Verbena Bonariensis

My blooming Verbena bonariensis.

Thai Dragons

'Thai Hot Dragon' chile peppers on my single plant. This plant has grown fast and produced many peppers.
There was a bit of a mystery concerning this plant: some of the peppers had absolutely no heat at all (they're supposed to be 8 times hotter than a Jalapeño). I discovered it was because those peppers were drying on the plant and not ripening.
The other day, I tried a plump, juicy red pepper. After chewing for a few seconds, I was running back into the house hollering.
The heat lasted about 1 hour.

Stairway to heaven

Saturday was an extremely memorable day, the kind of thing that I'll likely still remember when I'm 83 years old sitting in a retirement home somewhere. As usual, I was a little later getting started on the ride to O'Reilly's than I'd planned, but the 15 minutes was fairly easy to make up, most of it was gone by the time I reached Canungra (after riding through the beautiful gorge) and started the 900-metre climb. The views up here are great, but what I really came for was the walk to Stairway Falls with the Gold Coast Hiking group that I discovered on the Internet a couple of weeks ago.


They turned out to be a great group. Friendly, adventurous and supportive. The walk itself involved a descent into a valley to the Blue Pool, before a trek along the rushing Canungra Creek to the falls and back, and a total of 12 unbridged creek crossings. There were, of course, the obligatory leech attacks (which caused some rather interesting reactions from Louise, our "fearless" leader), and a few obligatory falls in the creek (one of which cost me a pair of sunglasses), but it was worth it in the end.


On the ride home I was left to reflect on the day, and realised just what this experience meant. I don't know if any of us would have been able to follow the "track" and make it to the falls individually, but collectively it could be done. Sometimes it's also nice to find people with whom these experiences can be shared, and this day really had everything. I plan to make this the first outing of many with this group. There's talk of a climb of Mt Cougal next month -- all I can say is "bring it on".

Fountain Foolery after the Fun Match

You can biggify Hank's picture - he's really very cool about being in the pool!
I had to do obedience performances last Sunday in Hayward. I'm not wild about these things, but this Fun Match was held in a pretty area of the college campus there. When most of the classes were over, a few of us doggies ambled around searching for some fun and look what we found! A cooling-off place with sprinklers! Wish I'd had my kong, but it was Hank, the bulldog, who showed me this place - a few other pups came and joined us, but we didn't get their pictures. Hank is very advanced - in obedience that is. His mom, Jean Marie, is very cool.See ya 'round!

Frostflowers

White crownbeard - Verbesina virginica
Before I knew the real name of these plants I called them Ice Plants. I'm a flower nut but mostly a springtime flower nut, so I haven't studied fall flowers very much.
They have small, somewhat coarse white flowers. There's a lot more leaf than flower to them, so sometimes they suffer from the "it's just a weed" syndrome.
It seems like half the time I ask wildflower experts the name of something, it turns out to be beneath their notice, and they'll say "I don't know, it's just a weed!"
Anyway, this plant is called White Crownbeard, frostflower, or frostweed. Here's a site that shows them in bloom.
The most interesting thing about these plants to me is what happens after the flowers are gone. The first time I saw it, I wondered if loose cotton had somehow blown into the edges of the yard.

It only happens after a really hard freeze. Although the plant remnants look like dry sticks by the time it freezes, they somehow produce all this ice. One website I visited said that they are drawing the water from the ground.
The first time it happens is the most dramatic, and forms the most ice, but it'll happen again several more times when we go through cycles of warming up and then freezing again.
So what makes it happen with this plant, but not with others? I have no idea.
After I wrote the above, I searched a little more on Google and found this page that explains more about the phenomenon. (And has lots better pictures than mine!) The frost from plants he found was very thin. On the plants here it varies, but is usually thicker.

Bicycle Trails Calendar

I have published my first calendar. The calendar features photos I have taken while riding my bicycles around the country. Contact me if you are interested in ordering one.

Adjusting to colder water and weather

Lake Michigan's surface water near Chicago dropped about 10 degrees over the past week. This morning's 19-knot winds beckoned, but the water temperatures whispered, "Bring your neoprene caps and poagies."

We suppose some people don't hear things like that.

After weeks of warm water, we were somewhat sad to find the lake back in the mid-50s. But hey, this is Chicago. And besides, our west coast friends consider temperatures like these normal.

We surfed and played a bit, then tried to convince one of the denizens of the doggie beach that we weren't deep sea aliens come to steal his tennis balls.

It's important, we figure, to get out on the water as the temperatures drop to soften the shock of winter's arrival. Poagies and all.