Over the years we’ve spent several months of March in Myrtle Beach, which is when the rhododendrons bloom. Or do they? I fully expected to see bushes covered in pink flowers when we arrived a little more than three weeks ago, but the bushes below our balcony were green and stayed stubbornly so.
But a week can make a difference. Even what-a-difference.
How it started (Mar 23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How it’s going (Mar 30)
Last week we had pollen. This week we have yellow traffic lights in a yellow school bus’s windows. Will we get the three-peat? That is, a continuation of the entirely coincidental and totally meaningless week-over-week examples of things yellow? Will we find a yellow face? On a bird? IN A REFLECTION?
Likely not, but stay tuned.
Standing outside the tub, I turn the water on. I adjust the single-lever faucet off dead centre. I wait for hot/cold feedback. I adjust again. I wait again. I realize I will have to wait an unknown period since this is the first time using this shower and its sensitivity to adjustment is likewise unknown.
I finally determine the macro faucet placement to produce hot water, not cold. I adjust the micro placement to produce tolerably hot water, not scalding. I wait for tolerable/scalding feedback. I adjust again. I wait again.
I determine that the feedback delay and/or responsiveness likely exceed my patience, so I will have to settle for close enough. I pull up the shower diverter valve.
Ack!
Spend enough time being photographed and you learn to ignore the cameras. Movie actors, of course, must seem to ignore them when working, but professional golfers must really ignore them, even as every swing and facial expression is captured and transmitted to the watching crowds. The same applies to professional curlers, although the crowds are smaller.
Large birds that frequent accessible swamps and estuaries must be made of the same impervious stuff as professional athletes. If I move slowly, stand back, and let the zoom do the work, these birds often reward me by ignoring my presence. In this busy state park, have they learned to ignore people with cameras? Maybe. People in general? More likely.
It’s yellow. It’s fine. It’s everywhere, most obviously on dark cars and on windshields.
But it really is everywhere. It’s on white plastic handrails, hard to see but obvious to the touch.
It’s ground into wooden stairs.
It’s piled up in tiny drifts along the ridges of a metal threshold.
It catches on any surface irregularities in concrete sidewalks and asphalt roads.
It forms a scummy layer on still bodies of water.
It’s throughout my breathing apparatus, coating my bronchial passages and the inside of my nose. No photos available, you’ll be glad to know.
*It* is pine pollen and the experts on allergies say that it is not responsible for the coughing and sneezing that enliven spring in Myrtle Beach, notwithstanding what the locals say. Pine pollen, it turns out, is too big to trigger true allergic reactions: that requires smaller particles.
Pine pollen grains can be 60 to 100 micrometers in diameter.
Pine pollen is large compared to other pollen grains
(typical pollen grain size is approximately 10 micrometers).
– The Asthma Center
Are you finding 60 to 100 micrometers hard to visualize, or is it just me?
We’re not making a watch or an electronic microscope here, so for our purposes it’s close enough to say that an individual pine-pollen grain is about the thickness of a human hair, or about twice the size of the smallest thing we can see.
The experts are admirably non-judgmental about pollen, even philosophical.
Pollen is the male part of a plant’s life.
It isn’t good or bad.
It’s just there, in great volume, in the spring.Pollen is a part of life.
It’s the trees’ investment in the future.
It also clearly shows that spring is here.
Smile as you sneeze — life is good.
In case you want to make your own investment in the future, consider this: Just being seen can be enough to attract all the blame.
Big, they’re not. Active, they are.
The downy woodpeckers in Myrtle Beach are much like the ones I see at home, although the second-floor balcony gives me a better vantage point here.
This little guy spent a fair bit of time checking out a hole in the tree trunk so I had lots of time to get photos. Most of them had him in motion faster than my shutter speed . . .
. . . or with his head still, but buried in said hole.
Just one showed him in a rare moment of rest with his head visible. Just one is all I need.
It’s a mystery: rows of trees laid out in neat grids in places that seem ideally unsuited to orchards. Dry places. Grit-instead-of-soil-underfoot places. And yet, rows and rows and rows (and rows) of trees that look a lot like fruit trees. Here’s a tiny sample, caught in passing at 75 mph.
We’ve seen these unmarked fields in southern Arizona and Texas. They can’t be fruit trees, can they? Maybe they’re nuts. Maybe I’m going nuts. This, right here, is exactly why we need more interpretive signs along highways. Enquiring minds want to know.
Not the bad-actor kind, the nature kind. Our rented apartment adjacents (why *isn’t* that a word?) a golf course. Moat-like, a small ditch separates said golf course from an otherwise-adjacent townhouse development.
Water means animals. Not always close, but animals.
Well, tea-residue face, I guess.
It’s clearly a face, but for me it’s the first such face-by-pareidolia not triggered by eyes. I wrote that sentence a few ways to avoid the tricky question of the adjectival form of pareidolia. Pareidolic? Pareidoliac? The former sounds like parabolic, the latter evokes maniac. Neither sounds quite right, although at least the latter would offer an obvious theme song.
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
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Posted: 2025 Mar 28
