Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - January 2016

Here we are at mid-January and still we've had no killing frost this winter in my zone 9a garden. Our lowest temperature of the season so far has been 34 degrees F. 

There are a few micro-zones in the garden where the merest touch of frost has occurred a couple of times, but, overall, plants that would normally be long-dormant are still showing a green face to the sun, and there are more blooms still going in the garden than I can ever remember at this time in January. 

This is 'Peggy Martin' rose which is just now putting on its first flush of blooms for the year. Normally, this would come in March.

This old pink Knockout rose has bloomed continuously since fall and it still has a few blooms open every day.

My last milkweed plant that still has leaves also has blossoms. The other plants were all completely devoured by Monarch caterpillars in December.

Yellow cestrum would usually be resting in January but not this year.

And those Monarch butterflies that grew from the caterpillars that ate the milkweed in December are very happy that the cestrum still has blooms.

Pots of sweet little violas around the yard provide more winter color. 

As does a planter filled with pansies and succulents on the back porch.

Wild oxalis sprouts in many of my beds in winter. Technically, it is a weed but I tolerate it because I think it's pretty and it disappears as soon as the weather heats up.

Meanwhile, the purple oxalis that I grow on purpose is blooming, too.

The Esperanza has been bitten back a little by the mid-30s temperatures we've had but it still sports a few flowers.

And the shrimp plant flowers continue to linger.

Turk's Cap ' Big Momma' is flowering.

And the pineapple sage continues to sport some blossoms.

The Meyer lemon is blooming.

But it also carries lots of fruit...

...in all stages of development. This one is ready to make lemonade or a lemon cake.

Purple trailing lantana - at its best in winter.

The flowers of the Cape honeysuckle have been a bit damaged by cold weather but they still hang on and feed the Rufous Hummingbird that visits them daily.

Even the blue plumbago continues to hang on to some of its blooms.

'Hot Lips' salvia has a few kisses for us.

Copper Canyon daisy should be long dormant by now, but it is still green. Still blooming.

The ever-blooming 'Encore' azalea has a few bright flowers going for this Bloom Day.

And near the front entry, the pot with the foxtail fern, red kalanchoe, yellow pansies, and other mixed plants blooms on.

It has truly been a weird winter so far. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency predicted that our area would have a wetter and cooler winter than usual because of El Niño. Well, they got the wet part right; we've had plenty of rain. But so far the cooler weather has not materialized. Of course, we've still got a little more than two months to go in the season, so perhaps they will yet be proved correct.

Happy Bloom Day. I hope whatever the season is in your garden - winter or summer - that it is kind to you.

Thank you, Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting us once again.

Black Skies by Arnaldur Indriðason: A review

Black Skies by Arnaldur Indriðason
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If Sigurður Óli lived in 2016 America, he'd be a yuge Donald Trump supporter. He would attend the rallies (probably wearing a tee shirt with the Confederate flag emblazoned on it) and would happily participate in the evicting and maybe roughing up of any protesters or Muslims who dare to show up. He is an angry right-winger who is dissatisfied with the way Icelandic society is going. It's letting in too many immigrants. It's providing too strong a safety net. It's too soft on crime.

That last one is the one that really gets his goat, because he is with the Reykjavik police, which forces him to place constraints on his basest - and racist - instincts.

His ideal is America. He attended police academy in America. His favorite place for a vacation is Orlando, Florida. He loves American television and American sports, especially baseball and football. He is enthralled by American capitalism and by the young tycoons in his own country who are following its example.

At the time of this tale, Iceland is enjoying its economic boom, which, like many of the era, turned out to be something of a bubble built on nothing but hot air. At a school reunion, Sigurður Óli sees many of his former classmates who are profiting from the boom and spend their free time partying with the international jet set. Siggi, on the other hand, has been in a relationship which now seems to be on the rocks and his career in the CID seems to be going nowhere. He is one miserable camper and a miserable human being to boot.

Black Skies finds Inspector Erlendur still on his walkabout as he was in the last book, Outrage. He's off in the place where he grew up, looking for a ghost from his past. No one, not his work team, his children, or his lover, has heard from him for a couple of weeks, and his daughter, in particular, is beginning to show some concern. Will the next book feature a missing person search for Erlendur?

Outrage had another member of Erlendur's investigative team, Elinborg, as the main character. She is a warm and sympathetic character and the reader pulls for her to do well and be happy. Now, we get the other side of the coin with Sigurður, a character for whom it is really hard to work up any empathy.

Sigurður gets involved in a case when he agrees to do a favor for one of his classmates that he met at that school reunion. To do so, he has to pay a visit to a purported blackmailer, a woman who has some incriminating pictures in her possession. When he gets there, he finds the woman's beaten and bloody body on the floor and as he is examining her, her attacker rushes him and then exits the house with Siggi chasing him. Siggi loses the race though and returns to get help for the woman who is still alive. Unfortunately, not for long. She dies in the hospital and it becomes a murder case.

In investigating the murder, the police discover a chance link that leads them to a group of those young tycoons, bankers who have made millions from the boom. But it turns out that one of them had died several months earlier under suspicious circumstances. Is all of this connected? Bet your kronurs it is!

There is a secondary plot, unrelated to all this, involving a man who was a victim of extreme sexual abuse as a child who has now, as a very damaged adult, encountered his abuser once again. This is a character that Erlendur and Sigurður had met in a previous book. In this case, we see that Sigurður may actually have a heart, after all. He does try in his own way to help the man. But it is too late. Maybe not too late though for Siggi.

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Backyard Nature Wednesday: Purple Martins

Male Purple Martin photographed at our backyard martin house some years ago. These are the birds that are our first spring migrant arrivals. The adult male scouts generally start arriving here in late January. None have been reported in Texas yet, but they are already arriving in Florida and Georgia and soon they will be present all across the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

These birds are long distance migrants. Most of the martins that nest in the eastern half of North America fly across the Gulf of Mexico in spring and fall, although some probably take the land route through Mexico. They spend their late falls and winters distributed throughout much of South America and their springs and summers throughout eastern and central North America right up into Canada. By mid-April, they will have made it all the way up into New England and many will continue even farther north.

Purple Martins have lived in close proximity to human beings for hundreds of years. Native Americans used to put up gourds as nest boxes around their villages in hopes of encouraging the birds that are voracious consumers of flying insects. We have continued that tradition and, from simple gourds to elaborately designed and constructed "martin mansions," these artificial houses now sprout all across the land. Martins in the eastern part of the continent live almost exclusively in housing provided for them by humans. Those that nest in the West still, for the most part, nest in natural cavities as all of them once did.

For those of us in this area, it is the martin that is the harbinger of spring rather than the American Robin. We have robins with us all year, but we look and listen for that first martin to assure us that spring has really arrived. I expect them any day now.

Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham: A review

Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't often find myself reading best-sellers while they are still on the New York Times top ten list. I'm usually late to the party. Years late, in most cases. But I read a review of John Grisham's latest, Rogue Lawyer, and I was intrigued and decided to get on the bandwagon and read it right away.

Grisham's narrative takes off with the power and speed of a locomotive and just continues to gather steam over the next 300 or so pages until he delivers us safely into the station once again. He has stolen the germ of an idea from Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer (all writers steal; they just need to make sure the take from the best as Grisham has), but Grisham's Sebastian Rudd is definitely not a "Lincoln." He is a Ford van lawyer.

His base of operations is a customized bulletproof (and it needs to be!) van with Wi-Fi, fine leather chairs, a bar, a small fridge, as well as a hidden gun compartment. It is his office and, in a pinch, can serve as temporary living quarters.

Like The Lincoln Lawyer, he has a driver who is a former client. His driver, though, is his only employee and serves as his law clerk (Rudd paid for his community college course as a paralegal), his bodyguard, his golf caddy, and one of his very few friends. Sebastian Rudd is not a well-liked man in the unnamed Southern city where he lives. He rubs the powers-that-be the wrong way.

Rudd, however, is on the right side of the law. Or at least the right side of justice. His passion is justice and he's not above cheating to ensure that his clients receive it.

His clients are generally people that other lawyers won't touch. They are frequently guilty, sometimes of heinous crimes, and the ones who are innocent are often scapegoats selected by the police and the politicians to answer for crimes that the police can't solve. In at least one case, his client is a elderly victim of a wrongful assault on his home by an out-of-control SWAT team that killed the man's wife in a pre-dawn invasion. But most of Rudd's clients are not nearly that sympathetic.

Rogue Lawyer is told in the voice of the protagonist. It is a series of vignettes of cases that he has handled. Rudd is very much the hero of his own narrative and he is not above exaggerating his prowess in the courtroom. He is always on top of his game in that arena - at least in his telling.

The crimes that are described here include many of the issues on which John Grisham himself has spoken out over the years; things like capital punishment, a militarized police force, political corruption, human trafficking. His vividly drawn character, Sebastian Rudd, fights the good fight against all these evils.

This gritty but witty book feels very much like it might be the beginning of a series. By the end of it, we have a very good picture of Sebastian Rudd's backstory. It's a story that could continue to be developed by its creator in any direction that he chooses to take it. That would not be a bad thing. I, for one, would not mind reading more about the Ford van lawyer. 

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Poetry Sunday: I Worried

Here's one for all the worriers of the world, among whom I count myself. We are the ones who always fear the worst and are first to blame themselves when things go wrong. Maybe in 2016 we could all just stop worrying and, like the poet, take our old bodies out in the morning and sing. 

I Worried

by Mary Oliver

I worried a lot.  Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not how shall

I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up.  And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

This week in birds - #188

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Blue-winged Teals are one of the more common ducks seen in this area in winter. Here, a pair posed for me at Brazos Bend State Park. As with many species of ducks, as well as birds in general, the males and females look quite different.

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The occupation of our Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by armed and petulant insurrectionists continues. The refuge is a major stop on the Pacific Flyway for migrating birds and its Migratory Bird Festival in April is a very large attraction for birders and those who love birds. The festival is also a big source of revenue for the small community of Burns. The community wants these interlopers out yesterday and they are joined in that wish by birders everywhere. 

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Why do we feed birds and other wild animals? Is it really for the animals or is it for ourselves? It certainly gives us pleasure, but it provides the animal with the sustenance it needs. Nature writer Helen Macdonald suggests that it is an affirmation of life and is both altruistic and selfish.

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Birders have been buzzing over the last couple of days about some remarkable footage captured by a traffic camera over a busy highway in Montreal. It features a magnificent Snowy Owl in flight. The bird seems very curious about that camera.



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2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the Migratory Bird Treaty between the United States and Canada. That act, along with three others that followed, form the basis for all of our efforts to conserve the bird life of our continent.

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The Painted Bunting that had caused such a stir around Brooklyn's Prospect Park this winter disappeared this week. It was last reported in the park the day before the weather there turned really cold. The bird may have sensed the coming of colder weather and moved south or it may have stayed and been killed by the cold. We will likely never know.

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Sea otters have those short, round faces that always seem to be smiling benevolently. It's the faces and the animal's furry roundness that makes them so appealing to humans, but, in fact, the otter's smile hides a crushing bite.

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Birders around Edmonton, Canada, have been treated to the sight of a rare Gyrfalcon hunting in a rail yard there.

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The EPA  has completed a risk assessment that highlights the dangers of neonicotinoid pesticides to honeybees. Unfortunately, the study failed to take into account the dangers to native bees and other pollinators.

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Our throw-away society is having an unnatural effect on the balance of Nature. For one thing, in some areas, it is encouraging overpopulation by gulls who feed on our discarded food. 

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The conservation plan for the Greater Sage Grouse does not fully protect the birds' wintering grounds. Research by the University of Wyoming indicates that at least 18% of the birds travel outside the protected area in winter.

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Images of a nursery of elusive narwhals - that's the whale with the unicorn horn on its nose - has been captured by aerial photography in the seas off Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic.

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Unusual numbers of wind-blown Little Auks (Dovekies) have been driven from their Scandinavian wintering grounds into the waters and shores of Scotland.

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A 10.5-year-old Glaucous Gull (age determined by the band it was wearing) has been reported in Labrador. That's not any unusual age for a gull; still, it's nice to know that this one is still flying.

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I think we tend to have the idea that we are protected from the effects of dangerous chemicals, but, actually, many of them are virtually unregulated. (Thank you, Congress!) Consequently, people and the environment at large may be exposed to them over many years, resulting in almost incalculable damage. 

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Americans love their parks and wildlife refuges. In fact, sometimes we almost love them to death. The Park Service charged with protecting them occasionally has to limit access in order to preserve them. Muir Woods National Monument is one such extremely popular spot. So popular that in 2017, you will have to make a reservation to enter. 

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Around the backyard:

The expected onslaught of Pine Siskins that I was anticipating earlier in the week has arrived. There are now dozens of the little birds in my yard, joining the scores of American Goldfinches that were already here. With the coming of the siskins, traffic has definitely picked up at the feeders. I'm now seeing more of our winter warblers, chickadees, and titmice, as well as large flocks of White-winged Doves. Yes, winter feeding is well underway.

Numero Zero by Humberto Eco: A review

Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Humberto Eco's latest is more novella than novel at only 208 pages. I read it in translation, of course, and found it to be a quick and easy read, quite a change from some of the other Eco books I've read, such as The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Prague Cemetery. Even though it is slimmer and perhaps more accessible than those other books, Numero Zero is full of Eco's trademark love of conspiracies and of afflicting the powerful. It is a satire on the politics of modern Italy and it seems to me that the author is having great fun in its telling. I sort of imagine him chuckling away to himself as he sits at his word processor, getting it all on the record and tweaking the language to make it just a bit more acerbic.

The time is 1992. It's the Berlusconi era in Italy. A recent scandal revealed a labyrinthine system of kickbacks and payoffs that went straight to the center of power in the Italian government and religious bureaucracy. Powerful political parties were brought low. The government collapsed and out of all that chaos Silvio Berlusconi emerged.

Berlusconi was a Milanese entrepreneur with ambitions to create his own empire. A couple of years later he would be elected prime minister and would be a presence in Italian politics for years to come. But in 1992, he was still building his empire.

Eco's book never mentions Berlusconi, but the eminence grise, the hidden power in his tale is an ambitious businessman known as "Il Commendatore." Berlusconi was known by the honorific "Il Cavaliere." Coincidence? Nothing is coincidental in an Eco work!

Il Commendatore is starting up a newspaper, staffed by mostly hack journalists, who are busily preparing dummy issues. In fact, the main purpose of this newspaper will be to supply stories with which to blackmail the powerful.

Eco has great fun with the sorry state of modern journalism, both print and television, as well as the state of politics in Italy. In his world of conspiracies within conspiracies, it's actually all a part of the same picture.

I do enjoy Eco's writing, even if I'm not always smart enough or well-informed enough to figure out exactly who or what he is skewering. I love the marvelous word play and the combustible mixture of political corruption, love, conspiracy theories, the Mafia, and, yes, even murder. 

In this book, he gives us a conspiracy that reaches all the way back to World War II and Mussolini. It is strictly a minor work by a master but it is certainly worth the couple of hours it takes to read for those of us who are Eco fans.

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