Science brain is no fun

Well my job has changed in the past few weeks, I was teaching 50% time, and I had a private office where I could surf the web in my spare time and ponder the meaning of life privately. Now I am doing lab research 100% time in a lab with six other people, shared computers, a lot of noise, and no private time. All of a sudden my mind is a total blank. All I think about now are primers and promoters and PCR (and other things that don't start with the letter P). It has made me realize how completely your job can take over your brain. I really have nothing interesting to say, all my brain power goes to thinking about experiments and there is nothing left over for creativity. I am sure it is the same for many other people who have jobs that require them to think all day, at the end of the day the brain gets tired. Or maybe it is just me.

Tulipomania

Some years ago I was having a conversation with friends and a friend of a friend of a friend said that her favorite flower was the tulip. At the time I thought it was strange, since I only knew tulips from mass plantings of identical tulips that all bloomed at the same time, looked like tubes of lipstick, and were quickly removed once past their prime. They seemed the ultimate in disposable flowers.

Now that I have my own garden, my opinion has changed, and I love tulips. I have planted about 100 in my garden, and there are probably 100 more that are survivors from previous owners' plantings.

Tulips are great because of the intense colors they have, their sculptural shape, and the way they change over the bloom time. First of all, they are great in the bud. This one below is an unnamed cultivar that just came up in the garden.



This one, Tulipa 'Oratorio', is just starting to open up.



Tulips are beautiful when you look directly down on top of them. The patterns in the flowers are amazing. Another anonymous variety.



This one just looks like a fancy sculpture to me. The color is fantastic too, as is the petal texture.


Even when they bloom in unexpected places tulips are beautiful. This one is growing therough the chain link fence in our yard.



This one is Tulipa 'Quebec', a Greigii type tulip. Another top view.



These are more unknown tulips. I would never plant orange and yellow tulips, but these just came up and how can you not like that?




I think I would plant more species tulips if I were to do it again. Their foliage is less intrusive. This one is Tulipa humilis 'Persian Pearl'.


Even when tulips are fading, they look wonderful. Then you can look inside them to see the reproductive parts and how they are beautiful too.


Now tulip season is almost over, although there are still some late tulips blooming in the garden. I also planted many daffodils, which are supposed to be more easily perennialized. Somehow they are not returning year after year, while the tulips, supposedly more difficult to get to come back, seem to be doing fine. In fact, in areas of the yard that we reclaimed from grass, many of these unnamed tulips have come up, probably after years of not blooming, a testament to their durability

I am in love

With my digital camera. I have always wanted to take up photography, but my technical ineptness, lack of ability to focus the lens well, and general success to failure ratio have kept me from really pursuing it. Meanwhile, all my friends and family were getting digital cameras. After seeing and using my sister's camera last summer, we decided to get one ourselves. I have so far taken about 600 photos, about 500 of them are pictures of my garden. I just like the crispness, the color intensity, and the automatic focus of the camera. I don't think I will be doing much manipulation, say with Photoshop, I enjoy the challenge of taking a picture from what is available to me, rather than manipulating the environment or the photo.

I think 75% of the reason why I started a blog was because I like how digital pictures look in other blogs and I wanted to be able to see my pictures in a blog. I also like doing short photo essays about what is blooming in the garden, or my favorite color of the moment.

I also set up a flickr site, here. There are only about 165 photos there so far, but more to come.


I like taking still life pictures, like this one.




I like taking close-ups of plants so they look different, like this.



And, of course, I like taking pictures of flowers. Who doesn't?

How to name a blog

I really have no idea. All I know is that took me hours to come up with a word that I am only so-so happy about. My first fifty choices were not available so I had to resort to a thesaurus to find a related word. Maybe I should have played random word grab for a while and come up with a name like happypickle, armadillosunset or bluebananabottle. Or maybe I should have thought of more song lyrics and picked chickenwiretrunk or fromthebalustrade. But I didn't. Most of the craft blogs I visit have cutesy names like loopylu, myprettykitten, or yarnypants. Somehow, that didn't seem to fit me either. Neither would anything with the word blog in the title (surely that has been done before) or ending in -ette, like wonkette, or daily anything.

Some of the names I wanted, like smalldrops, were taken but when I checked them, the blog hadn't been updated in two years. Hey Buddy, use it or lose it. And who else would want chromosphere or quercus or geranium or greenery? I guess someone. But it is over and I can move on. As they say ... a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Frondescence

Frondescence (n.) The time at which each species of plants unfolds its leaves.

Frondescence (n.) The act of bursting into leaf.

I prefer to interpret the word a bit more generally to include flowers. Maybe there is a different word for the act of bursting into flower, but I do not know it.

This is one of my favorite times of the year in the garden, when plants are just coming into leaf or flower. It reminds me of one of my favorite poems, Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Robert Frost.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

In memoriam

Last night I realized that it is the twentieth anniversary of the death of a friend of mine. We met as junior year study abroad students in France in 1985. I still remember the first time we met, sitting in the lounge area of the dorm we were staying in at the time. We talked for hours, and it was if we were just getting reacquainted, rather than meeting for the first time. I don't think I have felt that way when meeting anyone else in my life.

On May 16 1986, he and a friend were coming home late one night (probably drunk) and wandered onto the train tracks and were both killed by an oncoming train. Seems so unlikely that something like that would happen, but it did.

It was May 16 in France, but still May 15 in the US. I have the clippings from the newspaper in C-U and one of them states May 15 as the date of death and the other one states May 16. Odd. Somehow that prevents closure, bringing up the trivial point of which day to pinpoint as the one day.

I don't think any person, save my immediate family and my husband, has had as much of an impact on my life as he did. He was only 20 when he died, and I was 18. Rest in peace, Tom. I still think of you.

Things I have learned

Do not try to start a blog or a flickr site right before finals week, especially when you are teaching a class of 300 people. I just submitted my grades, and can actually spend some time doing this.

Inaugural

This blog is for me.