Beltane Sumi-e Moon
Of course, one of the things I forgot to mention about my brief, successful excursion into small engine repair is this. Now I can mow the fuel. That clogged carburetor had given me a pass for a week or so until I decided to tackle it myself. Mowing the fuel is much different from mowing a yard. The purpose has little to do with aesthetics or neighbor pleasing. The fines, as the fire experts call them, are grasses and flowers that, when dry, serve as a fuse so that ground fires can travel from place to place.
That’s why the 10 foot rule on limbing trees. All limbs must be at least 10 feet off the ground when there are fines because flames can leap from ground to tree otherwise. There are also ladder fuels like shrubs and young trees which can ignite from the fines and carry the fire up, like a ladder, to the higher branches of the conifers. Reduce (mow) fines, cut down ladder fuel and limb trees. After creating spaces among and between trees, these are the usual annual chores to make a property as fire resistant as possible. They also include cleaning gutters. Fire mitigation in the WUI is never done. Until, that is, a big fire. Then you can wait a while to return to fire mitigation.
One thing it took moving to the mountains to learn: I’m allergic to lodgepole pine pollen. I could have done without revealing this part of myself. It’s a couple of weeks of fine yellow grime on table tops, windows, cars, window sills, all for sex and we’re forced to participate. Well, my body fights back. Ah, choo!
In climate change news the 416 fire outside Durango has claimed part of the itinerary for the Tom, Mark, Paul and me trip. We were going to ride on the Durango/Silverton Narrow Gauge railroad. Nope. Closed through the time we’ll be there due to fire risk. We may hit Four Corners and Mesa Verde and the hot springs instead. The area is full of interesting bits.
Went to a talk at Beth Evergreen last night on linguistics. Elizabeth Moore, an administrative assistant on our staff, is a very smart woman. She majored in linguistics and offered a crash course. A lot I didn’t know. She gave a quick overview of a very complicated discipline, explaining its fundamental disciplines like phonology, pragmatics, syntactics, morphology and its more esoteric branches like neurolinguistics and cognitive linguistics, graphetics and philology.
After sledging and searing the meat and softening the vegetables in the fat, I put a three or four pound hunk of chuck roast in the slow cooker along with potatoes, carrots, onions and celery. It cooked all day, coming out fork tender. An easy meal. Jon and the kids got stuck in traffic so they ate later.
A beautiful day in the neighborhood yesterday. Blue sky. White clouds. Mountains covered with the many shades of green possible after a week of good rain. Maxwell Creek and Bear Creek headed to the Gulf with lots of energy. Lucky we live in the Rockies.
