Tonight we watched Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. I was prepared to dislike the movie, because it had gotten so many bad reviews. I liked it, though. Evil got its big, ugly ass kicked. Good things happened, and sad things happened, and both made me cry, but it was the good kind of crying. So, even if the movie wasn’t perfect in every way, it was perfect in all the right ways.
Our school system ultimately decided to offer a distance learning option that includes teachers. I hope it will turn out to be a good one, because we enrolled today. We are now committed to it for the remainder of this calendar year, regardless of whether or not in-person school resumes in September.
Tonight we watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It was better than I remembered it being. The kids were both excited to see BB-8 again. (Do they ever love that droid! R2-D2 is chopped liver to them.) We will probably watch The Last Jedi next. I saw that one a few times on Netflix, so I wouldn’t mind skipping it, but the kids could probably use the recap. And then (finally!) we’ll watch The Rise of Skywalker. It’s the only one I haven’t seen yet. The kids still haven’t seen the prequels, though, so maybe if we’re not all totally burnt out on Star Wars, we’ll watch them later this year.
My husband accidentally melted rubber (from a spatula) onto our waffle iron a few weeks ago, and we haven’t had Sunday waffles since. Instead, we’ve had Sunday pancakes. This change is fine by me. It might be possible to remove the melted rubber from the waffle iron, and I will eventually give that a try, but not until I get sick of pancakes and/or nostalgic for waffles.
Today I saw a headline: “4 Things Making Your Living Room Look Messier Than It Is” (from apartmenttherapy.com). That cracked me up. As if my living room isn’t legitimately messy and only appears to be because of four things! Hahahahahah. Nope. My mess is the real deal.
Unlike some of the other plants that have crisped up under the unrelenting summer sun, the spotted spurge is still fresh and green, so it was very noticeable in the yard today, where I was walking barefoot. Though I only just identified it, it seems to be pretty well established. I hope that stepping on it is not enough to cause skin irritation. I tried not to step on it, but I probably did. I washed my feet off with the hose outside before going into the house, and again in the bathtub with soap and water afterward, just in case. Sometimes poison ivy grows in the yard, too, and of course, there are ticks, so washing off is probably always a good idea.
Livia is so amazingly detail-oriented. When we go out for Sunset Walk, she likes to race down the driveway and get to the road first. Then she reports back to me about how the sunset looks. She tells me the details of how the different colors are combining together. She has also tried just about every possible way to grip the handlebars of her bicycle and has explained to me all the pros and cons of each grip. She went on a bike ride with her Daddy today, and my goodness, was she full of details when she got back!
As I’m writing this post, I can hear thunder in the distance. That’s good. We had a few cool days last week, but now the heat is back with a vengeance. So I hope the storm will come our way and drop some rain on our parched little plot of land.
Getting out of bed in the morning is not on my daily to-do list. There are times when I think it ought to be, though. It’s so hard to drag myself out of bed these days that I feel like I deserve some sort of reward for it, even if it’s just the small satisfaction of checking an item off a list.
I never got around to creating a camp schedule for the kids. This should come as no surprise to people who have a stronger grasp of reality than I do. I tried, but I eventually realized that my enthusiasm for the job was not equal to the task of overcoming the obstacles, not the least of which was my full-time job. So I had to let that dream go. But I never gave up the dream of spending more time with my kids, and over the course of the summer, we have had a lot of walking time together, watched a lot of movies, and we’ve even done the occasional craft (tonight we made houses out of craft sticks). It’s not summer camp, or even close, but it’s still good.
Last night we went out for Sunset Walk and discovered a rainbow. On one side of the sky was the sunset. On the other, a rainbow among pink clouds. I wanted to take a picture of the rainbow, but I didn’t have my camera. I don’t usually carry one at that time of day, because the lighting is poor. So I ran all the way up the driveway, up the stairs into my office to grab the camera, and back down the stairs. Then I hopped on my bike and sped back down the driveway. I arrived at the road out of breath, but just in time to capture the rainbow before it disappeared.
Earlier this year I spotted a new plant growing near the end of my driveway.
Mystery Flower 6/19/20
Looking at both the flower heads and leaves, I thought this mystery flower was likely to be a clover. Going on that assumption, I searched online for “yellow clover.” The search returned a lot of hits, because there are several varieties of yellow clover, called “hop clovers” or “hop trefoils.” There is also a related plant, black medick, that is said to look similar, so similar that it, too, is sometimes called “hop clover.”
Unsure which plant I had found, I put the pictures of my mystery flower aside. But I kept an eye on that patch of flowers as it continued blooming and, later, started to seed. The most reliable key to distinguishing between hop clover and black medick, I have learned, is the seed heads. The flowers of hop clovers are said to puff up as they mature, coming to resemble hops, which is how they got their name. Then they turn brown, much like white clover flowers do. Black medick develops a distinctive cluster of seeds that turn black as they mature. (This webpage, though specific to Cape May, is a handy guide to some common clovers and clover relatives. It includes pictures of the flowers and the seed heads.)
Now that my mystery plant has gone to seed, it’s time to make the identification.
Mystery Flower Seed Head 8/18/2020
Surprise! My mystery flower is black medick. I’m a little disappointed, because I wanted another clover to add to my list, but I’m also glad to have learned about a new type of plant. Black medick is, like so many of the plants in my yard, considered to be a weed, but as far as weeds go, it’s a good one. As a member of the legume family, its roots host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and over time it will improve the quality of the soil in which it grows.
Riding my bicycle today, I reached a point at which my heart was hammering and I felt a little nauseous. I told Livia that I had hit my limit. Livia tried to encourage me. She said, “You should push past your limits.” I replied, “At your age you can do that, and it will make you better. At my age, it’ll give you a heart attack.”
Yeah, I know that that wasn’t the most inspirational or cheerful thing to say to a child. And one could debate whether or not it was only prudence that made me stop. But none of that changes the fact that what I said is true. I am getting old, and lately I have been really feeling my age 🙁
Given how many new plants I’ve found in my yard this year, I’m beginning to think that if I wait long enough, every native and naturalized plant will eventually show up here. Not that all of them are the kinds of plant I want growing in my yard, but I appreciate the convenience. The pandemic has been keeping me at home, so it’s really quite nice of the plants to come to me.
Here is one of the latest additions to my yard.
Spotted Spurge My hand behind the plant offers some scale. Those flowers are tiny. Note the dark spot on some (but not all) leaves. I thought the spots looked purplish, but online sources describe them as “red” or “maroon.” Picture taken 8/8/20.
This newbie is spotted spurge. It is among the nastiest of the nasty weeds, or at least that’s the impression I got from Google, where nearly every hit on “spotted spurge” was about how to get rid of the plant. I wouldn’t make any bets on it being the nastiest, though. The competition for that honor is fierce. We’ll have to wait and see how this plant measures up to other plants in my yard over time.
My Audubon wildflower guide didn’t include spotted spurge, which made identification harder. And I wish I’d been more careful when selecting a picture of the plant to use as my example. I focused on the tiny flowers and the apparent hairiness of the leaves and stem. Had I looked more carefully at all of the pictures, I would have noticed that some of the leaves had spots on them. That was a big clue that I overlooked. But it is good to keep in mind for future identification that the leaves don’t always have the spots.
Once I finally identified the plant, I got a strong feeling of deja-vu. I knew I had heard of spurge before. So I let my brain cook it for a bit, and soon I had my answer.
Two answers, actually. I have seen spurge mentioned in two notable places. The first was on my own blog (duh). Earlier this year I found a plant that I identified as a spurge, and I wrote, “I am unfamiliar with this plant, so I will have to do more research.” I never did the research, though, and I forgot all about it. That plant, by the way, was most likely cypress spurge.
The other place in which I’ve seen references to spurge is in books about foraging, where spurge is often mentioned as a poisonous look-alike for purslane. The two plants don’t look that much alike to me, but they do seem to spread along the ground in a similar way, and they apparently favor similar locations, so caution is merited. You can read more about the subject at this foraging website.
After reading about spurges, I recommend that everyone learn to recognize their local varieties. Spurges, it seems, are not friendly plants, and perhaps Google was on to something when it pointed me toward all those weed removal services. According to my Audubon guide, most spurges are poisonous. Some of them, such as cypress spurge, can cause contact dermatitis. Spurge nettle (a.k.a. tread softly) is a spurge that grows in the South. It has stinging hairs on it, like a nettle, and it can cause a bad rash.
But spurges are interesting, too. Some spurges look like cactuses, and some have fantastic names, such as devil’s backbone and Medusa’s head. I would like to know more about them. So, as I said that first time I mentioned spurge on my blog, I will have to do more research.
