Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Rare things

I don't like to ride in the rain and I will almost always NOT ride if the weather is sufficiently threatening. The remnants of that last hurricane are about to blow through here and the learned opinions of those employed to scare us about the weather were universal in stating that we should be afraid, very afraid. The weather was sufficiently threatening.

I suspect they are right, they usually are. But they are in the business of predicting for the day and longer. My opinion is not learned but I am a pretty good self taught predictor when we are talking about looking at the radar and predicting for the next two hours, long enough to get in a two hour bicycle ride.

Shortly after noon I decided that the leading finger of the storm which was closest to here was actually losing form and falling apart. The main storm was still out there but I thought it might be a couple of hours away. I thought I could ride out a few miles and head back to be close to home after about an hour and then stay close to home, ride as much as I could and at least get in part of a ride. Well, every time I rode east it felt like rain was imminent. But I knew that the storm was coming from the west and every time I got a look at the western sky I was encouraged to keep riding. At first I was hoping to get in 8 miles, then 10, then 14. I got the full two hour ride.

I am home, I didn't get wet. It has rained here, a bit, but now it looks as though the main piece of the storm will slide past on the south side.

The second rare thing is what is going on in this photograph:That worker is plowing down an unharvested crop. I don't see that very often at all.

I suspect it is related to nitrogen fixation as I think that plant being plowed down was a clover or possibly some other fodder crop, a member of the legume family. So what is going on there is good land management but it is still not something that I see very often.

The third rare thing is this appearance of albino vermin in Falcon Heights.

1 comment:

Retired Professor said...

That almost looks like a fox. But an albino squirrel is rare enough.

Did you know that in New Zealand, swans are black?