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Monthly Archives: January 2010

Moonset

With the snow clouds gone, the snowscape was very bright last night from the nearly full moon. Here the moon sets during a very cold sunrise — 13 degrees. The photo was taken from the window of my radio room. The same photo, converted to grayscale, with contrast increased.

Snow day

It’s been snowing for about 20 hours. Here in Stokes County we have about 10 inches or more on the ground. On my deck, where the snow and rain pour down from the valley on my roof, the yardstick is showing a pile of snow 31 inches deep and growing. Lily does not like the […]

A fuller full moon

spaceweather.com The moon will be full tonight. It will be the biggest full moon of the year. That’s because the moon’s orbit is elliptical, and the moon will be at the apogee of its orbit, about 30,000 miles closer to earth than at its perigee. According to Spaceweather.com, that’s makes the moon 14 percent wider […]

Solastalgia?

New York Times The New York Times Magazine for Sunday has an interesting piece on the developing field of ecopsychology, which explores the ways in which mental processes and mental health are affected by the environment. Solastaglia is a word for what we experience when we see damage to our world. This experience varies from […]

Biscuits vs. rolls

Biscuits and rolls are so similar, and yet so different. They’re not interchangeable. Who would want rolls and gravy and scrambled eggs? There’s one way that rolls win hands down: they’re healthier. The shortening adds a lot of fat to biscuits, and the soda or baking powder is a big hidden source of sodium. Biscuits […]

A foodified quandary

A Walmart avocado When I lived in San Francisco, shopping at Walmart was unthinkable. All big box stores (or book stores) were scorned for a number of reasons, not least for what has happened to small, neighborhood merchants. But it also was easy to not shop at Walmart in San Francisco. I’d have had to […]

A revolution in reading and publishing

And there you have it. Apple’s new iPad is everything we hoped it would be, except that Apple is staying with AT&T for its Internet connection instead of moving to Verizon. All the iPad models will work on local wifi networks, though. It seems to me that the book publishing industry will now change very […]

Beet curry

I paced in circles in the kitchen this evening, trying to figure out what I wanted for supper. Something over rice seemed appealing. I knew that I needed a heavy dose of garlic to try to fend off the cold I’m afraid I picked up on a trip to town last night. And I had […]

Solar activity picks up

Today’s two sunspots: spaceweather.com Much has been written in the last couple of years about how quiet the sun has been. We are just starting to emerge from the low part of the 11-year sunspot cycle. For months, there were no sunspots at all. Today there are two active sunspots. In another five years, this […]

Priddy's store was hopping today…

Ron Taylor in Priddy’s store with some of his products that Priddy’s sells Coming home from the post office at Danbury, I stopped at Priddy’s General Store today to pick up a few things. There were a lot of customers, but in between ringing up customers Jane Priddy still found time to talk with me […]