Machinery and memories

That's a fully restored International Harvester Farmall Tractor.

The road to town today yielded some interesting sights and stirred a memory from youth.

OK, I dug everything i can dig, now get me down.

The first such sight was the excavator to the left. When first sighted it was alone atop that little mound of dirt about 10 feet or so above ground level with no other machinery around it and it looked like it had left itself stranded high above the surrounding territory with no way down. Unfortunately by the time we came to it on the way back, it had started filling trucks and didn't look quite so stranded, but you get the idea. The original caption was to be something like "OK, boss. where do I go from here?" or some such. It's a lesson I should have learned a long time ago: when you see a photograph, stop and take it; things probably aren't going to be the same when you get back there.

The second, that tractor in the bushes painted Fourth of July colors is one I have meant to photograph for years. It was to be part of a whole series of yard ornaments in the neighborhood here. At one time it was displayed prominently but has since been banished to the bushes. When I first saw it, I think it had steel wheels, but it now has rubber. It was one of several vehicles that owners seemed proud of enough to display in their yards. One even had a limousine, but that eventually disappeared and my funky project never got off the ground. This little tractor remained.

The Fourth of July tractor has seen better days.

The crown jewel of the day was that Farmall tractor, painted in the original distinctive bright red. That's where the memory rose. You see, I owned one of those as a boy. Oh, it wasn't the big real thing, but it was a Farmall tractor just the same. My cousins and their family lived on a farm cultivating crops and herding dairy cattle. I always looked forward to going there becasue we got to play in this exotic building called a barn. It was a fascinating place with its cattle and hay mow and we used to play hide and seek climbing among the bales on the second floor. You had to be careful not to fall through the hole in the floor where the hay was delivered to the floor below to be fed to the cattle. My hero at the time was my oldest cousin who at the age of 13 was allowed to drive the Fordson tractor as he joined the work force on the farm.

On the days when we couldn't play outside or go to the barn which was some distance from the house where they lived, we played indoors with a miniature Farmall tractor and a full set of operational implements that my cousins had for toys. Each machine was an exact replica of its original with amazing detail. These weren't tiny Hot Wheels; the tractor as I recall was probably 8 inches long and maybe 4 tall. The plow actually dug dirt (usually sand); the manure spreader spread manure; the cultivator cultivated. Together they were as realistic as a toy farm implement could be and I wanted a full set.

Unfortunately my parents couldn't see a suburban kid like me wanting anything to do with farms and discouraged me with every new plea.  But to me farms were exotic places with huge animals and tractors that signified a boy's growth into manhood the day he was allowed to first climb into that shaped steel seat, set the throttle by the lever on the steering column and head down the field determined to plow a straight row. Already one cousin was doing it, and I was the next oldest boy in the family. I might have been able to save enough from my meager allowance, but they weren't all that easy to find either. As I recall they were only sold by Farmall dealers, which weren't all that common in the normal shopping areas.

For what seemed to be an eternity, I had to settle for the occasional visits to drive my cousins' Farmall around their living room rather than my own around my bedroom at home, or better yet that Fordson my role model was driving regularly.

After what seemed like years of begging, one Christmas I unwrapped one, a genuine McCormick-Deering Farmall tractor. That was a brand of the International Harvester Company. Despite the fact I had advanced to an age where toys were becoming less interesting, I was thrilled, and, of course, I had to have some equipment with it. I was allowed one to start and I chose a manure spreader. To be honest at the time I don't think I knew what manure was or why it had to be spread but with all those parts spinning around when pulled by the tractor, it had the most action of any tools in the selection.  Later I recall obtaining a plow as well but it wasn't heavy enough to dig anything harder than sand.

AN ADDITION:  OK, I came across this today (5/29) and as one who has had
an interest in tractors all my life having a serious attack of tractor envy.  No 
caption with this at all, but OMG! 

In time I outgrew the toy, but the tractor remained for a long time on a display shelf and every time since leaving home for good that I come across the real thing it drags up a memory of what was probably the all-time favorite toy from my youth. American farming outgrew that tractor, too, as it was designed for small and medium sized farms which have all but disappeared and newer machinery designed for different specific tasks has replaced it.

I have no idea where my tractor is now; my nieces some day may come across it among the stuff my mother left behind and now that the next generation of our family is having children, perhaps another child will experience the same thrill I did driving my bright red Farmall tractor. Even better if someone could find it and send it along so I could give it to my own grandson, that would be wonderful.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Farmall tractors.

Push the Castle hanger over the cliff

It's been a long time since the last rant about television outside advertising one-liners, so here goes.

Once again the writers of the TV show "Castle" have come up with a disappointing dangling mystery to hold viewers over the summer. They did it a couple of years ago with an unrealistic event and then, again this year.

As a watcher of several television mystery series, I have seen many of them disintegrate when they go too deeply into involving the main characters in crimes against themselves. I mean how often in real life do policemen and their families become the targets of crime? Except for the occasional threat, or a heat of the moment, probably not often. Yet, every mystery show eventually gets there and then loses its focus in dealing wtih crimes against their characters rather than coming up with a new mystery for those characters to solve in their unique ways each week.  At some point they become little more than soap operas. It's one thing to build back story with family members but quite another to involve them in crimes of lingering mystery week after week.

Even "Castle" got there eventually, entangling just about every main character and family member in some sort of contrived crime, one of them involving a missing relative which is also often used in hack mysteries. Then once the sexual tension between Castle and Beckett disolved into plans for a wedding the quality of writing began a slow decline.

A few years ago, in the last seasonal episode, a sniper shot Beckett. Now, who was really going to believe one of the two main characters in the series was going to die? She didn't of course and the cliffhanger didn't really work.

Then this year they outdid themselves. In the final episode where one contrived event after another stood in the way of the wedding, the writers ended it with Beckett in her wedding dress staring at Castle's car burning in a ravine within minutes of their scheduled wedding ceremony. Now, who is expected to believe Castle actually died? I suppose the cliffhanger is who did this and where does the main character end up before the issue is resolved.

Here is the best guess. In this last episode, the two became involved with an organized crime figure, but that seems too obvious even for the those still writing the series. My bet is it involved Castle's mysterious father, who showed up in an episode where Castle's daughter was kidnapped by some international criminal bent on revenge against hs father. The father appeared and revealed himself in time to save them and then disappeared into the haze of international intrugue again, but with the suggestion he would be heard from again.  The mysterieous all black SUV with tinted windows that we are to believe pushed Castle off the road on his way to the wedding, hints more in that direction, than in the direction of some Mafia don.

So we are supposed to spend the interim until the series starts up next fall wondering if Castle died. Doubtful.  Maybe we are supposed to wonder who did it and will he and Beckett ever exchange vows. and for sure I doubt anyone who appreciates the show will accept a scenario where Castle awakes in the hospital suffering from extreme amnesia. Reaching the point here where I don't much care. I am still betting on the father string, given that the writers just can't live without one of those now that the issue of Beckett's mother has been resolved.

Or just maybe they could go back to solving crimes, which has always been the best part if the Castle series.

Time we have wasted on the way ...

And, speaking of fire...

Smokey haze masks the 
mountain viewed from 
almost the same spot today.

This is the normal (though
spectacular) view of Pioneer
Peak from my driveway.

… we have a few going on here.  The Funny River fire on the Kenai Peninsula was almost 63,000 acres (almost 100 square miles) Thursday evening (5/22).  That compares with the national news fire near Sedona, Arizona which was about 7 square miles Thursday morning.

We have another fire on the west side of Cook Inlet which today was threatening a major power plant at Beluga. Called the Tyonek fire, that one was 1,800 acres by Thursday evening.

Up north where the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline crosses the Yukon River there's another fire of 450 acres and growing within a mile of the Dalton Highway, the main surface connection between the North Slope oil fields and the rest of Alaska. That one has forced the closure of BLM facilities in the area.

This situation is so fluid I am not going to try to keep up, so for those interested here are some links to official sources for information about the fires:

Alaska Interagency Coordination Center

Alaska Interagency Incident Management Team Facebook page.

Alaska Interagency fire information mapping page

Funny River wildfire community Facebook page

Central Emergency Services

Alaska Wildland Fire Information  This is an interagency website developed by federal and state agencies in Alaska to provide timely and accurate fire information for the entire state. The agencies that support this site are the BLM Alaska Fire Service, Alaska Division of Forestry, US Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

Alaska Division of Forestry Facebook page

US National Weather Service Alaska Facebook page

BLM Alaska Fire Service Facebook page

InciWeb Funny River fire information

To check air quality

PDF: How smoke can affect health

The Alaska Life Facebook page has some good photos and video

Almost all of these pages have photos, maps and situation updates with more current information. Additionally just about every news outlet in the state has stories and photos about the fires.

Fire in the hole

NASA Earth Observatory / Rob Simmon

This view of the Aleutian Islands and the Alaska Peninsula shows 52 volcanoes. It came from the MODIS imager on NASA's Aqua satellite. The names have been colored to match official activity status according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Green means no activity, yellow is "advisory" with activity possible, orange is "watch" meaning an eruption is close. Those uncolored don't have monitoring equipment on them.

For some reason this statement from a teacher has stayed with me since the seventh grade. In a Latin class (yes, I am old enough to have encountered Latin in a public school) we were studying Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. The stiff, very proper teacher, an imposing presence with her perfectly coiffed white hair told us with all her authority that there were no active volcanoes in the world any more. We believed her. None of these kids in Western New York could refute that and mostly we weren't curious enough to look any further into it. Also, we didn't have Google where we could have found out quickly. If you wanted to know about something that happened since last year's Encyclopedia Britannica yearbook came out, it was a monumental task.

In fact at least three volcanoes around the world erupted in 1954, Kilauea in Hawaii, Ngauruhoe in New Zealand and Bam, which killed 25 people in Papua New Guinea. I am not sure about the others in that class but I lived on in perfect ignorance, believing what she told us and never hearing or reading anything to the contrary. Volcanoes never really came up in my life for a long time after that. Still in the back of my mind somewhere there lurked the suspicion, the wondering at how a person could say something so absolute about something as fluid as the natural world, a world that included lava. And, why would volcanoes just go dark en masse. I guess now in my mind it was linked somehow to something like the extinction of dinosaurs.

I am not sure when I noticed the first eruption of my experience. I do know when the first eruption affected me. That was in 1975 when Mount Augustine in Lower Cook Inlet, Alaska, blew its top. That sent an ash cloud over Anchorage and was the first time I stretched women's stocking material over the air intake for my car's carburetor to keep that fine caustic dust out of the engine.

And right on cue this happened June 2. The Alaska Volcano Observatory 

upgraded Pavlof Volcano in the Aleutian Islands to RED / WARNING 

status. An eruption was occurring and pilot reports indicated ash had 

reached 22,000 feet. According to the AVO,seismic tremors increased 

starting about 3:00 p.m. AKDT June 2. Satellite images showed a 

plume extending over 50 miles east of the volcano.

Since then I've been aware of several eruptions including a few that dusted my surroundings. And, every time one does that I think back to that seventh grade Latin class and the woman who said there were no active volcanoes left in the world. In fact, I now live near what is sometimes called the Pacific rim of fire, a string of volcanoes part of which runs along the south coast of Alaska and through the Aleutian Islands and follows faults between tectonic plates. It seems like one or another of them is at least steaming or smoking almost any time you look.

Though obviously they can be very destructive, volcanoes in the neighborhood are one more element that adds to the lure and mystique of Alaska. And in them lies the constant reminder of how absolutely wrong some of what we heard in public education was in the 1950s. There was a warning  going around later during the social eruptions of the 1960s that would have fit the volcano situation and certainly applies now with anyone who wants to saying anything they want to on the internet or on supposed news shows, and that is: "Question everything."

It wasn't until my mid 30s when everything I knew for sure began to unravel. The volcano statement being just one example. I found many things I had held as gospel weren't true or at least were only partially true. I remember telling a friend the older I get, the less I know for sure. It seemed my black and white knowledge had turned into several shades of gray. Of course a lot of this involved science, given all the discoveries since the 50s. What I began to see was an ever-evolving, shape-shifting, multi-colored, vibrant, alive flow of knowledge that took constant upgrading on my part to remain relevant.

This map calls it the "Ring of Fire" we call it "Rim," same thing. 

Those three volcanoes that  erupted in 1954 are in the same ring.

A line from William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life" comes to mind, the one where one guy at the far end of  the bar, occasionally rises to proclaim "there's no foundation, no foundation all the way down the line." With my body of knowledge now questionable, I was finding little foundation where I could stand. Eventually we have to adjust, reassess what we know according what we learn and to current conditions and move with the flow or be left behind in a sucking swamp of half-truths, untruths and even outright lies. One only has to listen to the same news item reported on a few different programs to see how difficult it is to pin down the truth; somehow we have to develop filters to understand.

In the process we need to decide what is a fact and what is questionable.  I started with the fact that there are active volcanoes, lots of them, and at times they do erupt. I have a jar of volcanic ash on my desk at the East Pole to prove it.

Alaska Volcano Observatory

A FRIEND MET ANOTHER VOLCANO DENIER, HERE'S HER STORY: "I will always remember the out-of-state piano teacher my son had when he was learning the Suzuki method at a summer camp on the Alaska Pacific University campus.  The young woman who was teaching came from Missouri, and she was well-meaning, but she made a mistake.  She had given the students, 9 or 10 years old, a homework assignment to make up a short piano piece based on some aspect of Alaska nature.  The next day she asked each of the students to play what they had come up with.  My son had created a rather dark and heavy-handed piece to represent the volcanos.  I was sitting in the back of the room, so heard her reaction.  She said, "That's not what I was looking for.  The assignment was to create something about Alaska.  There are NO volcanos in Alaska."  My son just looked down and did not say anything.  As an observer in the back, and mother of the poor kid, I did not feel it was appropriate to say anything, so I didn't.  I talked to him afterward, though, and felt he had handled it in an okay manner. I gave him some tips on how and what he could have said.  There would have been little point in arguing with her and as the teacher, that's disrespectful. He was never going to see her again anyway.  It still bothers me though."

How does your garden grow

Potatoes are planted and so far have survived four nights covered,
but we're now out of the woods yet.

How many ways is this year in the garden different from other years? Well, for one, daytime temperatures have been in or near the 70s since the beginning of May. It's been a severe case of temptation not to plant. The rule is Memorial Day, or if you believe in folklore, when the leaves on the birch trees are bigger than a squirrel's ear. The leaves are big enough, but the temperature still drops to near freezing some nights, so temptation is being kept at bay for the most part.

Except for potatoes: They outgrew the pots I had them in so, I planted them after three days of hardening and so far they have survived four nights in the mid to high 30s with no apparent ill effects.

Female Pine grosbeak scoping.

Male Pine Grosbeak.

Then there are the unusual visitors. Normally Pine grosbeaks come to the feeders in winter and disappear somewhere over the summer. But, for the past two weeks a couple of females have been hanging around picking through the spillage left on the ground after the feeders came down. Today a male joined them and they spent a couple of hours around the yard. I posted that on a bird facebook page and a responder who lives a few miles north and west of here said they've been around that area too. That kind of cut into a wonderful theory/story I was getting into. I wondered if one of them was the female I rescued last winter, the one who slammed into the window and ended up being taken to Birds TLC in Anchorage. Was it possible the bird recovered, was released, and found its way back here and brought along a couple of friends just because I am such a great guy? Ha, probably not.

This year progress has been slowed several times when tools broke.  More broke in the past two weeks than those lost in the past 10 years. The chain saw was first and of course that's a normal one, pinched bar and fouled chain. Then a rake broke, and then a shovel. Granted both of those broke after being used in situations they weren't designed for, but they've survived  that sort of thing in the past. I haven't decided yet whether the tools wore out or I am getting stronger. But, instead of buying the cheap one at a big box again, I went to a real hardware store and bought the expensive ones. Let's see if I can break those. And, I suppose the clock is ticking on the next tool to break.

Is this an asparagus sprout?

Now, ending on a positive note, I've been clearing out and shaping up some things I have ignored in the past, for one, getting at the weeds even before I plant and trying to keep them at bay and clearing them from outside the framework around the edges. What that does is get me closer to the ground so to speak and today I made quite a discovery. Last year I planted asparagus for the first time, knowing the vegetable is a second-year harvest plant. Some stalks remained after the fall cleanup, but then Walter got in there one day and pretty much chewed them up, so I didn't expect much. Still, I have been watering the area in hopes something survived. Today I think I found a little bitty asparagus pushing through the dirt. That's what's in the small picture. There's a second sprout pushing up as well. So maybe this year I can enjoy at least one meal with my own asparagus. We'll see.

At one time there was a great breakfast cafe in Anchorage named Hog Brothers. They made some kind of dish with a poached egg, asparagus and a cheese sauce that was awesome. I have been hoping to try making one ever since they quit the business a few years ago. The place is still sorely missed by many of its regulars.

And, oh yeah, cleared out the roots from four stumps and slowly whittling down the piles of wood that needs to be split.

If the weather holds like this for another week and the forecast looks good into the next week, planting in earnest next weekend.

And, oh boy, now I feel pretty stupid. Just looked it up and the weekend I was thinking of IS Memorial Day. Duh.

I gave her the bird, literally

Rocking the Alaska garden

Too many Kochs spoil the broth

As a  person who pretty much lives on Social Security, it has baffled me trying to understand why so many people want to abolish it.

Usually it is couched in language about the national budget and the national debt. The problem with that is Social Security funds don't come from either, as it is a self-sustaining program paid for by workers' contributions that are taken out of paychecks and the interest those funds generate. The only place they cross is when the federal government borrows from Social Security funds to support expenditures. In fact the program is near the top of lenders to the government, holding paper for approximately $2.7 Trillion (that's right, capital T Trillion) in the national debt.

That might be a reason to abolish the program, which would probably include forgiving that debt. If it is done, you have to wonder where the rest of the money in Social Security accounts would go. Remember, this is money collected from working citizens, not any form of federal dole.

Today I came across another reason Republicans and Wall Street and the Koch brothers want to abolish this program first instigated by that evil socialist Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ever since its implementation in the 1930s, Social Security has been a hated target for Republicans and the big money institutions. 

Stomping feet and demanding less

There's an opening line in a television commercial going around these days where the announcer says: "Nobody ever stomped his foot and demanded less."  It went on to demonstrate how people want more and bigger.  The commercial was for some electronics service provider bragging that its plans provided more service for less money than anyone else's.

But the never-demanding-less thought hung around for a while. Thinking back I don’t recall stomping my feet but I surely remember looking at the small cup of soda I bought at a movie theater for about $10.  It was about three sizes bigger than anything I wanted. And you have to wonder if that's the kids' size and then not wonder why we have an obesity problem. NO! I don't want that much. Looking at that monstrosity you begin to realize the New York mayor who tried to ban super-sized drinks wasn't so crazy after all.

Recently I went through a fast food drive-by and ordered a sandwich and a drink.  "You can get two for the price of one if you buy the meal," the buzzy voice said through the remote speaker.

"I don't want two, I don't want the meal, I want one sandwich."

"All right." the voice came back, the tone expressing disbelief that I would not take such a deal.  "I don't want that much." He had that same tone in his voice when I told him I didn't want the sauce either.

Rocking an Alaska garden

Rocking the garden. Nagging stump gone, ground sloped away from the house, planters ready for something.

 Sitting yesterday taking a rest and enjoying the amazing "silence at the break of noon;" it was so quiet the sound of cracking intruded, two Pine grosbeaks picking at the spillage from the last bird feeder taken away the day before. They were a first, and a second; the only times they have been sighted around here in other than winter conditions. A junco also toyed with the good seeds among the husks.

Despite the frequent rests, the yard is slowly taking shape; the garden ready for planting, some landscaping, more on the firewood piles and leaves and other detritus taken away.

The main garden raked and ready for planting. Those are potatoes and

taking a chance, hardening for two days and will plant tomorrow. I have 

more seed potatoes if these don't make it because of the early planting. 
The stones are for passive solar heating when they are covered at night.

And rocks, yes, the rocks, raising the issue of comma placement and how that little curlicue can change meaning so easily. Is it rock the landscape or rock, the landscape.  Both work in this case.

And speaking of rock, and oh, boy, is this a paradigm leap, I came across some interesting music this week.  Go with me through the thought process as it goes in a semi-logical circle. 

The news this past week, particularly in politics reached absurd levels, and especially with the things repuglicans come up with to say about (take your choice) Obama, women's anatomy, crime, Benghazi, well, pick a subject and one of them at least, has said something stupid about it. All the time I was reading about all that stuff, a song kept going through my head and rather than waste a lot of time writing about it, I put a post on facebook that read: "Some days the news is so absurd you have to take refuge among the poets." To that I added some lines from Bob Dylan's "It's all right, ma. (I'm only bleeding)."

Wildflowers from last year coming back.

Thinking about the songs from my own youth and then what passes for music these days always raises the thought that our music had real lyrics. Dylan is a case in point.  And there are so many others. There's a meme going around showing a Nikki Minaj lyric which is essentially one line repeated about a thousand times with just about any song from  the 60s. Another one compares credits of a Beyonce song with the same sort of repetition listing six writers and six producers while Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" lists one writer and one producer.

Another of those trees 
split and stacked, only
two more to go.

That all took another hard turn this week when another song crossed the airwaves, a song by a modern rocker, with, get this, lyrics that say something. The group is The Pretty Reckless, the lead singer is Taylor Momsen who in another life played a character in one of those teen drama TV series, "Gossip Girl." The music is hard rock as well as pretty reckless but within it are lyrics that actually have something to say. One song had been recommended to me by a friend and I liked the music so much I ended up buying a whole album. I learned later it is a concept album with a thread that runs through it and it should be listened to with the songs in order.

The lyrics of another song on that album hit home relative to the news today. I think she was singing to and about the mind of a mass shooter in a school, but to me the words also address what is going on out there in the Nevada standoff.

For just a sampling this is the chorus from the song, "Why'd you bring a shotgun to a party?"

"Why'd you bring a shotgun to a party?

"Everybody's got one, there's nothing new about it

"Wanna make a statement? You should've come without it."

And, in the last singing of that chorus the last line changes to:

"Wanna get the girl? You should've come without it."

I thought about putting a video here, but the song has some raunchy language and in some of her videos, Momson is as close to naked as you can get and still stay on YouTube, so if you want to, you can look it up yourself.  Additionally I might have learned a lesson and maybe lost a friend or two by posting something pretty raunchy on Facebook last week so I am laying low for a while. I also recommend the song "Heaven Knows."

Which all completes the circle from rocks to rocking to rock and roll as I rock out working in the yard. The neighbors love me. Ha!

"Why'd you bring a shotgun to a party?" (Words on screen, no nudity, profanity)

Green Day

I had the grand idea today to find music for this post and looked through the rock group Green Day's playlist, but the closest I found was "Wake me when September ends," which doesn't really fit. So, here is "Spring" from Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," Green day being the real start of Spring around here, after all. (It's long, so maybe start it and then go do your other internet stuff while it plays.)

It's that day when the buds pop on the hardwoods and cast a green hue across the forest canopy.  That's almost two weeks early. In past posts it has ranged from May 13 to May 17, so, (ok so i just ran through "real," "damned" and "very" as potential adverbs) early. See the Mark Twain quote below for an explanation. Ever onward and greener.

One for my own silver linings playbook

Looking at the sunny side of things.

The five trees that blew down in the storm last fall have been a pain of one kind or another ever since. The only upside is the wealth of firewood they will provide, although it is fast-burning spruce instead of the more desirable birch.

Hauling them down out of other trees, cutting them up into sections, digging out stumps, plans to the E level and most of the splitting still too go because they are still too green to cut up easily this firewood warms half a dozen times at least.

But, today, a silver lining from all that travail showed up, at least to my vision, today.  Apparently it has been going on for some time. The answer is in the photo.

For all the time I have had this garden, there has been a sunny end and a shady end. The end closest to the camera in this photo has been the one in shade for most of the day. Shady end indeed. Does it look like it?

Well, it isn't the shady end any more. Three of those huge spruce that fell cleared the sky at that west end of the garden. Sun hits it about an hour after local noon (do I have to explain that again. Because of politics, business and daylight savings time, local noon here, the time of day when the sun is highest in the sky, is 2 p.m. by the clock.)

The sun then stays on that spot almost until sunset, at least five or six hours of daylight. That's actually more than the former sunny side of the garden gets. If you look closely at the picture you can see the garden is all raked out and the wire is in place for the climbing plants. I am going to have to move some of it into this new sunny place.

One sign the sun already is working, in the areas where I threw mixed Alaska wildflower seeds last year the ground is covered with little green plants. Some of that is visible in the lower right hand corner of the picture.

So tempting to go outside with the garden already.  It has been hot here the past few days and supposed to go well into next week.  It only takes a look at the thermometer in the morning to prevent that.  Right now it is 77, but when I woke up this morning it was 33.  We still could have a freeze, so you really have to stick with the Memorial Day rule. Meanwhile there's lots of growth in pots and flats in the house.