Author Archives: Mark P

Broken trees

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We have had not only a lot of rain over the last week, but also some wind. A couple of days ago the wind was so strong that it snapped a few dead pines in our yard. The thick fog on Saturday makes it a little hard to see.

I think the visibility was less than 100 yards. I counted six dead trees that had been broken off, either near the base or about halfway up the trunk. I was not surprised to see some broken, but I had hoped a few of them would be good for firewood. If they break like these did, they are too rotten for that.

This is just off our driveway, opposite the house, in an area that I haven’t even walked through yet. Down the driveway a little there are even more downed trees. It’s a tangled mess that I have just barely begun to clean up. It’s going to take a long, long time.

Clouds and things

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We are in the middle of a fairly long string of rainy days, interspersed with days that are merely clouds. Everything is pretty gray right now.

This image was from a few days ago, before the deluge.

I like this one because of the three segments of the image. There is the top area, which is very close to a mackerel sky. Then there is the lower area of dark clouds. Below that there is the reddish glow of sunrise with the stacks and cooling towers of the power plant in the distance.

I took this on another day.

It’s a nice shot to the east opposite the sunset, but that’s not why I took it. The reason I took it had disappeared towards the north by the time I got outside with my camera. But then I saw something else.

Here it is a little closer.

A formation of geese. There are only eight here. The other flock was much larger. It was their honking that alerted us to their presence.

This was some blue sky and white clouds that appeared unexpectedly on Sunday afternoon.

I took this right after I took the dogs out for their pre-dusk constitutional, without my camera, of course. It’s nice enough, but, again, the scene I really wanted had disappeared by the time I got back outside with my iPhone.

It’s going to be rainy for the rest of this week. That means the dogs get a short morning walk. That’s actually OK, because we’re having to reduce Zeke’s activities for a while anyway. He suffered some pretty bad back pain two weekends ago. He and I spent the night together in the living room, him walking constantly, and me lying on our sofa, hoping he would finally be able to settle down and sleep. He couldn’t. He would lie down for a few minutes, then get up, sometimes with a little whimper, and then he would stretch, and pace. We had already given him the medication our vet prescribed for this problem, but it always takes a full day before he gets any relief. It’s hard to watch him when he’s hurting like that.

I took him to the vet that morning but she didn’t have anything else to suggest. She said we just have to wait for the medication to get into his system. We give him previcox, which is an NSAID. It’s the second or third medication we have tried, and it doesn’t work any more quickly than the previous ones.

 

A few new pictures

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Despite the lack of posting, we have been here all along, and here are some photos I took to prove it.

We have been having a lot of cloudy days lately. The sun broke through just enough to make this fain rainbow. Leah says she can’t really see much there.

Mollie likes to lie on her back in different places around the house. Here she is in front of the stove.

She folds her front paws like she’s praying.

She also likes to climb up onto the window stool. Here she is in the kitchen window. Our collection of fossilized wood is crowding her.

Zeke also lies on his back occasionally.

This is the result of Zeke and Sam playing while on the leash.

Zeke looks like he’s asking Sam, “Did we do that?” Makes a nice blue and orange barber pole stripe.

We were sitting on our sofa a while back and heard a strange sound. It was Mollie snoring. I hope you can hear it.

Moon over the maple

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Thursday night the moon was just past full. There were a few clouds in the sky. This is what it looked like when I took the dogs out for their last evening walk.

I put my camera on a tripod and took a time exposure for this shot. I don’t know exactly how long the exposure was, but I think it was around one or two seconds. The tree is our misshapen but photogenic maple.

You may or may not be able to see a kind of spider web effect around the image of the moon. This is caused by reflection from the branches of the tree. Any part of the branch that is perpendicular to a line to the center of the moon will give a nice reflection. The parts of the branches at other angles don’t reflect much, so it leaves a kind of broken wreath around the moon.

There is also some iridescence in the clouds below the moon. I didn’t notice it until I saw the photo.

Big cedar

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Cedar trees are not common on the mountain, but they once were. They exist today mostly, but not entirely, as fallen, dead trees. I have scavenged a few downed cedars in the past for firewood. My miscalculation on how much firewood I would need this winter sent me out in the yard on Tuesday to cut up another one.

This tree is about 30 feet from our driveway in the most overgrown part of our property. A small part of the property on the north end has fairly mature hardwoods. The eastern and southern parts of the yard were apparently clear cut, or almost clear cut, and have grown back in a thicket of densely-packed, small pines with a few larger pines and maples.

I have not seen one live cedar on the property, but this dead one must have been a giant among cedars. Here is my chainsaw for scale.

It’s hard to see the size of the trunk at its base. I counted about 50 rings in the branched trunk next to the saw. The main part of the trunk is a minimum of a yard in diameter. Here it is from a different angle.

My chainsaw is just visible on the left. Note that the bar on my chainsaw is 20 inches.

This tree was a monster of a cedar, or, more properly, a juniper. This is from the Wikipedia entry on the eastern red cedar:

Juniperus virginiana is a dense slow-growing coniferous evergreen tree that may never become more than a bush on poor soil, but is ordinarily from 5–20 m or 16–66 ft tall, with a short trunk 30–100 cm or 12–39 inches in diameter (rarely to 27 m or 89 ft in height, and 170 cm or 67 inches in diameter.

 This tree is certainly at the upper end of the usual trunk diameters.

Another web site calls the eastern red cedar a “moderate to long-lived evergreen,” and says that some specimens have been known to live more than 500 years.

Our specimen fell to the ground a long, long time ago. This type of cedar is resistant to rot and insects, so they can lie on the ground for years without rotting into mulch like most trees in our area. This tree has certainly been on the ground for longer than the almost 14 years we have lived on the mountain. It probably fell a good bit before I started building our first house, and that was 20 years ago. Given the rot-resistance and the condition of some of the tree, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it fell 30 or 40, or even 50 years ago. And, given its size, it might well have been growing on the mountain during the civil war.

There has been some rot. Some of the ends of the branches have dried out and have begun to simply disintegrate. But some of the wood is still firm, and it still produces that characteristic cedar smell when it is cut. Once the moisture from the recent rain has dried, I expect it will produce a decent, aromatic fire.