Many of his paintings have a smoggy-foggy quality that is off-putting to modern buyers. "Where is the color? Where is the clarity?"
It is worth considering that most of his paintings were made during a period in history when COAL was the primary fossil fuel. There were no fly-ash collectors or scrubbers. That hazy overcast was exactly what he saw...and breathed, just like nearly everybody else in densely populated areas during that era.
On the other hand, maybe he had cataracts.
Part of Quicksilver's morning routine is to listen to a short piece of music at the very beginning. It is usually an instrumental piece and I try to have something "iconic" lined up.
This is the piece we listened to this morning. It was twice as long as a typical selection.
I think the acoustics and ambience of where they were playing captured the essence of Albinoni's Adagio in G minor.
One characteristic of this recording is that the musician plucking his cello is barely captured in the recording (you can see him at the 0:25-0:34 mark). His play is more of a subconscious heartbeat that runs in the background rather than an in-your-face part of the recording.
Just remember, if it isn't baroque then it cannot be fixed.
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| A smashed up, shapeless greenish ball |
The package weighed 493 grams. The plugs were small, probably 72-cell trays and they were very moist.
I was going to plant them directly into the row but decided to put them into the hospital instead.
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| No surprise: They look yellow and all balled-up |
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| I moved them into a 50-cell tray and left an empty cell on every side for improved air flow and light penetration. I will give them a few days of this and then, on a cloudy day, give them some exposure to the sun/UV. |
Considering the abuse at the hands of the US Post Office, I am very pleased at how they look. It will take a few days to see if they suffered permanent trauma, but at this point I am very optimistic.
Heartbreaking if true. One minute run-time.
"Magic" Johnson's child wishes his parents were dead.
Mr. Johnson and I are the same age. We both grew up in Lansing...I lived almost exactly one mile north of where he lived. He went to MSU 1977-79. I attended 1979-1981.
He has a net worth in the neighborhood of $3B. My net worth is significantly lower.
I pity him and would not trade places with him.
"For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?"
I didn't sleep well last night, which is very rare.
T-storms rolled through about 12:30 last night and I had eaten later in the evening then usual.
I finally got settled back down and had many dreams:
I was back at work and got lost in the factory. I didn't know anybody. I wandered around for hours and got assigned to three different committees. I was surprised by the assignments because I wasn't wearing pants and back when I was working, that would have made me unsuitable for working on committees AND been a PPE violation. That may be different now days.
Looking at my emails this morning, I am expecting 25 fruit trees on Wednesday, ten blackberry bushes on Thursday and another fifteen blackberry bushes showing up on Friday.
The ten blackberry bushes expected on Thursday were stuck in a USPS facility in Tennessee for seven day last week. I expect them to be "cooked" and have to sort-out with the nursery how to handle it.
Bonus images
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| Swamp where I was planting Highbush cranberries and Winterberry |
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| More swamp |
Two hours time-on-task.
Since I am aware of the challenges to pollinators (not just honeybees, by the way), my goal is to make my "orchards" resilient to the point where a single, punch-drunk bumblebee can pollinate enough blossoms to set a full crop.
That means that flowers bearing appropriate pollen are in very close proximity to the pistils (the original "Sex Pistils"!) that need pollen. Ideally, every tree would have a single branch of a variety that offers compatible pollen and blooms at the same time as the host tree.
To that end, I had six trees grafted to Liberty (an exceptionally early bloomer) in a row. I grafted a twig of Golden Russet (early bloomer) on four of the trees. The two that I skipped did not have a branch in a favorable location.
I also grafted a pear of unknown parentage onto a tree that volunteered. I first noticed the pears (two trees) in a yard north of Vermontville. The two trees were exceptionally large and were carrying impressive loads of fruit.
I approached the people living in the house (Amish, by the way they dressed) and they agreed to let me take some scion. The tree on the west had larger fruit that seems more resistant to cracking, so that is the one I grafted into the planting of Harrow Sweet as a potential pollinator.
Tick season
I cut my hair and beard. Mrs ERJ prefers me with longer hair and beard but...she likes it even better when I don't bring ticks into the house and bedroom.
Looking ahead
I am pretty much caught-up with planting the stuff that is being delivered. I still have packages scheduled to arrive, but the time-urgent tasks are done for now. Maybe I can start working down the simple maintenance and picking-up tasks.
Rust, rot and depreciation never sleep!
A note on fireblight
Most heirloom apples are relatively susceptible to diseases. Back then, people were not as concerned about the cosmetics of the fruit as they are today.
Fireblight is the most devastating of apple and pear diseases. It often kills the tree. Today, there are chemicals that can control the disease but the organism keeps mutating and new strains evolve that elude the control measure.
Lists of fireblight resistance can be frustrating because there is often disagreement about how resistant any given cultivar is. That often comes back to:
Many of those "Very resistant" varieties with salable sized fruit are introductions from modern breeding programs where fireblight resistance was one of the primary selection criteria.
There was a fruit grower in Southern Indiana named Ed Fackler and he worked very hard to grow organic fruit. He originally bought into the hype that the apple cultivars of yesteryear were more disease resistant than modern apples. He fruited more than 400 heirloom varieties. He almost caused a riot when he announced in a large NAFEX meeting in 1990 that "Most heirloom apple varieties are almost extinct for very good reasons. They are of mediocre quality and riddled with disease issues."
It is telling that an apple tree only had to be just a little bit better than the other five seedling apple trees in Farmer Jones's orchard before the proud farmer named the variety after his wife or local celebrity. If you were a new settler in the area and Farmer Jones offered you a root-sucker from his prize tree, you were a fool to turn it down.
It isn't hard to win a beauty contest when there are only six contestants. The ratio between seeds that are germinated and cultivars that are named in modern programs is on the order of 100,000:1.
Fireblight was less of an issue because apple orchards were widely separated and the "indigenous strains" of fireblight either targeted Hawthorns (Crataegus) or the very late blooming Malus coronaria
