| Flashback |
[01 Dec 2009|09:39pm] |
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I survived the crunch at work before Thanksgiving and spent a few days in Indiana. Unfortunately, I came back sick. Fortunately, it's just a cold and not the plague. I'm taking a couple days off work to get better, and what better time than to work on that backlog of photos?
This set is from Lord Stirling Park not too far from here in the Great Swamp. I've been there several times in search of orchids, and though I've never found any there, the wildflower display in the summertime is spectacular. You can see the rest of the pictures here. I finished off another set a while ago but forgot to mention it. They're from the Whittingham Wildlife Management Area, and you can see them here.
Summer isn't that far gone, but it already seems like a year ago. I can hardly remember July, let alone springtime; it's been a long year and it's going to be a long time before it's green and alive outside again. Here's hoping some of my plants indoors pick up the slack this winter. It's been a long time since I've seen any of them flower.
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| Flashback |
[16 Nov 2009|10:12pm] |
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Metallica -- For Whom The Bell Tolls |
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It's been a long, long time since I had anything to say here. That's not to say that I haven't seen and done a bunch of interesting stuff, but it's been tough to find the words. I've got a horrible backlog of photos to edit, too.
This one's from way back at the beginning of August, when we went back to the Black River County Park to catch a population of Goodyera pubescens in bloom. This orchid seems have at least a plant or two just about everywhere, but this was the only time I've caught it in flower. There were plants everywhere, sprinkled amongst the understory. It's weird to find flowers in the thick of the forest in the middle of summer, and unfortunately that meant there wasn't much else to see during the trip. You can see the rest of the pictures here. As it turns out, this was the last set of pictures I took with my old digital camera.
I figured out how to get my car to play MP3 files off a CF card, so I'm now in the process of ripping my CD collection. Before long, I won't have to carry any of them around anymore. I figure I'll also use the linux box to serve them at home, one of these days.
I've been burned out at work for some time now. Fortunately, the year is starting to wind down. I'm looking forward to some time off next week.
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| Orchids! |
[24 Aug 2009|07:59pm] |
I finally managed to wrangle a couple days off work, and Friday I went to the Jamesburg Park Conservation Area while ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) winktwice was at work. I spent a couple hours trying to penetrate an impenetrable swamp (it won), huddled down in the middle of open wetlands to wait out a thunderstorm with only a cheap poncho to keep my camera dry, and ended up coming out of the woods way the hell on the wrong side of the park from my car. But I found orchids, a nice population of Spiranthes cernua just starting to flower:
Of course, there are other pictures from the hike. I figured out exposure compensation on my camera, which was annoyingly nontrivial. Come on Canon, flip the power switch a click past 'on', half-cock the shutter, and then use the rotating selector on the back? Surely there's a better way to do it.
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| Photogeekraphy |
[16 Aug 2009|10:12pm] |
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Well, it's been about five years and seventeen thousand exposures since I got my first digital camera. That trusty little Nikon Coolpix 5700 probably has 400 miles on the trail and who knows how many thousand miles on the road and it's served me well. I'm growing as a photographer, though, and it was time to move on; the image sensor has been getting noisier of late and it developed so many hot pixels after I had to send it in for repairs that I couldn't reasonably take fireworks pictures anymore. And I've been wishing I could just get a little wider, or a have little more reach, or a little more sharpness, and it's all beyond what that camera was made to do.
Earlier this year, I attempted to order a new camera, but the dealer apparently wasn't all that serious about actually selling them and after a sixteen-week backorder I canceled the order. I needed the money for closing costs, anyway. Unfortunately, I'd already invested nearly $1k in glass that I couldn't use on anything.
Well, my finances have stabilized and I decided it was time to bite the bullet (again). I'd been carefully watching to see what reputable dealers had the Canon EOS 5D Mark II in stock, and just barely missed getting it from a couple of places. The Best Buy a few miles down the road nearly always had it available, but who wants to pay nearly $200 in sales tax? Last Friday, I had a crazy idea, and I asked Google for help. It turns out that Best Buy has a nearly perpetual 10% off coupon, and that more than took care of the sales tax problem. I walked out of the store with an enormous hole in my credit card and a tiny box with one of the hottest full-frame DSLR cameras ever made.
I'm still learning the basics of how to use it, but it's already amazing. When paired with the EF 180mm f/3.5L macro, it's the wildflower photographer's wet dream. I was shooting with a cap gun before; this thing is a bazooka. The only downside is that the camera and lens together weigh more than my tripod. I chose a place not too far from here, not expecting much out of the ordinary, so I could get used to the camera. The Six Mile Run Reservoir in the Delaware and Raritan State Park certainly lived up to that; it was remarkably average. My shoulder was sure feeling the weight of the new gear by the end of the hike yesterday. But I did manage to get a few good shots:
I thought it might be appropriate to start with a picture of one of my favorite flowers, Chicorium intybus. That's the ubiquitous chicory that you see growing in the cracks of the sidewalk on the side of the road. I think it's neat that a plant can thrive in such awful conditions and manage to put up those lovely little blue flowers all summer long. That image is a little cropped from the full frame, but when you've got 21 megapixels to play with, there's always a few dots to spare. The rest of the pictures from the hike are here.
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| House |
[08 Aug 2009|09:52pm] |
I never realized how many learning opportunities owning an old house would present. Not having reliable internet access really made things difficult, but Verizon finally figured out that there was inductance on the line (whether intentional or accidental, I don't know) that was attenuating the DSL signal. It's good to be plugged back in.
Unfortunately, many of these learning opportunities are things like plumbing, which I never really cared to learn much about. I can deal with Swagelok parts and 500 pounds of hydrogen at work, but water pipes with their corrosion and mineral deposits are icky. But the hot tap in the shower had a bad leak, so plumbing it was. Turns out someone left an O-ring out when they put in the valve. Recently, the taps in the bathroom sink started leaking, and I had to special order parts. We were without hot water in that sink for a week and a half waiting for the parts, and the old handles wouldn't fit on the new valves because they were too badly corroded. At least that sort of thing can be had at the local hardware store.
Another one is cutting the grass. I've never been a huge fan of a huge carefully manicured lawn, but now I have to care about it enough to avoid having the city cut it and fine me for an unruly yard. As far as I'm concerned, it's silly to spend so much effort on a crop that you can't eat (or smoke, I'm sure some people would say). I ended up buying a reel mower. It's nice and quiet, takes no gas, needs almost no maintenance, doesn't blast a cloud of allergens and stink into the air, and was only $100. In the front yard, which the neighbor had mowed one or twice, it was a piece of cake; twenty minutes and I didn't even break a sweat. The back yard was less pleasant, since it hadn't been cut since probably a month before closing, and a little reel was never designed to deal with foot-tall grass. Surprisingly, I was eventually able to beat it into submission, though I'm very sore now.
Next on the list is electrical wiring.
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| Home sweet home |
[18 Jul 2009|11:01pm] |
It's been nearly two weeks since the move, and Verizon still hasn't managed to get my DSL connected. I'm currently sitting on my front porch, stealing internet from the neighbors, drinking a beer, and reading about electrical wiring. I could rant about how miserable a monopoly Verizon is, but I suspect it would be preaching to the choir.
It turns out that more than half my upstairs rooms don't have grounded outlets. All of them are wired in such a way that my voltage detector goes anywhere near the lighting fixtures even when the lights are off. Some of them have three-prong outlets, but the ground connector is only wired to the back of the outlet box and not to anywhere it could actually do anything useful. And it appears that there's no rational correlation between the location of an outlet or light and the circuit it's on in the breaker box. On the bright side of things, I'll know an awful lot about electrical wiring if I don't electrocute myself before it's all over.
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| Hiking |
[04 Jul 2009|11:42pm] |
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Yesterday winktwice had to work, so I went hiking at the Ash Brook Reservation, a 600ish-acre tract of swamp smack in the middle of the sprawl that I drive through on the way to and from work each day. I was hunting Platanthera dilatata, but didn't have any luck finding it. Several miles into my slog through the swamp, I did find another Platanthera species, though. It's a big genus, and I was really hoping for my first one to be a nice big white P. dilatata or P. blephariglottis, or a purple P. grandiflora or P. psycodes, or even a brilliant orange P. cristata or P. ciliaris. And the list keeps going on! But I found the least attractive of them all, the green-white Platanthera lacera:
It was really dumb luck, stumbling on three of these plants; they're the same color and have the same leaves and are the same height as the grass they were growing in. These are the kind of plant you could pass within three feet of and never notice. It's also the fourteenth species or major variety of orchid I've found since moving here. I also got my first good shots of a deer, but you'll have to look at the rest of the pictures to see it.
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| Dénouement |
[30 Jun 2009|10:59pm] |
Closing was a zoo. My project at work has been a series of escalating crises.
And then, everything just worked. And I now own a house and my part of the delivery at work is done.
We move on July 7.
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| Anxiety |
[19 Jun 2009|07:53pm] |
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One week to closing, and signing my name to a fifth of a million dollars in debt.
My chemistry for the first delivery of the project at work I've been working on since Thanksgiving happens next week. I joked at the group meeting today that you could subtitle the project "how to spend half a year of your life putting two hydrogen atoms on a molecule". And it's just been one crisis after another for the past couple weeks. I can't even make firm moving plans until I know how said chemistry turns out.
My landlord, who swore up and down he'd work with me and be flexible on the move-out decided that he was going to be an asshole, and is expecting me to pay for an entire month's rent that I'm not going to be there for, despite the fact that I gave him notice half a month early. Half a month's rent would be reasonable. None would be generous. I hope that this building sinks into the ground and is buried in rotting shit once we're out of here.
I got an electric bill for over $600 today. That's ten times my usual consumption! It's like accidentally leaving three space heaters running continuously for the past month, and I think I'd notice 3 kW of waste heat. They're going to have someone check the meter soon.
The camera that I ordered sixteen weeks ago still isn't here. I told the company they were a bunch of incompetent assholes and canceled my order. I'll burn the money at one of the big retailers sometime after closing.
I could use a drink. A gallon of drink.
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| House |
[14 Jun 2009|09:28pm] |
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The house purchase has been hurry up and wait for a month and a half, and now it's lurching into fast forward. I've got approval from both of the seller's banks for the short sale now, we had the inspection yesterday (passed with only a couple minor problems), and most of the paper-pushing on my end has been finished. The seller's first bank wants to close by the 26th, so with any luck I'll be a homeowner by the end of the month.
I will be so glad when it's all over, I'm moved, and I never have to pay rent again.
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| Orchids! |
[07 Jun 2009|10:33pm] |
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I've been so tired lately, I've been falling behind on my pictures.
Last weekend, winktwice and I went hiking in the Pine Barrens at Greenwood WMA in search of Arethusa bulbosa. We found a few at Webb's Mill, but most of them were on the wrong side of the swamp to get close to them. I did get pictures of one of them, in addition to some other interesting plants and critters and stuff. We spent a lot of time trying to find them farther downstream, but the vegetation was so thick we couldn't really stay close to the water.
The day after she had to work, so I headed up to the Pequest WMA drawn by the possibility of Liparis liliifolia, in addition to a few orchids I'd seen elsewhere. Sadly, I never found anything that looked like orchid habitat, and most of what I did see was overrun with invasive species. I do have some pictures of the trip, though.
Yesterday, we struck gold in the Pine Barrens in Wharton State Forest. We found a small colony of Liparis loeselii, probably four dozen plants with half of them flowering, all in the space of about six square feet. But while they're little and cute, they're green, and you'll have to look at the rest of the pictures from the trip to see them. The real draw was the dozens of Calopogon tuberosus we found in a savannah along the Oswego River:
I will admit that I ended up knee-deep in muck more than once trying to get to semisolid ground to take pictures of them. But it was well worth it, and a remarkably productive hike even if it did involve driving down a couple miles of sand road, not knowing if my car would get beached on the soft sand in the middle of the ruts or drowned in the puddles straddling the road. The Pine Barrens are such a beautiful area, as I'm constantly reminded while we're down there; it's just sad that it's a sixty or ninety mile drive to get there from here.
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| Orchids! |
[24 May 2009|02:53pm] |
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Iron Maiden -- Sign of the Cross |
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We went hiking yesterday at the Jamesburg Park Convervation Area not too far from here. This place is the northernmost disjunct of the Pine Barrens normally found in the southern half of the state, and it's a fine place to find the pink lady's slipper Cypripedium acuale:
We saw probably a hundred plants in flower, with easily twice that many with no blooms. There was even a white one, a couple critters, and some bizarre fungus that looked like a pastry turned evil, and of course I took pictures. Unfortunately, the pine trees were busy being promiscuous, and everything was dusted with pollen; neither Benadryl nor Zyrtec could hold back my allergies.
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| Vignettes |
[17 May 2009|07:25pm] |
I got a call from my attorney last Friday; the seller's second bank gave a verbal agreement to the sale and papers saying as much should be coming soon. It might not be long before things start rolling forward and we set a closing date.
I took last Wednesday off and winktwice and I went hiking at Frederick, Wilcox, and Tourne parks in the Mountain Lakes area. We were looking for Cypripedium parviflorum, the yellow lady's slipper, but didn't have any luck finding it. We did find two flowering Cypripedium acaule, the pink lady's slipper, but they weren't in good enough shape to take pictures. Honestly, the parks were kind of boring; five or six miles of walking though featureless upland forest just isn't my thing. I did manage to get a few pictures from the trip, though.
We were still hunting yellow lady's slippers this weekend in the Johnsonburg area in the northern part of the state. The area was beautiful, with trail leading over the top of limestone cliffs and through the valleys in between. And she was running back and forth across the trail, picking up every critter she could find. There were plenty, between millipedes, frogs, and hundreds of these red-spotted newts:
We did eventually find a single flowering plant of Cypripedium parviflorum, too, but you'll have to look at the rest of the pictures to see it. Unfortunately, the trail dumped us out on the road on the opposite side of the nature preserve, and we spent three miles hiking around a country block to get back to where the car was parked. That was some orchid.
I've also pretty much solved the problem at work that's been my project since last Thanksgiving, and the chemistry is going to be used in the first delivery soon. And in two weeks, I'll have an intern for the summer.
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| More orchids |
[12 May 2009|07:08pm] |
Last Sunday morning I headed out to the Black River County Park for a hike. winktwice had to work, so I picked a place we had already visited. I found a few colonies of Goodyera pubescens and verified that one of the plants from last fall was indeed evidence of Galearis spectabilis, of which there were about half a dozen scattered plants flowering. The scenery was nothing short of gorgeous, too, as the park follows the Black River as it winds through its ravine. I wasn't expecting to find this, though:
Cypripedium acaule, the pink lady's slipper, is known from the park, but I thought it was too early in the season for flowers, but two plants seemed to think otherwise. I also found the white-lipped form albiflorum, though that plant hadn't fully opened its flower yet. As you might imagine, I've got pictures aplenty.
It might seem like we're getting lucky finding all these orchids, and some discoveries (like the yellow lady's slipper a week ago) were luck. Most of it has been the result of extensive research and careful searching. I've scoured the internet for every mention of orchids in New Jersey and I have a rather large Excel spreadsheet cross-referencing locations with species. There's 97 places on the list so far. I've also got a spreadsheet of known blooming times so I can have the best luck catching these plants in flower. I've made custom Google maps (private, of course) to chart the known ranges of different species. It's rare that we put in less than five miles a day when we're out hiking.
I'm beginning to suspect that most of this state is suitable habitat for at least one species of orchid. The land here is rich, and that's precisely why it's called the Garden State.
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[09 May 2009|09:42pm] |
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Labyrinth -- Terzinato |
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Today winktwice and I hit the trail at the Sourland Mountain Preserve searching for the Showy Orchis, Galearis spectabilis. I knew it was going to be there, since we saw a bunch of plants in bud a couple weeks earlier in the year last year. We weren't disappointed; I'd estimate we saw a good thousand of these little orchids, all in full anthesis. We even found the all-white form gordnierii and the all-purple form willeyi, a handful of plants each.
As you might imagine, there are plenty of other pictures from the trip.
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[02 May 2009|08:42pm] |
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This morning winktwice and I went hiking at the Ken Lockwood Gorge Wildlife Management Area. I nearly wrote off the place as not worth visiting, since most of the description was uninspiring: A walk on a road by the river one way, and the return trip via the gravel bed of an old railroad, frequented by mobs of people. At least we had a crappy weather forecast to keep people away. The only things that were interesting were the fact that it was named one of the ten prettiest places in NJ, and that Galearis spectabilis was known to flower there. We had good luck finding that early spring orchid last year, and had high hopes for it today.
Unfortunately, we never did find what we were looking for. There were many plants that grow in association with them, but not a single Showy Orchis to be found. Fortunately, we found half a dozen colonies of Goodyera pubescens, (not flowering; it flowers in Jul-Aug), and a few dozen plants of Cypripedium parviflorum var. parviflorum, the southern small yellow lady's slipper, which is something I'd never seen before:
I wasn't expecting to find this uncommon variety any time soon, let alone in bloom; I figured when I went hunting for yellow lady's slippers, it would be for the somewhat more common Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubescens, which start to flower mid-May (and which was the first wild orchid I ever found). As you might imagine, it's been a good day, and I'm really stoked for more orchid hunting in the weekends to come.
On an unrelated note, one of the people that was working on my mother's house was interested in my old shitheap of a classic car, so I will be selling that thing soon. It's been sitting parked in the back of her driveway ever since I moved here, and there's no sense in keeping it when I've lost any interest of restoring it. That, and I could use the money for the house. Closing costs are wicked expensive here.
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| Vignettes |
[26 Apr 2009|10:20pm] |
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House stuff: The sellers accepted my offer, I found a real estate attorney, and made it through attorney review. The house is now under contract, waiting for seller's banks to commit to the short sale.
Our weather went from cold and rainy to two days in a row that hit 90. Weird. At least it looks like spring outside.
winktwice and I went hiking at Lewis Morris Park yesterday and Washington Valley Park today. Both were nice, and as you might expect I have pictures from both. The former was full of yellow trout lilies (like the one below) and mountain bikers, while the latter one had millions of marsh marigolds on the banks of the Middle Brook. I like springtime.
On a completely different note, it should be illegal to drive an ice cream truck more then five miles an hour while the music box is on. Doppler shifts make them sound really creepy.
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| Househunting, finis |
[19 Apr 2009|06:41pm] |
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Last Friday we took a look at one more place, it was small.
Yesterday we went back to the place we liked from our first day of hunting for a second look. I took pictures, but none of them are all that great. For the curious, though, you can see it on Google and Realtor.com.
Today I made an offer for it. It's a short sale; I'm hoping for the seller to agree quickly, then we can get through attorney review and into bank bureaucracy. I just might be starting to get excited about the whole thing.
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| Househunting, cont'd |
[15 Apr 2009|08:55pm] |
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This househunting business is tiring stuff. From last Friday:
1: Tall ceilings, hardwood floors, big windows good. Holes in ceilings, water damage, fireplace in kitchen bad.
2. Older building with addition. Big, but much of the space is dysfunctional. Bleh.
3. 1.2 acre yard good. Everything else starts at bad and gets worse. Must have been an old-cat-lady house, but from the (lack of) smell it's been vacant a while.
From yesterday:
4. Historic Van Wyck district in Plainfield. Gorgeous architecture (!), huge windows (one is fifteen feet wide, easy), hardwood floors, fireplace, hand painted murals on walls. Bar in basement. Kitchen is a complete wreck and plumbing in basement appears damaged. Only one story (waste of a small yard around here), high taxes. Must have been really nice once upon a time.
5. Still in historic district. Amazing old building, full three stories + basement. Most windows broken, hardwood floors buckled and soft in spots, kitchen a wreck. How can someone let a building die like this? With five or more bedrooms, it would have been too big anyway.
6. Tiny. Seven foot ceilings fail.
Some things had potential, but everything is too much work to be livable. We're going to take a look at a couple more tomorrow, then I think it's time to take a second look at the one we liked, and maybe make an offer.
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| Househunting, part 2 |
[09 Apr 2009|10:42pm] |
1: Very cute old building, beautiful big windows and hardwood floors and funky irregular doors leading to oddly shaped closets. I could tolerate (and maybe fix) the dysfunctional kitchen, but there's no helping the shithole neighborhood a block from an eight-lane highway.
2: Homeowner apparently doesn't understand that telling the listing agent that any time is a good time means people will come by at any time. It wasn't a good time.
3: Every room is too small, basement is only five feet tall, plywood for floors upstairs (?!), large but somewhat wonky 50'x250' yard.
A bit of a disappointment, really. We did some searching online tonight and sent some ideas back to the realtor. Hopefully tomorrow is more interesting.
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