Budbreak

It must have happened some time between Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday morning I took the steeper route up Ballaine Road and the hillsides didn't look any different from their typical winter gray-blue under overcast skies. Later the skies cleared and I first noticed it heading home after work--I looked up and saw Ester Dome coated bright velvet green in the evening sun. Maybe it happened after the sun broke through the clouds, or perhaps even Tuesday evening in the lingering heat of what had felt like a summer day.

It seems the set design of spring is the last component to the ongoing wood frog opera, waterfowl airshow, songbird recital, mosquito cotillion and fly jamboree. We wait so long for this--the mild air, the greenery, the explosion of life, and I sometimes forget that it will be over in a few short weeks. Right now I want to enjoy my front row seat to the best show in town.

it's like a stray dog, a facial tic...

it's back. My May 12 posting reappeared on my dashboard again. So that everyone will think I'm crazy to say it had disappeared.

C'mon, who's behind this?

photo credit: worldwide hippies

Frackballed: Ai WeiWei and Me

So yesterday I posted the following entry:
So You're Moving to Alaska--Good for You!: What. The. Frack.
May 12, 2011 ... Frack. The oil companies have the world by the balls. They are whining about Congress raising their taxes. They say if we want our gas cheap ...
alaskaorbust-diane.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-frack.html

And it disappeared.

I had a picture of the evil cabal of generals and world leaders from the 1963 movie "Dr. Strangelove" as a stand-in for my rant on the so-called "arctic summit" going on right now in Greenland, in which I said something like I guarantee that Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney and the other heavies will be sitting around playing monopoly with the arctic with their little plastic boats and oil derricks and stuff.

I called the Alaskan Permanent Fund Dividend "crack ho oil welfare shut-up money" designed to mollify the residents of this state with a little crumb so they can go buy a snowmachine and be complacent, if not happy.

I talked about fracking, which basically wastes precious water to extract deep, hard to access deposits of fossil fuel by fracturing rock and poisons the water to boot.

I said the oil industry is a dirty business that poisons the world in order to make its fatcat selves rich, rich RICH!

And when I went back to my blog site I got this:

Page not found
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bX-v8095m
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etc etc

I'm not what you'd call the paranoid type, but

What the frack indeed.

And if I'm justified in my paranoia, hey, I'm just a little fish in this big ol bowl, but if the powers that be want to skewer me, I can't stop ya. And I'm not afraid of you either.

"Wood Frogs--Oh Boy!"

That's a quote from my friend Jim Harris, a naturalist and videographer, when we last spoke about hunting for wood frogs back when I was living in the Chicago area.

Wood frogs are rather rare in Illinois; in interior Alaska they are still pretty abundant, and I heard the first wood frog of this spring May 5, a lone frog calling from Simon's small pond in the black spruce bog just west of our cabin.

What do they sound like? Kind of like a quack-quack-quack or a tiny little car engine trying to start. I shot some video of their chorusing last year on May 15, 2010 from the same pond. Turn your sound up, it's pretty faint!
wood frog chorus

Will there be more wood frogs a-calling soon? I hope so, last year they were quite loud at sunset and seemed to be in all the ditches and nooks and crannies around our neighborhood.

photo from Forest Preserves of the Kankakee River Valley, Kankakee, Illinois