2015 - Another fine year shot to heck! Year end musings

What's a tree worth? This interesting thought came to me while watching the chainsaw pros quickly clean up the ice storm tree debris.  As TPP watched a nearly 20 foot limber pine zip through the chipper, you know you only paid $130 for the tree plus the cost of delivery and planting (too big), but even if someone were to give you $200 for a replacement, you can't get back the 8-10 years of growth. That begins to tell you how much a really big tree is worth, they're really priceless and they should not be taken down without damned good cause.
So instead of a tree limb mess there now exists a 15 foot wide 20 foot long empty space although TPP's Sinocalycanthus appears to have escaped tree fall damage.  Good thin it'd be pretty tough to replace.  So the Phactors get to rethink this border garden and maybe try something different; it was a bit too shady for the limber pine. 
This ends TPPs first full year of retirement and the most surprising thing has been how busy his life has been. So no daytime TV, no shortage of chores, no shortage of gardening jobs, no boredom at all. On the positive side, he cooks more Italian food and shops more for groceries. Further he resolves to clean up all of the kitchen messes he creates. 
This blog is also almost 8 years old. Although very few people noticed at first, readership has been pretty steady for the last few years. Hope you all appreciate the total and complete absence of annoying popup ads or pathetic bloggers begging for donations. Heck, TPP hasn't even tried to flog his real life counterparts book; hard to do when writing under a pseudonym. The assumption is that readers appreciate these efforts.  Hard to know what my readers think because - in general silence. TPP admits that the primary purpose of this blog is to get things off my mind, to blow off steam, and lower the blood pressure in a semi-constructive manner.
Politics is so very bad this year that TPP can hardly write anything at all because it all comes out sounding so very pessimistic that it doesn't help the old state of mind at all. Seriously thinking that candidates should be asked if they garden, and if not, then we should forget them completely. Hoe some weeds, mow some grass, grow some tomatoes and then we'll talk.  Maybe 2016 should be the year of Gardening for better government, then we sharpen our hoes and weed out all of the baddies.
Send your local politicians some seeds and see what they do with them. Maybe we can grow some better government, a real grassroots effort.  Tell the blogger what you thinks. Time to cleanup the kitchen.

When it rains, it sometimes pours

This is both literally and metaphorically true.  A nice band of storms passed through the region dumping a nice quantity of rain.  Following a most excellent seminar by a former student who has become a very 1st class biologist, the department retired to this student's favorite watering hole.  Upon emerging a heavy dark band of clouds covered the entire western horizon, and TPP was a good 20-25 min walk from home. Weather moves fast out here in the Midwest and experience indicated this would be close and it was, but TPP made it with 3-4 min to spare.  Us field workers can walk pretty fast when needs be.  At any rate, our gardens got a tad over 2.25" of rain, and some much needed relief.  Also just in time for planting the new tree mentioned a few blogs back.  It poured.  So it did metaphorically too.  NSF shut down while in the middle of a complicated and somewhat confusing collaborative grant proposal submission, and a lot to things need to be done still, but maybe the shut down will provide a bit of time relief.  Then my copy editor emails that the book ms is ready to be returned, and does TPP want the punctuation edits just accepted so that he could concentrate on the more substantive edits?  Sure, why not?  Now a nearly 700 page ms is no small matter, and who knows how many edits that might contain.  These things all get done when TPP is not teaching or in other ways interacting with students, or eating and sleeping.  Oh, and Lincolnland has mandated that TPP take his ethics training and his crime reporting training in October too.  TPP thinks he'll plant a tree and go buy some apples.

A great hybrid concept!

Welcome to the Crown and Anchor a truly a great hybrid concept, a TARDIS hybridized to a tavern.  No matter when you enter it's happy hour inside, and no matter when you decide to leave, the hour is respectable outside.  No more missing the good times, no more getting yelled at for loosing track of time. You could even emerge before you went in thus eliminating the necessity of an excuse or explanation of where you were, or were not, although you do this at the risk of upsetting the space-time continuum with a time travel paradox. Who could have thought of this? 

Just a little bit busy this spring

The end of the semester, the beginning of field season, a publishing deadline, and home gardening are all colliding here in May when the days just don't have enough hours.  At the coffee shoppe this morning, at least 5 colleagues were sitting there with piles of papers.  Only one of them was in a semi-good mood.  What a terrific person she must be.  Students want to know their grades, and TPP wants to provide them as soon as possible.  However, a bit of patience is a virtue and so is a careful, thoughtful evaluation.  Same goes for the field work and gardening. This afternoon will be spent in the field looking for our permanent plots.  They are marked in the SW corner by a big spike and a inch and a half numbered aluminum tag.  It's hard enough to find them when the prairie has been burned, but this year is didn't get burned.  When the plot gets found, a 36-inch pvc pipe is shoved over the spike at the corner.  When the vegetation really gets up there, it's hard to even find the pvc.  An observant person can be within inches of a tag and not see it.  This is sure to be fun.  At home, plants are showing up faster than the Phactors can plant them, and it's always good to take time to plant things well and in the best location possible.  One particularly well-placed plant is an orange flowered azalea that sits in a nice copse among old spruces, a bald cypress, and big hostas.  In flower, it really lights up the space, which faces the street.  Yesterday a passer-by noticed it and braked their car suddenly for a better look and almost got rear-ended.  That would have been an expensive look.  People have actually stopped, parked, and come to the door to ask what variety it is (spicy lights).  Just planted a new azalea in the same series that has white and yellow flowers (highlights). TPP will try hard to get some more plant placements like this.        

Home again

The Phactor likes to travel, but hates traveling.  Going new and/or different places is great; getting there is a pain.  Unfortunately out trip home set a new travel record from southeastern most NC to its border with TN on rt 40;  It took eight and a half hours!  With no diddling around!  The problem was simply too many people in too many cars rendering our intra- and interstate road system wholly inadequate, then you compound that with hot weather, the attendant car breakdowns, poor driving habits, and short tempers, and you have near gridlock appearing at the slightest provocation that increased our usual trip by nearly 2 hours mostly spent standing still in traffic, and none of it was due to road construction.  It tried our patience and endurance.  On the good news front our cat-plant sitter did a great job and things looked well-watered and well-nourished, although something ate half our zucchini plants.  The plans for the garden moat and mine field must get completed if our wildlife friendly yard is going to stay that way.  

Friday Again

Yesterday, Friday, was a strange Friday, probably because most people acted as though it were a Thursday, and now it's Friday again. Is the Phactor caught in an endless Friday Ground Hog Day loop? Too many seminars (2 for job interviews, one visiting researcher) and a day of cancelled classes have generated a day-date disconnect like some rift in the fabric of time and maybe it will take a massive pulse of tachyons fired from the main reflector disk to get me back to tomorrow. Glad this week is almost over, or is it? Very troubling. Where's the Doctor? Who?

Universal Standard Time - Set Your Watches

Each fall and spring here in the Northern Temperate zone, excluding Hoosiers who insist on doing their own thing for the silliest of reasons, our local time reference shifts an hour to take maximum advantage of daylight hours. This shift between daylight savings time and “standard” time always causes considerable consternation, so the Phactor has no illusions about how troubling it will be to resetting your time pieces to account for new data that provides an age of the Universe at 13.75 billion years (+/-0.11) rather than 13.73 BYA. Yes, this was published 9 months ago, but what are a few months (years, eons) on such a time scale? So set your watches accordingly. This of course rather points out that our local time designation, a system designed to make trains schedules meaningful and accurate, and in this the good old USA this is an abject failure, is quite arbitrary and those atomic watches that set themselves to an accuracy of one 250th of the second or something like that are an absurdity. Numbers like 13.75 billion years always sort of boggle the mind, as does the implication that the universe ballooned from a subatomic size to something the diameter of a soccer ball during its first 30 seconds of existence. And so you sort of wonder where did all this stuff come from, and the answer, a marvel of mathematical logic, is that the sum total of positives and negatives, the matter and antimatter, in the universe are essentially zero, so there is nothing to account for save a miniscule asymmetry on the side of matter, and this is what we see. The Phactor does so apologize to any reader who has a more sophisticated understanding; this is the best this botanist can do.