We’re kind of stuck here waiting for fence to happen [Monday]…and we’re still on the Forever Diet, [but 40 lbs lighter than last year!] but—
Who knows? We might get something special for dinner. Or something. I’ll have to see the cook [me] feels.
It looks nice out, but the house was 64 this morning, and Jane and I both swear we can’t get warm.
In the news, another 7.5 quake in the south Pacific: thus far Chile, Acapulco, Mexico; and now Papua New Guinea. I’m thinking we’ve got a big tectonic plate doing a little tension adjustment. California folk, please take care.
And the Dragon has flown: the SpaceX program has launched for the space station.
I need to go to the store and get some fish food.
And maybe I’ll pick up an Easter treat.
The weeping cherry is blooming. The regular one out front is breaking buds; the dogwood is trying; the star magnolia has bloomed, and the redbud and the magnolia are in the early stages. The peonies are really breaking forth, even the ones we had to pot pending the fence being settled.
We also need to measure our extant trench and go get some pipe to make our new rear of yard faucet hookup. We decided we’re tired of lugging hose past fragile plants, so we’re going to have an underground extension, connected to the back faucet by hose, then 30 feet of pipe, then a faucet where we can attach another hose. WE might use irrigation hose for the interim, but it’s pretty stubbornly coiled and might fight us trying to lay it down in such a long trench. We’ll see re relative price.
At any rate, spring is springing and things are blooming, and while the bunny leaves no eggs in our lawn [we have no lawn!] we still celebrate the annual appearance of flowers and new life!
Happy Easter to you and Jane too. Here in NZ we have the Easter Friday and Monday as a holiday, so we are enjoying our long weekend.
I have my fingers crossed for you to have lighter winds Monday, though it does make it hard to type.
We will be building a deck this long weekend, well my husband and a friend will do most of it. We have had the decking for four years. We bought it the Spring before the first September quake here in Christchurch. Then the following February put paid to decorating until the house could be repaired. All the repairs are done and we are transforming a shingled area into a deck to have the back of the house look more finished. Long lead time, but we are finally starting before Autumn (Fall) truly arrives. After two weeks of rain we will be walking through mud to unearth the decking from behind the garage, but we have gumboots (Wellingtons) or whatever the other readers’ countries call them.
Our Roses are still blooming and the leaves are looking gorgeous as they are turning.
A pipe and hose definitely is a better proposition than hauling hose past the more fragile plants.
We call gumboots ‘galoshes’, though properly those were the black rubber sort that latched; or we call them rainboots, or rubber boots (though they’re plastic,) or just boots, and then distinguish other sorts of boots as cowboy boots or riding boots [English style], or western boots, which are cowboy boots but perhaps without the ‘riding’ heel. 😉 All because we cannot simply say Wellies.
We heard about the terrible quake. We hope everything is settled down now. Here in the Pacific Northwest, indeed all down the west coast, we have that balance of beautiful scenery—and occasional upheavals. You have some of the prettiest scenery on the planet…but let’s hope it holds still a while!
And I suppose for you, Easter must be a harvest festivity rather than a spring one!
I wear “duck boots” when needed. They are rubber for a couple inches up from the sole, covering the toe, then leather above for lace-ups.
Socal had its earthquake about three weeks ago in La Habra, though sequences of earthquakes don’t correlate over long distances. Our quake was a moderate 5.1, roughly 30 miles SE of LA. Damage was generally minor, though a few structures were red-flagged: unsafe to live in. The quake was very significant, though.
You may recall the 6.7 1994 Northridge Earthquake, which produced a record (for North America) 1.8g acceleration. Earthquake damage is very idiosyncratic. A cousin lived a mere one mile from the epicenter and only had a little minor damage–tchotchkes knocked over, paint cracked as the building flexed. However, 57 people died and some “soft story” buildings collapsed their soft stories, typically parking levels. A number of overpasses fell, which lead to the change from square to round pillars, which trap even broken concrete in the rebar so failure isn’t complete. The rebuild of those overpasses was amazing: http://www.ccmyers.com/emergency_project.cfm?ID=7
And oft forgotten in the shadow of the 9.0 Tohoku earthquake and Fukishima (where TEPCO is still doing little more than building tanks to hold radioactive waste water) was the series of earthquakes 2010-2011, a cluster of quakes starting with a 7.1 then a couple around 6.3 among dozens at 5+, in and near Christchurch (Chch), New Zealand. In addition to destroying many classic neo-gothic landmarks (like Chch Cathedral), the quake mortally damaged half of buildings over five stories in Chch, especially those older than thirty years, built largely of concrete or unreinforced masonry. A few totally collapsed. Over one hundred buildings over five stories–a couple 20 stories–were damaged so badly they could only be demolished.
Which brings us back to La Habra. The other end of the La Habra fault is in downtown Los Angeles, which has all too many buildings of the kind that collapsed in Chch. Owners have been resisting even finding out if their buildings are structurally sound since Chch, but La Habra may tip the balance. The risk of losing a negligence claim has just gone far, far up. Of course, the owners may be like the West, Texas fertilizer owner, carrying far too little liability coverage and shielded by limited corporate liability.
Jane and I were in our third-floor apartment on the edge of a cliff which may *be* the fault line in our little 4.3 here in Spokane a few years ago. I was standing by the fireplace talking to Jane, who was sitting on the couch, and all of a sudden I found myself continuing my conversation while doing a ridiculous set of bows I hadn’t planned and didn’t understand. Jane (a west-Coaster) exclaimed: “We’re having an earthquake!” and I ran out front to look at the massive wooden chandeliers on the outside stairs…swaying about a foot, all told. So was our dining room one, on a shorter chain. And it seemed to me that Jane and I were not only moving to and fro, but a little sideways, which proved to be true: our living room floor had split all the way to the entry, ie, front to back of the apartment. A few people in town had chimney damage, but that was about the worst…
Except a year or so later they surprise-condoized our apartments, and offered us that apartment for 350,000.00. Ha! We knew where the fault was. In the first place, the new owner was from NYC, and the real price should have been, oh, maybe 150,00.00. And in the second, Jane and I, who had just come in from 3 weeks on the road, immediately, that day, began an apartment search, because we figured everybody else in he complex was going to be out looking in short order.
They were. But we had a new apartment first. Oh! Lynn Abbey came to visit, 2 weeks later, and we were able to show her where we were GOING to live….
We haven’t had another since. I’m sure we could, since we did. But we’re old faults here, not the brand spanking new ones on the coast. So maybe we’ll be another while before we have another.
In 1984, while I was stationed on Guam, I experienced my first typhoon. I put up the storm shutters, and was able to stay at home, my wife (I was married then) was called in as essential personnel and had to go to work down island.
Sometime during the evening, while the winds outside were raging, I heard what sounded like a freight train approaching. Now, for those of us in the Midwest, this is almost certainly a tornado….. The floor under me gave a quick jerk to the side, as though someone had taken a rug and flipped one end of it to create a small “wave” that rippled down the length of the rug.
After the typhoon passed, there was no report of an earthquake during that storm, but I know what I felt. Winds weren’t that high for this storm, it was barely a category I storm.
I’ve waked in the middle of the night to hear a water glass on my nightstand tapping against the lamp, and realized at the time we were having an earthquake. This one was a 4.7, and certainly not that much damage.
Richter scale numbers can be deceiving, too. People sometimes think that a 5.0 is 10 times worse than a 4.0, and that’s not so. They go in increments of 30, so a 5.0 is 30 times stronger than a 4.0, and a 7.0 is 27,000 times worse than a 4.0, if I read the scales properly. I can’t imagine ever going through a 9.0. I have a friend who is from Christchurch, NZ, who now lives in Tokyo, who gave us some reports on the city when he got a chance to go back home and visit.
I lived in San Diego, which , while not as seismically active as say, Lost Angeles, does have several faults, including one that runs through downtown…..I still don’t understand why Pacific Gas and Electric built the San Onofre nuclear power plant where they did at Oceanside…..didn’t seem to make sense to me, at all.
My post above was a bit misleading. The R-scale measures the amplitude of the seismic waves, whereas the figures I used were a result of the energy of the quake. This link does a better job of explaing: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/how_much_bigger.php The magnitude scale is really comparing amplitudes of waves on a seismogram, not the STRENGTH (energy) of the quakes. So, a magnitude 8.7 is 794 times bigger than a 5.8 quake as measured on seismograms, but the 8.7 quake is about 23,000 times STRONGER than the 5.8! Since it is really the energy or strength that knocks down buildings, this is really the more important comparison. This means that it would take about 23,000 quakes of magnitude 5.8 to equal the energy released by one magnitude 8.7 event.
It’s really only the Richter scale informally. The exact calculations have been refined from Richter’s work, which was specific to California. USGS currently uses the Moment Magnitude Scale (MMS or Mw) for earthquakes 3.5+. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale
A difference of two, say 6.0 to 8.0 is an increase of 1000 times the energy, or 31.6 times for a difference of one. However, I believe even MMS does not consider the length of the earthquake, and the bigger the quake the longer its duration.
Also, actual shaking intensity and damage depends on the geology of the area. A great deal of damage in Chch was from liquefaction, where the ground essentially turns to quicksand. This is a threat to many areas in the SF bay area. Some geology has a jelly-like effect, quivering and increasing damage, like some areas in LA. Quakes in the Eastern US travel faster and farther because of the rigid metamorphic bedrock of the region (which also makes for an excellent skyscraper foundation); a quake that can shake a wide area in the East may dissipate harmlessly in the California desert, such as the 7.2 1999 Hector Mines quake which caused only mild damage and injuries despite being stronger than the largest Chch quake.
***
Happy Easter! (A little late for Chch.)
I live in the most seismically active county in Ohio. In 1937, there was a fairly significant earthquake in Shelby County, they determined the epicenter to be about 3 miles from the village of Anna, OH. Anna suffered the most damage, but the quake was felt all over the county.
Why here? According to my copy of the “Roadside Geology of Ohio” (thank you, CJ), there is a 1 billion year old Precambrian fault known as the Ft. Wayne Rift. This fault is covered by a buried valley filled with glacial deposits, overlain with the surface soil. When the Rift let go, it set up vibrations in the glacial material which then shook like gelatin in a bowl. While we don’t get the massive tremors that say, California gets, or those around the Pacific Rim, we still get earthquakes, and possibly every day, just not measurable.
I understand the LA Fire Department stocks a minimum of two weeks of supplies in their emergency center downtown. The expect the streets to have some feet of glass and stuff, if there’s a big one. The highrises will probably be okay – they’re mostly newer – but there are a lot of buildings that are pre-1950. Not so tall, but also not necessarily up to current code, although some have been retrofitted, as have many of the masonry buildings in the really old areas (pre-1920).
One of the problems with building codes is that retrofit regulation is at the local level, and some cities don’t require retrofits unless the building has a change of purpose. This is actually a fairly inadequate way to handle the problem – it means that if something has been a restaurant, as long as it stays one, it doesn’t have to be fixed.
Happy Easter to you, as well!
I am down to about 194 pounds, from a high of about 220 pounds last year. I’m on no special diet, just watch how much I eat, avoid a lot of high-fat foods, and rarely eat out unless I make it a special reward.
My dogwood trees have budded, the blossoms aren’t yet out, but I have two white dogwoods, one in the front, and one in the back. I’ve also got two maples that are starting to show reddish leaves. I’m sure the below freezing temperatures Monday night didn’t make them happy.
I trimmed a rather large shrub in my front flowerbed this afternoon, I’m not sure if it’s a wisteria, a lot of canes that look somewhat like grapevines, branches every which way, and it surrounds a honeysuckle shrub. I can’t remember what color the flowers were – the honeysuckle blooms are yellow and white. Most people hate honeysuckle because it’s invasive, but this hasn’t seemed to go anywhere that I can tell – maybe the other shrub is keeping it in check.
Roses were cut back severely last month, dead canes removed, and I see some green canes starting to peek out of the bud union.
I hope the peonies that I bought last year (in pots) and planted on either side of Sadie’s grave come up, as well as the other perennial flowers I planted in the front. I have to get something for Birdie’s grave, too, it’s been 5 months now……
Peonies are great plants. We have 4 tree peonies, and 2 are getting sizeable (for peonies). If they’ll grow for you, I think you could hardly do better. If you want size, however, one of the flowering fruit trees is an all-season pleasure.
Peony blossoms make wonderful jelly.
I just looked at the spots where I’d planted the peonies, one plant, the white bloomed one, has shoots about 8 inches tall. The other one, which is red bloomed, has shoots that just broke the surface. Maybe they’ll bloom this year, since last year was their first year in the ground. My mother had them all along the fence in our back yard, as did the lady on the other side. We had some at the house we bought in Portsmouth, VA, too, but since I was there less than 1 year, I don’t know how well they did.
Um, is it OK to trim my roses after the current blooms drop? — And *where* precisely am I supposed to trim the canes? I need the most simplistic beginner’s explanation of that, please.
It seems the second rose bush in my back flower bed survived after all, but not another that was removed, as it had very obviously died completely from our one strong cold snap (despite being covered).
Spring has sprung here. The roses have a very nice crop of blooms which are almost ready to drop their petals. Everything else is about ready to bud out and bloom. If my budget allows, I’ll add something to my back yard flower bed. I can’t do my front lawn (re-landscape) yet, but the flower/landscaped beds there are doing as usual.
It was beautiful out this morning, sunny and pleasant.
Hmm, and the forecast says we’re going to climb into the 80’s next week, all week. Easter is our last chance for cool weather. After Easter Sunday, we’re increasingly into summer weather here.
Have a good Easter (or Passover) everyone!
(Wow, do I even *have* food dye these days in the pantry / spice rack? I should check. I did not remember to get an egg dyeing kit.)
Always trim roses to a five-leaf joint…at least 5 leaves. You can cut them most any time: in some areas you should nail-polish or tar the stub to prevent parasites.
And I love Eliot’s cats…
I’m no expert, but I do have a good book about pruning… summer pruning should be limited to deadheading, cutting off the stem preferably just above the first 5-leaf below the dead flower. If there are no 5-leaves on that stem, just above a 3-leaf will work too.
In winter, prune them back hard (I see a lot of people cutting back all the stems to a foot off the ground, though I kept them about twice as tall), unless it’s a briar rose (with bramble-like whippy stems; IIRC those either need to have 1 in 3 branches removed at ground level, the oldest each year so in 3 years the whole bush is renewed, or you let the whole pile grow year by year without pruning).
If your winters can be frosty it may be best not to trim them back too low at the start of winter, as the stems can sometimes die back a little in frost: if you pruned them back early to the last bud-bump that could cause a problem (I’ve had a nice bush turn into a one-legged one after a hard winter). But you can cut them back at least half way in (early) winter, for most types, and cut them back to the point where you want them to start at the beginning of spring (just about when the first leaf buds are swelling; I often forget this part). To avoid mildew colonising the plant it’s best to prune when the weather is dry.
If what you’ve got is not a tea-rose bush but a climbing one, the method of pruning depends on the kind of stems it makes:the ones with lots of thin whippy stems need a different regimen than the ones that make a few thick sturdy woody stems that try to grow straight up. Those last can have trouble regenerating if you cut them back too far.
The smaller rosebushes (from miniatures up to 50 cm) with small flowers that grow in bunches along the twigs on a stem, instead of one or a few large ones at the ends of the stems, don’t need pruning at all.
On the other hand, if you’ve got good strong rosebushes they can survive a lot of ‘wrong’ pruning. One of the best known commercial rose growers in the country did an experiment once, pruning several of the rosebeds in their show gardens half in the traditional careful manner, and half just taking the hedge-shears to them and lopping off everything straight at the set height; the lopped-with-shears bushes flowered slightly better than the carefully pruned ones!
Maybe those were knockout roses, like mmberry mentions.
There are two issues of supreme importance with pruning roses: 1) what type of rose it is (Hybrid Tea, shrub, climbing, floribunda, etc.) each of which need different approaches, and 2) how tough your winters are. I see lots (and I don’t mean just here) of unequivocal statements about what to do. For the most part people talk about pruning under an assumption that they’re pruning Hybrid Teas. Hybrid Teas are by far the most popular roses, which leads to that assumption. So as in most other things, the true answer is, it depends.
I do “prune” my roses in the summer when I cut blooms, always with an eye to how that will influence the growth and development of the plant. But I live in Portland and my favorite red, “Grand Masterpiece” (JACPIE), will bloom into November in many years!
The main reason for doing an early winter pruning is to cut down on the “sail area” so the hard storms don’t rock the plant and break roots at the crown. If your plant is in a protected location, and your winters aren’t so hard, it may not be necessary.
This year I didn’t do my normal “President’s Day” pruning and shaping at all. Last spring was wet and the fungus diseases did a lot of damage. I wanted to push lots of leaf growth this year, so “don’t cut ’em off!”
I’ll toss in a nickel here.
In addition to Paul’s comments, in the case of tea roses, you can ‘aim’ the next round of growth from a cane by choosing which 5-leaf stem you cut above. The 5-leaf stems point in different directions as you look further up or down the cane; growth will proceed up and out from the junction of cane and 5-leaf stem. Choose (and trim about 3/8 inch above) the 5-leaf stem which aims growth into a desired direction.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/04/15/300136332/can-it-be-parrots-name-their-children-and-those-names-like-ours-stick-for-life
Many social animals, like horses and dolphins, have names. Not the names we give them, but the names they give themselves.
It’s not clear domesticated cats are that social, but maybe TSE was right.
From experience, the roses will continue to bud and bloom if you cut the dead or blooming flowers back down to a junction with leaves. As long as you don’t allow the heads to set as rosehips you will get loads of blossoms. If the heads drop their petals and produce the rosehips, the bush tends to stop producing blossoms. Don’t trim the bushes back to canes until it gets cool next fall (probably the end of Oct or Nov in Houston. You want to keep many of the leaves over the spring, summer, and early fall so that the bush can store energy to see it through the winter. Arizona isn’t known as a great place for roses, but out compound at work had two rose bushes that languished for years with not pruning and very little watering. One fall I finally took the bushes in hand and cut them back so far (down to five canes less than ten inches tall with only one union a piece), that co-workers were telling me I was trying to kill them. The next spring the bushes grew back 60% of the previous years growth and put out hundreds of blooms apiece. That summer the roses grew to over three feet tall and four feet across; and the following year with only limited pruning to over four feet tall and six feet across.
Also, be careful when watering. I used a drip watering system for my roses (the whole back fence had nothing but roses when I lived in Virginia Beach), especially when I lived in San Diego. The leaves are susceptible to mildew if they’re not dry by the time the sun stops shining on the roses. I used a 1-gallon per hour drip near, but not on top of, the roots, and my landlady was shall we say, jealous? Right now, my roses are of some indeterminate variety, they were here when I bought the house. I have my favorites, but my all-time favorite is no longer available and was a very difficult rose to maintain, anyway. I cut the canes back last month, they’d had sufficient time to freeze with all of the below-zero nights we’d had over the winter. Make sure you clean up the cut canes, don’t leave pieces of them lying around, they make nice homes for borers….at least, I’ve read that somewhere. I use a systemic feed & anti-aphid mix for my roses, too. The worst pests, though, are the Japanese beetles. For them, I take a jar of soapy water (or sometimes gasoline) and flick the beetles into the jar where they drown. I tried milky spore disease, and that kills the grubs in YOUR yard, but not in any other places…..and I haven’t seen it listed on the market any longer, either. Maybe they found out it does more than kill beetle grubs.
Ann Leckie (hautdessert on Shejidan board) has been nominated for a Hugo for her novel Ancillary Justice. http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2014-hugo-awards/ She is a long-time fan of CJ. Congratulations Ann!
I got an advance review copy of Ancillary Justice from NetGalley and really enjoyed the book. I need to buy a copy now and figure out if I’m eligible to vote or not.
Indeed, congratulations!
If you want the easiest rose I have ever seen, get knockout roses. They bloom almost continuously from spring till late fall. I have seen them hacked back without proper pruning and they bounce back! Every year.
The PNW has had R9 earthquakes from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, very like the Tohoku Quake. There are signs of 13 in the sediments off the Columbia since the last Ice Age deposits. The last one was Jan 26, 1700, as the tsunami was recorded in Japan.
Probably not the right place to post this, but I got this note in my e-mail, and wonder how much I should beware of it.
Azurline,
RichardGuen has sent you a new personal message entitled “Game of Thrones Saison
4 Episode 3 Vostfr”.
You can read this personal message by following the link below:
http://forum.shejidan.net/index.php?act=Msg&CODE=03&VID=in&MSID=44395270
Regards,
The Shejidan team.
http://forum.shejidan.net/index.php
I got it too, and was also unsure if it was real or spam. Since I haven’t seen any of the other episodes of GoT, I saw no point starting now anyway.
The Guild has been notified of the Filing of Intent, and has acted upon it. There is no such member by the name of Richard Guen. I did get a note from The Mule stating that the Guild has removed the message.
Apparently, it was generated by a spambot that somehow got access to Shejidan. Appropriate security has been reinforced, and those who allowed this spambot access to the third floor of the Bujavid have been removed from their duties and assigned elsewhere.
Turning boulders into rocks, rocks into smaller rocks, small rocks into gravel, and gravel into sand, are they?
I’m not sure if they have that capability any longer. The Guild’s actions appear to have been quite effective…..of course, nobody knows which Guild member(s) actually were responsible for the “removal”, although I have my own theories.
I just hope this doesn’t happen again.
Ah – that is why Commodo has blocked the site for over a week. And I thought that they were just being irritating.
And I have missed being able to access the site.
Could you change “Papua, New Guinea” to “Papua New Guinea”?