But now it is all water under the bridge, or should I say into the reservoir.

The reservoir is fed by a few stream, but mostly by a pipe line that brings water from 40 or so miles away.  From here it goes into the water treatment plant and comes out of our faucets.  While these pictures show the lake and it's surroundings in full glory, it is actually the areas far away from the dam that are the most fun.  We can reach these areas from our home as well as from the regular parking area, and we have spent a lot of time in those swamps looking at red-headed woodpeckers, herons, gannets, wood ducks, Canada gees, bald eagles and even at various plants like lizard's tails.  We have been standing in the swamp in February doing the great back yard bird count ankle deep in mud and chilled, but thrilled at all the birds.  That bird count is always on president's day weekend and it is so appropriate to count in a park where George Washington hung out at one time to make the life of the Britts miserable.

At one point the swamp/lake is fed by a spring that is located in the Yorktown Battle Field National Historic Park, a place I have written a lot about.  This spring is actually located need the encampment that George Washington used during the revolutionary war.  I am sure he drank from the spring.  This is another subject I wrote about in a post called George Washington's shovel.  The area is full of remnants of these two major wars that were fought on the Peninsula.  It is really a neat place to live and experience.

It is actually amazing knowing that drops of water that we drink and molecules of air that we breath have all passed through the body and lungs of people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Hitler and people alike.  We are such a closed system, that we better take care of it.

Fincastle (10/17/2014 and 10/18/2014)

This past Thursday, Friday and Saturday I took part in a stormwater workshop that was put on by the Virginia Association of Professional Soil Scientist (VAPSS).  It was held at Camp Bethel in Fincastle.  Camp Bethel is in a great location and a well thought out camp/retreat.  As a Unitarian Universalist I will not comment about the religious background of the camp, but in no way was there any evidence of a religious message, maybe with the exception of the “no alcohol” rule.  But that was ok; my liver got a break.

The first day of the conference I gave one talk and I served on a panel.  The second day I gave two talks.  Being good soil scientists the third day it was time to look at soil pits, which was great.  I needed to participate a little, but it was a long time ago that I looked at soils in this way.  But truthfully, as one of the major contributors at the conference, you are always on, and people constantly approach you with questions or to start a discussion. 

The best thing was that my wife came with me for a change (she is a soil scientist), and regardless of all the teaching and exhaustion, we were able to sneak away after the meeting for a hike to peep at some leaves, enjoy nature, and just decompress.  There are some great trails at the camp; although the marking of the trails can be done better than just pulling a paint brush over the bark of a tree.  Regardless we had a wonderful time, being away from the hustle and bustle at the office, being in nature, but also being with peers; people with similar interests, who are pretty darn intelligent and just plain fun to be with. 

It was great to recharge the batteries and enjoy life; although it did nothing for the internal debate we both have about what to do when (and sometimes if) we retire: do we want to stay where we live; do we want to move to the mountains and keep our boat as a free motel room in the Tidewater; or shall we move back to New Mexico?  This all came back up during our drive home.  We love them all and honestly, we came to the conclusion that you can only stay (mentally) young if you have a variety of interests and hobbies and foster that in each other.

Blue Ridge Parkway (10/15/2014)

Having to travel out to the western part of the state, we decided that it did not matter what time we arrived at our motel, so we took the Blue Ridge Parkway to our destination.  It was just after a rain, and the fall colors were in their full glory.  Below are some pictures I took on my way down to Roanoke from Afton Pass.

The pictures below give you an idea of the vistas and just simply nice areas we passed by.  We crossed the James River, which was flowing lazily underneath the bridge that is posted here as well.  There is a restored lock on the other side, and that really amazes me, the human effort that was put into getting transport up these types of river.  The other photographs are some beautiful pictures of fall colors and a wall near the visitor's center near the Afton Pass.  It was a great dive and wonderful to see nature in its full glory.

Fall in Richmond (11/5/2013)

Although it is early November, it already feels like late fall.  On the road from home to work the leaf colors seem to be just past prime.  Here in Richmond they are definitively past their prime.  This photo shows how empty Richmond is, even at lunch time.  Summers are better, but people seem to shun the outdoors when it gets a little cooler.

Douthat State Park (10/27/2013)

The hike on Sunday was magnificent.  We did a great hike, starting at the cabin over the ridge behind our cabin along the Mountain Top Trail.  The views were exquisite, the leaves were turning, and it gave us a nice view of the lake.