Standing Into Danger: Along Piney Creek

Showing posts with label Along Piney Creek. Show all posts

Friday, August 18, 2023

Happy Smiling Faces!

Thousands of happy smiling faces lined the road greeting us

as we drove home from the airport after visiting Nova Scotia recently.

Home again on Colorado's Beautiful High Plains

E-470, Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 3, 2023

Colorado has enjoyed a cool summer with lots of rain and sunshine,

and millions of wild sunflowers have exploded along roads and highways

and in odd corners of disturbed ground.

A Sunflower Explosion

Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 14, 2023

Wild sunflowers are sustained by run-off moisture from the roads,

heat from the asphalt, and little competition from other vegetation.

They can outgrow noxious weeds like sweet clover and thistles.

Vail Daily

The Common Sunflower (Helianthus annuus)

Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 14, 2023

As I drove around on errands and to appointments last week, I became

more and more curious about this happy, cheerful plant dominating the landscape.

So on Tuesday I grabbed my camera and went on a sunflower hunt along Piney Creek.

Upper Pond Along "My" Section of Piney Creek

Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 14, 2023

I knew the sunflowers would not grow near the creek bed

because they don't like water-logged soil,

so I headed for a dry bank above the creek where I thought they might be.

Sunflowers Clinging to a Bank

Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 14, 2023

The gangly sunflowers clung to the bank, but not displaying the beauty I hoped to find.

So I headed up a gully and found hundreds and hundreds.

Voilà!

I followed another gully back to the trail that led to the power line right-of-way,

because I was getting worried about snakes and ticks.

After taking a brief break from the strong afternoon sun

in the shade of a cottonwood stand, I headed uphill for the power line.

Cottonwood Stand

Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 14, 2023

The last time I had walked this way on May 2nd,

a large grading and restoration project blocked my way.

Land Restoration

Aurora, Colorado, USA

May 2, 2023

Today I found a new cement trail had been constructed

beginning at the Douglas County line and running south.

It followed the power line down into marshland,

straddled a stream running into Piney Creek, and wound up the other bank

to link up with the trails in the Inspiration development.

The New Concrete Trail

Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 14, 2023

Sun Flowers Galore!

I followed the new cement trail down the hill, across the stream, and up the other bank: Sunflowers galore!

The New Stream Crossing

Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 14, 2023

And Up the Other Side

Wild sunflowers are beneficial to the environment in many ways,

one of which is land restoration.

Sunflowers are used as a forb component in reclaiming drastically disturbed lands,

renovating ranges for domesticated animals, and other conservation practices

such as pollinator habitat for bees and other pollinators,

establishing permanent vegetation in areas of high erosion,

and the restoration and management of declining and rare habitats.

Sunflowers provide food to insects, birds, deer, and other wildlife.

Bees Love Wild Sunflowers!

Restoring an Eroding Slope

Stabilizing Slopes

The wild sunflower is native to North America,

and Native Americans first domesticated the plant as early as 3,000 BC.

They boiled and ate flower buds and raw seeds

and ground the seeds into flour for cakes and bread.

They drank an infusion of the plant that eased

rheumatism and chest pain and stimulated appetites.

Different parts of the sunflower plant were boiled to make yellow, purple, and black dyes.

Dried sunflower stalks were used as building materials.

nrcs.usda sunflowernsa

Spanish explorers took the wild sunflower to Europe around 1500.

By 1716 an English patent was granted for squeezing oil from the plant's seeds.

Peter the Great is credited with popularizing the sunflower

as an ornamental plant in the 18th century.

The Russian Orthodox Church added to its popularity

by forbidding the consumption of most oil foods during Lent

and leaving the sunflower off the prohibited list.

By 1830, sunflower oil was produced on a commercial scale in Russia.

Eastern Europeans and Russians who had emigrated to America

imported the commercial sunflower because it was a protein-rich food for animals.

By the 1920s the US was growing commercial crops of sunflowers,

followed by Canada in 1930.

nrcs.usda. sunflowernsa nuseed

Some of my happiest hours are spent roaming along the trails in my area,

and hunting for sunflowers on a gorgeous August afternoon is hard to beat.

Smiling Happy Faces!

I'm linking to Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date and Nicole's Friday Face Off.

Thank goodness I have an understanding husband who takes me out for dinner

when I arrive home hot, happy, and too tired to cook.

A Club Sandwich and Sauteed Vegetables to Share

Parkway Bar and Grill

Aurora, Colorado, USA

A Muley Walking Past Our Car

Aurora, Colorado, USA

August 3, 2023

I was slammed this week with appointments and commitments,

so I'm still catching up with last week's comments. So sorry!

Have a great weekend!

Till next time ~
Fundy Blue

My next post will be soon! 🤞

On the Bay of Fundy
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue
All Rights Reserved

Friday, May 20, 2022

Matt Haig's "The Midnight Library," Shrödinger's Cat, and Sex in the Park

Recently a good friend and former third grade teammate from Sunrise Elementary, Susan,

invited me to join a new book club with some retired colleagues, the Sunettes.

It had started while I was in Hawaii, so I missed had the first two meetings.

"I'd love to," I said. "When are we meeting?"

"On Thursday afternoon," Susan replied.

It was Sunday evening. "Okay! What's the book?"

"The Midnight Library by Matt Haig."

Ahh. Teachers, libraries. Perfect! I thought.

I vaguely remembered hearing of the book,

A New York Times bestseller. "I'll order it tonight."

After slogging through Philip Goff's Galileo's Error for weeks,

I needed an easy read and a break from philosophy, quantum physics,

and my favorite, Schrödinger's cat.

My Favorite Cat

Sorry, Grumpy Cat ~ You've been dethroned!

I coughed up an extra $2.99 to have Amazon deliver it the next morning.

My week was shaping up to be hectic, and I didn't have time to run to a local bookstore.

When Haig's novel hit my front step late on Monday morning, I dove right in.

No time to read the back cover or inside jacket,

and besides, sometimes it's fun to jump into a book with no preconceptions.

Like when I started a new school year without reading the cum files on my kiddos.

I wanted to spend time with them and form my own first impressions.

With a hot cup of coffee, I settled in to read, pirate style with an eyepatch.

Three hundred pages and one eye, this was totally doable in three days.

Like No Pirate Ever!

I read the opening line: "Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora..."

Oh, oh! I thought. The novel started with a bang, an undisclosed tragedy.

On the third page, nineteen years later

and twenty-seven hours before Nora decided to die, I read,

"And although she had studied enough existential philosophy..."

Oh, no! Philosophy! I thought Nora wanted to be an astronaut or glaciologist!

What happened?

It was downhill from there. Her cat Voltaire had been killed.

Nora was a suicidal young woman on antidepressants and anxiety medications.

Too close to home for someone who has struggled with

depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts forever.

Nora decides that she is crap at life and swallows an overdose of her meds.

At 00:00:00, midnight, she walks into an immense library and time doesn't advance.

She meets her high school librarian, Mrs. Elm, who had delivered the news

of her father's death nineteen years before she decided to commit suicide.

"So, I am dead?" Nora asks?

"... Between life and death..."

Damn! I thought. Quantum Superposition. Here we go.

I swear my favorite cat will make an appearance.

Alive or Dead?

"To be, or not to be?"

So begins Nora's adventure in the Midnight Library,

stuck between life and death at 00:00:00.

The library books enable Nora to live different lives,

each life in a different world where she made different choices.

Before time runs out, how does she answer the ultimate question:

"What is the best way to live?"

Damn! I thought. The multiverse. A possibly infinite number of parallel universes,

including one where Louise is getting it right.

I'm not going to say any more about Matt Haig's amazing novel The Midnight Library

except to say that I absolutely loved it.

I connected more with this book than perhaps any other I have read.

So what happened to my post which I was writing last Thursday night

after the book club meeting with my dear Sunrise friends?

I was utterly exhausted after a week of multiple appointments,

enthralled reading and rereading,

and enthusiastically discussing the novel with the Sunettes.

I started to write my post, but I got distracted

by Schrödinger's cat and played in a rabbit hole instead.

When I realized what had happened, it was after 2:00 am,

and there was no way I was going to get anything published.

Not this night. Not Friday.

But in some parallel universe I did get it published ~ lol!

So here are some Schrödinger cat funnies that I enjoyed:

It has taken me a long time to wrap my mind around

Schrödinger's cat and quantum superposition.

So if you haven't heard about my favorite feline, here's a quick introduction.

Schrödinger's cat is one of the most famous thought experiments in science.

We are often so locked into empirical evidence in science

that we forget that thought experiments are useful exercises.

"A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory,

or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences." (Wikipedia)

Depending on how the experiment is structured, it may not be possible to perform it,

and, there may not be a need or intention to perform it.

Schrödinger's Cat in Quantum Superposition, Both Alive and Dead

Consider Schrödinger's unfortunate feline.

The poor creature is trapped in a steel chamber that is sealed off from the outside.

Sealed in with the cat is a Geiger counter containing a tiny amount of radioactive material.

Within an hour, or maybe not, a single atom of the radioactive material will decay.

When an atom decays, the counter tube discharges,

and through a relay it releases a hammer

which shatters a flask of hydrocyanic acid and kills the cat.

The radioactive decay is random, and therefore so is the cat's survival or death.

In quantum physics the cat is in a state of superposition, simultaneously alive and dead.

Only when the container is opened by an observer is the superposition resolved.

The cat is dead, or the cat is alive,

depending upon whether an atom radioactively decayed or not.

My Former Most Favorite Feline, Grumpy Cat

Schrödinger wasn't promoting simultaneously alive-and-dead cats as a serious possibility.

He was illustrating the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics in 1935.

The prevailing theory, the Copenhagen interpretation, maintained that a quantum system

remained in superposition until it reacted with or was observed by the external world.

When this occurs the superposition collapses into one or the other possible states.

"Schrödinger's famous thought experiment poses the question,

"when does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states

and become one or the other?" (Wikipedia)

PETA exposes animals suffering in laboratories, in the food industry,

in the clothing trade, and in the entertainment industry

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

I probably should have introduced Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian-Irish theoretical physicist (12 August 1887 - 4 January 1961).

Schrödinger in 1933
Wikimedia

Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 together with

English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac for their work on quantum mechanics.

Schrödinger was interested in explaining

that an electron in an atom would move as a wave.

This resulted in the Schrödinger equation, which calculates

how the wave function of a quantum mechanical system evolves over time. (Britannica)

A Cat Comedian

I will always struggle with the quantum world and how it forces us to see the universe.

I wish I had been born with the gift of understanding higher mathematics.

I hit a wall with algebra and geometry and just forget calculus and statistics and beyond.

I can sense mathematic's clarity and beauty, but its exact meaning eludes me.

Too often I feel like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon.

If I had understood higher mathematics, I might have become

an astrophysicist, a cosmologist, or an astrogeologist.

Well, Himself, my sometimes-not-so-Ever-Patient husband,

is trying to tempt me away from cats, quantum theory, mathematics, and posting.

He knows how to work with ADHD personalities:

Warn them in advance that closure is coming at a specific time.

He told me about ten minutes ago that he would make me his summer cocktail,

if I would join him for a drink in thirty minutes on our warm deck

(before the snow starts to fly tomorrow).

That gives me about five more times to listen to

Radio Head's 2009 Grammy Performance of 15 Step

and a chance to add some more Schrödinger cat funnies.

(You may have to click on the volume button in the lower left of the video, if you wish to listen to the video.)

I'm sorry. I am out of control. This is my favorite cat, and I can't help myself!

And this feline has been the target of many, many funny jokes.

Schrödinger's cat is alive!

"I'm making the cocktail," Himself is calling.

Closure is approaching.

Just one more funny, and it has nothing to do with my favorite feline.

It is just too darn cute!

"Your drink is ready!"

Closing time.

I wonder how editing will go after one of Terry's potent cocktails?

***********

And for Rain's Thursday Art Date prompt of May Flowers, Pollination, and Birds,

here are five photographs:

May Flowers Along Piney Creek

Aurora, Colorado

May 5, 2022

Sex in the Park ~ Pollination

Cottonwoods are dioecious.

Female and male flowers (catkins) are borne on separate trees.

Top: Female Middle: Male Bottom: Female with Seeds Embedded in Cotton

They are cross-pollinated by the wind.

The female catkins produce seeds embedded in cotton which are dispersed by the wind.

Along Piney Creek Aurora, Colorado

May 2020 and 2022

June 2022

A Male and Female Mallard Pair ~ Birds

Along Piney Creek, Aurora, Colorado

May 5, 2022

Stay hopeful and creative!

Books Read in 2024

"5 Languages of Love: The Secret to Love That Lasts" by Gary Chapman
"At Home in the World" by Joyce Maynard
"Cockroaches" by Jo Nesbo
"Death's End" by Cixin Liu
"Eruption" by Michael Crichton and James Patterson
"In Darkness" by L. Diane Wolfe
"In My Time of Dying" by Sebastian Junger
"Nothing to Fear" by Julie McFadden, RN
"The Bat" by Jo Nesbo
"The Dark Forest" by Cixin Liu
"The Frozen River" by Ariel Lawhon
"The Last to Vanish" by Megan Miranda
"The Montauk Monster" by Hunter Shea
"The Road to Character" by David Brooks
"The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller
"The Twist of a Knife" by Anthony Horowitz
"The Uninhabital Earth: Life After Warming" by David Wallace-Wells
"The Women" by Kristin Hannah
"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens
"Writing the Shadow" by Joanna Penn

Pages

Friday, August 18, 2023

Happy Smiling Faces!

Friday, May 20, 2022

Matt Haig's "The Midnight Library," Shrödinger's Cat, and Sex in the Park

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)