Appalachian Mountain Dreams

After days of overcast, I stepped out the back door this morning before first light and say the moon. After the initial shock wore off I glanced around and saw stars too…Amazing. I had almost forgotten what clear sky looks like. This photo is what the Bluebonnets we Texans are so proud of each spring look like at this time

Jim Hightower offers up another tribute to Molly Ivins… We progressives, we Americans – and anyone, anywhere who loves liberty and justice – have lost a true, trusted friend. Molly Ivins died recently. Yet, Molly was more than a person. She is a spirit – a big, boisterous, joyful, irreverent, hell-raising, fun-loving, muckracking, uninhibited, maverick spirit. As such, she lives. I first

Reading the emails this morning I see global warming is kicking in on the Blue Ridge Mountains. The forecast for my friends on both sides of the NC/VA line has temperatures in the 40’s for the next day or so. I hope y’all don’t get the type of weather we have had since Friday, totally overcast and dreary. So far

Somewhere to the south, there are wild orchids raising their heads and fields of grazing geese, but not here and certainly not for some time. Reading the above line on Kerrdelune’s blog brought back memories of this past weeks trip to the Wildlife Refuge. It wasn’t the orchids, and the geese were not grazing anywhere around me. But the massive

Leon Hale just posted a blog entry on hawks…Chicken Hawks Inside The Loop A life-and-death bird drama is going on out there right now. Half a dozen pigeons are dipping and climbing and wheeling in a desperate way near our building . I’ve learned that this is how they behave when a hawk comes around. This time of year big

It is always nice to stumble across a reference to someone you haven’t thought about in a while. I don’t know how long ago it was that I started reading Dan Bricklin’s Log, nobody called them Blogs at that time though. Dan was one of the originators of the electronic spreadsheet and when I stumbled upon him back in the

 It seems the worst is not yet here. New Orleans is a city on a knife’s edge. A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, an alarming number of residents are leaving or seriously thinking of getting out for good. They have become fed up with the violence, the bureaucracy, the political finger-pointing, the sluggish rebuilding and the doubts about

Once more through the mill then two days of running madly in place before facing the mill race again. Lord, don’t you love the working families weekends? At least the Road Trip on Tuesday broke the routine of the week. A side benefit is it left me with a few weeks of photo’s to post to my two sites. My

Sun Through Clouds This patch of sunlight on an otherwise overcast landscape caused me to slam on my brakes and pull to the shoulder on my way home from my “Photo Road Trip”. I pass this field several times a week driving home from work – It’s on my de-stress route…Longer but saner.

It’s not the bird flue but it’s already causing havoc…Is this what we have to look forward to in the near future? That appears to be what the CDC was telling us when they published their recent “Guidelines“. DALLAS — With flu widespread in Texas now, a handful of schools are reporting enough absences due to flu and other illnesses