Yesterday (May 9, 2020), Sandy and I went up to Lake Manganese, which is just outside of Copper Harbor (and about 50 miles north-northeast of our house). We were mainly going up there to find the remains of the former manganese mine[1]. The last stretch was a two-track trail that I didn’t want to drive my car over, so we walked in. Once we got close to our destination, there was a series of cliffs bordering the trail, mostly going through an outcropping of Copper Harbor Conglomerate[2]. Here is one stretch of the cliff, with Sandy at the base of it for scale:
Back on October 1, 2019, I decided to take some pictures of the ragweed that grows alongside our road. This particular enormous specimen was down at the base of the hill, and stood over three feet tall.
We got some significant snowfall at the end of February, but March 1, 2020 turned out to be pretty nice so I went out snowshoeing. Just behind the house, I found a spot where there had been a lot of frantic activity by small animals in the fresh snow.
On June 29, 2019, I happened to look at a patch of tall, unmowed grass at the edge of our yard and noticed that some of the “grass” had rather attractive blue flowers.
While the plants themselves looked pretty grasslike, the flowers are definitely not at all like the normal things you would see in a true grass:
Jade plants (Crassula ovata) make really nice houseplants. At least, they do really well in our house. They are also alarmingly easy to propagate. Just take a leaf or branch and stick it into a pot of soil, water it from time to time, and there you are. We have a bunch of them in the house[1]. Like this one:
So, last week, the girls and I were getting ready to go out for a walk, when Rosie suddenly screamed and threw away her mitten. It seems that Sam had tried to put on the mitten first herself, felt something in it that “felt weird and creepy”, took it off, and then gave it to her sister to wear. At any rate, by this point neither of them wanted to touch the mitten any more, so when we got back from our walk I decided to see what was inside that was making Sam call it the “Evil Mitten”.
My hands are too big to reach into their mittens, so I decided to just turn it inside out. Sam had said it felt “crunchy, and scratchy, and squishy”, which wasn’t much help telling me what to expect. The first thing I saw was a lot of crumbs that looked like crushed chicken feed, so as the mitten inverted I was brushing this into a wastebasket. Then, I felt something that felt different. Like animal fur. And I saw this, sticking out of a hole in the mitten lining:
We all know that insects have antennae, but the question is, what are they for, exactly? They are clearly sense organs, but what do they sense? And why are they so wildly variable, ranging from tiny little threads, to great plumose things?
Every year around mid-June, we get periods where it appears to be snowing again, even though the temperature is around 70 F or so. Like this, on June 28, 2019[1]:
It even blows and drifts kind of like snow.
We have a lot of strawberry plants growing on our property, even though we never planted them. This blossoming specimen was photographed on June 3, 2019, and you can see how it is a low growing plant growing around the bases of plants that will ultimately become a lot taller.
Houghton is always so beautiful in mid-June, when the hibiscus bloom. Like this beautiful Chinese Hibiscus
. . . and if any of you checked that link before going further, you might be thinking “wait juuuuuuuuust a minute here. That’s a tropical plant! Are you seriously suggesting that you can grow those in Houghton, of all places?