Shut down the Minneapolis trash burner
I am appealing to Twin Cities-area folks to sign a petition to the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners to have a definitive shutdown date for the trash burner in Downtown Minneapolis, called HERC, as central to its zero waste plan.
Enchanted Highway & Yellowstone National Park filmstrip
A new filmstrip video shows photography by me and my wife of our 2017 vacation, which included visits to the Enchanted Highway of metal sculptures in North Dakota and Yellowstone National Park.
December: a poem in progress
The title to this blog entry refers to both an actual poem I’m working on and the general state of my mind and heart at this time. I’ve had some recent professional wins that I haven’t done any or much flogging on the Internet for because this past month I’ve had deaths in my family that I needed to mourn and participate in grieving rituals for.
Homemade food & drink love
For a person who grew up not growing anything in a garden or doing any homemaking crafts like canning, I’ve grown to make a lot of homemade love (apologies to the late J. California Cooper) in food and drink.
A double rainbow for MN POC Pride
I was a performer on the “Black Magic on the River” boat cruise held by MN POC Pride. As I was boarding the Mississippi River boat, I had the fortune to see a double rainbow at the dock.
The elegy: a sestina
In a poetry class I’m taking, the teacher educated us on the sestina, a very demanding poetic form with rules for word repetition for specific lines. I used the homework assignment to write a sestina to create my promised elegy to loss of friendship and friends.
A forthcoming elegy for lost friends
Last August, I posted a goodbye poem/letter breaking up with a friend who had hurt me profoundly years ago. Tonight, I found out that she had died.
Arts @ MIA filmstrip
I’m having more fun with the simple video editor that comes with my laptop, another result of which is a filmstrip video of photos I took last year at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA).
Sculpture garden filmstrip
Creating a filmstrip-style video of the photos I took of a heron was so easy that I’ve done it again, this time of the pictures I took of the Harrison Sculpture Garden at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.
Flowers in the arboretum
My spouse and I took our first trip to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum since The Before Times recently. At a native wildflower garden, we encountered a yellow lady’s slipper and a very-late-blooming white trillium.
A little nature filmstrip
My spouse and I have started doing the mile-long walk around Wirth Lake in a park shared by the City of Minneapolis and suburb Golden Valley once a week to try to shed some pandemic pounds. At the start of one of our walks, we lucked out on this water bird sighting.
A black-ish iris blooms
The photo on the left is a picture of iris variety “Before the Storm” in bloom in my yard from a few years ago. The iris on the right is called “Midnight Oil”; I took this picture of it blooming only a few weeks ago.
Wildlife in the urban garden
I’ve written in a previous blog how much I love dragonflies. This year, I caught a great photo of a similar brown dragonfly sitting on a stake I’ve used to mark where I planted some stonecrop that I moved from my shady front yard to the full sun of my backyard.
Native garden beauties
Two wildflower plants native to this part of the world have bloomed in my garden: wild geranium and Canada violet.
Black squirrel in Nebraska
In the Before Times, I recorded this video of a jet-black squirrel in the parking lot of a senior community in Lincoln, Nebraska.
White squirrel in the ’burbs
On the way to a curbside giveaway in a Minneapolis suburb, I saw a white squirrel among a group of ducks. I pulled over, got out my smartphone and tried to creep up on the squirrel to take a video.
Rainbow goddesses rising
Iris is the goddess of the rainbow, and she lends her name to a family of flowers prized for their colorful beauty.
Violet of a different color
One of the violets of a color other than purple that I collected and planted last year has bloomed. It’s mostly white with a light blue tint on the inside of its petals. This is my first success in adding color diversity to my front yard violet ground cover.
More early bloomers
There’s more early bloomers happening in my garden, including grape hyacinths and violets.
A native wildflower blooms
The latest bloom from my garden is the native wildflower hepatica.