EFF NINE

Can anyone guess where and what we ate for lunch today?

Watching for Crows

One is for sorrow
Two is for joy
Three is a girl
Four is a boy
Five is silver
Six is gold
Seven's a secret never been told
Eight is a wish
Nine is a kiss
Ten is the bird that you shouldn't miss

Salt Box With Porch

What if all my stuff fit easily in a little cracker box?
With a porch.
In the shade.

Near the bay.

Fierce Like Shandi

Immune from elimination. She nailed that fierce look.

Nursing Dixie

When you travel with a nursing baby you stop often. I never contemplated the ramifications of this until just recent. I think it is a skill I should like to explore more. It's actually a wonderful kind of game played in an uncertain number of innings between the start and stop of each days journey where Ruby initiates the start of every new round. You have three minutes to decide. Maybe five. Where do you stop to start the inning?

Bold P-NUTs

In the Panhandle of Florida you can get boiled peanuts spelled anyway you can make it work:

Bolt Penuts
Bold P Nuts
Boilt Pea Nuts

Go ahead.
See if you can make a new variant.

Ruby's First Grip

We have decided to salvage our shortened vacation and this is Ruby's first suitcase packed for the journey. The duct taped grip makes her look like a seasoned traveler. If mamas milk counts for "seasoning" then she is well seasoned.

This Is Why I Want a Scooter

This is why I want to get a scooter.

So... who wants on the team?

Looking For Grass?

This illustration is by Arwin Provonsha with the Purdue Department of Entomology. It's an illustration of a Say's firefly. There are more than 175 species of fireflies (actually beetles) in the U.S. but that number may be decreasing.

This summer I sat out in my yard patiently waiting for little Ruby to arrive. For some things there's not much you can do but wait.

Each evening I was treated to a massive display of firefly luminosity. But my backyard was the only place in the neighborhood where they were in such abundance. I attribute that to my tall grass areas where I'm establishing a native grassland.

I want little Ruby to be able to catch fireflies in a jar when she gets older. So I'm asking a favor of you. Quit cutting your grass please. The neighbors may complain but the fireflys won't.

One time when I was a kid we smuggled a bag full of fireflies into a movie theater and let them go. It wasn't as dramatic as we had hoped it would be. Mostly they didn't do anything. But it was a fun project none the less. I still remember it.

The Future of Parts

The whole is more than the sum of the parts. But the parts are so damn cute. Babies remind me of how simian we are. Toes reflexively squeeze around some imagined branch. Arms grab ahold of mom when startled. One day these hands will paint a picture or write a poem or dig a weed out of a garden. These toes will learn to pick up underwear from the floor without bending over or trace circles in the sand of a beach. For now they flail about without control or even awareness. How does that happen?

Collect Your Neon While You May

Top picture: 21 different options for the Times Square New Years ball lit by LED lights. (Photo captured from the New York Times web site. Photo by Ian Hardy.)

Bottom Picture: Neon sign captured at 8:15 on 9-1-08 along Bardstown Road.

I love the glow of neon and I can't remember a time when I didn't. The vivid glow of neon in the wanning evening light is magical. But it is a living fossil that feeds on a steady diet of fossil carbon. It takes tons of carbon to keep neon going night after night, year after year. I doubt there will be many more years left in the neon history books. Go capture images of them while you can. And if you don't mind sharing those images I would love to have you send them to me.

The future of commercial lighting is the LED. At mere fractions of the energy cost of neon you can create signs that flash ever changing patterns of light. Entire buildings could be covered in LED lights for the same cost of one large neon sign.

But even though I want to see our global energy budget reduced I will still miss neon.