Do you like your cookies sweet or crispy?

Here’s a twofer Tuesday. Why not?

And dragonflies, too

First the damselflies arrived, now the dragonflies are back. A Green Darner turned up, hiding in the shade of the daylilies. Unlike the butterfly, it held still, letting me get as close as I like.

Big Fat Yellow Butterfly

Let’s see, how are the flower weeks doing? The roses are petering out, but there’s still plenty of them. The peonies look good, though thunderstorms tonight will probably put a stop to that. The irises are in full flower, so maybe I should stop badmouthing them. They do last more than a week each, but […]

Re:Stalking the Wild Asparagus

If you’re interested in foraging wild foods, there are good resources on the web, but a library copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by Euell Gibbons has its own charm. The title essay tells how as a youth he went looking for something, anything for his family to eat and found armloads of wild asparagus. […]

Re: From Babel’s Fallen Glory We Fled

“From Babel’s Fallen Glory We Fled,” by Michael Swanwick takes you on a journey through another world. A sentient suit called Rosamund, tells of Carlos Quivera, who survived the ruin of towering city of Babel, one of many cities on the planet Gehenna built by giant black sentient millipedes. Quivera contrives an extremely rough alliance […]

Re: Ancestor Money

It’s a real pity that a copy of China Mountain Zhang has been languishing on my bookshelf, because what little I’ve read of Maureen McHugh I really like. Take “Ancestor Money,” (collected in Mothers & Other Monsters) which was read on Podcastle a few months ago. Rachel is spending her afterlife in Swan Pond Kentucky, […]

Fruit!

Fruit? Not yet. It’s exciting to see so many. They barely flowered last year.

Re: The Revolution Business

The latest installment in Charles Stross’s Merchant Prince series, The Revolution Business, is, well, it’s the latest installment of a series. You know, the one where mild mannered technology reporter Miriam Bekstein discovers that she’s a lost princess from a Clan of drug-dealing warlords from a parallel world, and now she’s a pawn in their […]

The week of irises

While the week of roses continues and the week of peonies continues, we also have the week of Siberian irises. Basically the same deal, like the rose, lots of flowers for a week, like the peony, total flop-over when it’s done. It’s a pretty week while it lasts.

The week of peonies

As the wild roses enter their second week of bloom, the peony bush is joining in. For about a week, it’s covered with huge, lush flowerbombs. And just as they peak, it rains and the waterlogged blossoms drag the whole thing down to the ground and that’s it. A week. After that, the bush reverts […]