July 3 2022 - Summer Bugs

 

I assume that Millie ate something disagreeable for her at the July 1st party as she hasn't felt well the last two nights.  She had to go outside in the middle of the night, and I stood on the porch watching her.  An amazing firefly was out - it was making streaks in the night - like a tiny shooting star.  I'd never seen streaking fireflies before.  It got me considering how our summer is so active.  It is bug time.  There are great bugs, ok bugs, irritating bugs and terrible ones - that would be ticks.  And that's just a human view.  Plants must have a more extreme reaction to the bugs that take care of them vs the bugs that eat them.   I was watching the fly on the kitchen counter and there's all that foot rubbing that they do.  House flies taste with their feet, which are millions of times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue. House flies also generally stay within one mile of where they were born.  Darn! They keep coming back into the house. But house flies are small things,  just irritants.  I was thinking about all the bugs that are in cottage country.  That brought up  dock spiders.  There is a video of a gigantic dock spider being hand fed.  The spider's name is Larry.   It isn't "hand feeding" actually, but a stick is used to feed it a grasshopper, and then a fly on a stick, and then another.  And so on.  Larry likes to eat and it is bigger than the signal reflectors on the dock.  Here it is in its own video.   One becomes aware of how many bugs there are in cottage country.   There seem to be more of more varieties - horse flies (the biggest), deer flies, moose flies, mosquitoes everywhere.  Itchy!  That's one of the cottage country experiences.   So it seems to me that we are lucky in Niagara to have some insects and not a lot.  I'll take the Monarch butterfly in the front garden yesterday.  It was flying around the Milkweed plants.   If we had a true Carolinian climate here, there would be many more bugs and mosquitoes.  I read that the early settlers did a lot of clearing of the land to get rid of all the bugs.  It worked. Daylily season has started.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

June 30 2020 - Blue Skies

The song Blue Skies was composed in 1926 as an addition to the Rodgers and Hart musical Betsy. Although the show ran for only 39 performances, "Blue Skies" was an instant success, with audiences on opening night demanding 24 encores of the piece from star Belle Baker. During the final repetition, Ms. Baker forgot her lyrics, prompting Berlin to sing them from his seat in the front row.  According to Philip Furia and Michael Lasser, the song was added at the last minute, and it was thanks to a panicky phone call from vaudevillian Belle Baker to Berlin, who complained that the score lacked a ‘Belle Baker song.’ They also write: “Berlin resented the interpolation of songs by other composers into the score of his shows, but he must have been delighted at the chance to work one of his songs into a score by the young songwriting team who were already being compared to Gilbert and Sullivan.” Ella Fitzgerald's version is 3 minutes and 24 seconds.  So if Belle Baker sang the chorus 24 times without the introduction, perhaps it is somewhere between one and 2 minutes x 24.  Wouldn't that have been somewhere between a half to almost one hour of Blue Skies?  Now that was sheer joy and optimism in 1926 - when we look at the lyrics of the chorus, it is understandable. Blue skies, smilin' at me Nothin' but blues skies do I see Bluebirds singin' a song Nothin' but bluebirds all day long Never saw the sun shining so bright Never saw things looking so right Noticing the days hurryin' by When you're in love, my how they fly Blue days, all of them gone Nothin' but blue skies from now on Never saw the sun shining so bright Never saw things looking so right Noticing the days hurryin' by When you're in love, oh how they fly Blue days, all of them gone Nothin' but blue skies from now on You know your Maples now: here's an anatomically correct Sugar Maple on the Muskoka Chair.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://www.blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

We are berserk about the smallest things:  How to get rid of ants in your driveway. There are dozens of these articles on how to kill this nuisance.  Doesn't it fascinate you to see these mounds of brown and go up it to find out it is a swarm of ants. This happened in the garden a few weeks ago, and I wondered what brown plant that could be. These ants are Pavement Ants. They were studied on the International Space Station in 2014.  Pavement ants have visible grooves on their head and thorax, with a single pair of spines on the thorax alone. They do have stingers. Pavement ants get their name because the often nest under sidewalks, driveways, and building foundations. During the winter, pavement ants may nest inside structures near a heat source. A mound of displaced soil near a paved area is probably a sign of pavement ants. Very often they build their nests along sides of garages and houses, and parts of houses which are constructed on concrete slabs. They may enter homes and businesses through small openings windows and doors, basement walls, or concrete floors. During the winter months, they can be found indoors as they are forced to look for food and water. There are dozens of sites that headline their articles "facts, identification, profile" and conclude with extermination.  The supposed danger is that "they can contaminate human and pet food and can carry germs and disease" - they do come indoors. I don't see any articles about any injuries, illnesses or deaths due to pavement ants. Main.govindicates that the stinger is too weak to damage human skin. So it would seem that this is some socially accepted obsession with neatness on the driveway.  Imagine 19th or early 20th century farm and home owners worrying about ants on the sidewalk or in the drive.  It seems unlikely. So let us conclude with light-heartedness of the last day of school and Ant Jokes, given that's our interest today. Did you hear about the ant that won the Nobel Peace Prize? He was brill-ant.  Where did the ants go on a date? To the school dants. What kind of ants always admit when they’ve done something wrong? Penance.  What is the biggest ant in the world? An elephant. What do you call an ant who skips school? A truant. Where do ants go for a vacation? Frants. What do you get if you cross some ants with some tics? All kinds of antics. What do you call a 100-year old ant? An antique. The countdown to July 1st starts with this picture.

It is Time for the Outdoor Chairs

Wake Up on the Bright Side I wonder how many pictures of Muskoka Chairs there are in my photo collection.  I'll start to gather them into a poster collage. If we were in the North-Eastern U.S. we would call them Adirondack Chairs. Wikipedia redirects one from Muskoka to Adirondack for information about the chair.   However, it doesn't explain how the chair migrated to Muskoka and got 'renamed'.  Back to Adirondack, the chair was originated by Thomas Lee in 1903 while on vacation in Westport.  He offered the design to his friend, a carpenter in need of winter income. That explains the patent by Harry C. Bunnell rather than the originator, Thomas Lee.  The article says that Bunnell registered the patent without telling Lee, and that Lee was surprised, but then didn't mind. Muskoka Chair Company is in Port Carling (that's in Muskoka), dedicated to making these wonderful, iconic, outdoor chairs.