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
Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog So You're Moving to Alaska--Good for You! does not exist.

Blogger is currently unavailable
Blogger is unavailable right now. We apologize for this interruption in service.
Please visit Blogger Status for additional details.


We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.
When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:
• Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
• Provide the following error code and additional information.


bX-ae5cd4
bX-wmxfuv
bX-ut7aaw
bX-wmxfuv
bX-v8095m
bX-4s41cn
bX-l0md13

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

The Cycle

"The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold. Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.
They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts
burning in circles like birthday candles,

for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living."

Excerpt from poem "Mother" by Ted Kooser


April 17:

April 18:

April 23:

April 24:

April 27:

We interrupt this posting

To tell you that YAHOO is not fit to dredge the bottom of my outhouse.

The sandhill cranes have managed to return to the neighborhood, right on time. Of course they have been at it for NINE MILLION YEARS.

We humans kid ourselves that this little house of cards we call civilization runs like clockwork--that is, until the day we cannot access our Yahoo mail account. Instead we get:

Ouch!
The error, LaunchEmptyResponse, occurred when trying to connect to Yahoo! Mail.

To retry Yahoo! Mail... To proceed to Yahoo! Mail Classic...

This error might be temporary.

Temporary Schmemporary.

Yahoo: Migrate, adapt, or better yet, just go extinct.

It's ON!!!

2 minutes ago---

While out in the still sunlit yard just after 9 PM gathering kindling for tonight's fire I heard what I thought was an out-of-tune trumpet blasting away just beyond the trees lining O'Brien Street. I stood and watched a big white winged creature make a sharp left turn out over the musher's field. A trumpter swan!!!! The birds are returning!!! The ponds have yet to thaw, but we're on our way!!