Summer Solstice

Yesterday was the day we mark as having the longest amount of daylight for the whole year. This past week I have been afflicted with a bit of insomnia and only seem to be able to get five hours of sleep at best each night. I woke at 3:50 am yesterday, well before that long period of light began. But the insomnia did allow me to enjoy every drop of sunshine the day offered. I didn't miss a thing. It was quite refreshing to see it only a little dusky at 9:00 pm, the way it will be at 5:00 pm come winter. But that's still a long way off and, though the days will shorten, they'll only lack a minute or so of daylight each time.

May, 2009

Well here we are in June already and the days are starting to heat up and get humid as they usually do this time of year. It was May that proved more unpredictable. In the course of 31 days, we saw highs in the fifties, highs in the eighties, heavy rain, sunny days and high winds. One day, 70 to 90 mph straight-line winds tore through southwest Missouri knocking over trees and downing electrical lines. I lost about a 70 foot section of privacy fence with two 4X4 posts broken off at ground level and the rest uprooted concrete and all. It fell over onto my neighbor's peonies. My dog was the only one excited about it since it meant she could terrorize two backyards for a few days. Looking forward to warm summer days and cool summer evenings this month.

All Lit Up

Earlier this week, we had a round of thunderstorms pass through during the early morning hours. I remember waking up just before 4am and hearing the sound of thunder nearby. I lazily considered getting up to unplug my computer but could not convince my body to follow through.

At 4:08am, I bolted out of bed as lightning either struck the house or something close to it. In rapid succession, I heard the zizzer, opened my eyes to see all the lights in the house flash on then off again and heard a clap of thunder that seemed loud enough to be something falling on my roof.

Lightning has made the phones ring before and one time, blue sparks connected my fingers to the truck door handle I was reaching for just before a bolt hit a tree about fifty yards from me, but this was the first time the electricity was close enough or potent enough to turn on lights that had been physically turned off.

I would have thought it was my imagination if it were not for a call from a neighbor who said they were worried because my house was completely lit up for a brief second during the height of the storm.

Personally, lightning scares me. I enjoy watching thunderstorms and am in awe of the power they can unleash but I have had a few close brushes with lightning that have gone beyond coincidence.

In this case, no damage was done. No major appliances nor the computers were fried. The lights went back off and the storm moved on. Only the eeriness of what had happened lingered.

Corn Cobs

The tailless squirrel returned this weekend. I hadn't seen him in a few weeks and wondered what had become of him. He wandered into the yard hopping like a rabbit and headed for my wildlife feeding area. I keep a couple of bird feeders there and pour some seed on the ground for the doves as well as some fruit for the mockingbirds. I also drop a few ears of hard corn, the kind grown as silage and made for squirrels.

The tailless one headed straight for one of those ears, picked it up in his front paws and began munching on it the same as a human would, grasping it firmly and working his way from one end of the ear to the other. All he lacked was butter and salt. After a while, he decided it would taste better if eaten closer to his own home, so he picked up the ear and headed across the street with it, although with a bit of difficulty as he had not calculated the full weight of his quarry.

But he finally did manage to make it to the neighbor's yard and I lost sight of him. Now I wonder what my neighbors will think when they find an empty corn cob tossed carelessly in the yard, and which one will get the blame for leaving it there.

Morels

I had my first encounter with a morel mushroom last weekend. I had never seen one before except in pictures so I was excited, especially since the finds are rare. I wrote about the experience on freshare.net and you can read that article here: The Morel of the Story.

What was surprising to me was that morels didn't taste as exotic as I expected. I thought I would discover a musky, woodsy kind of flavor but what I got was a mushroom so mild it barely tasted like a mushroom at all. I mean, it was good and I ate my share but I expected something, I don't know, maybe stronger in flavor? Something that would linger on my taste buds.

But don't read this as total disappointment. I'll be back after the oddly interesting little fungi same time next year.

Spring

Earlier this week I mowed the lawn for the first time this season. The mower was a little cranky after being made to sit quietly all winter in a cold storage shed but it was finally convinced to start. At this early juncture, my lawn is mostly comprised of tufts of grass in a sea of dead brown material and an assortment of weeds. But all of it needs a weekly trim regardless of affiliation.

The reward in these early days of spring is the sweet fragrance of hyacinths that permeates my backyard and entertains my nose if I as much as glance in their direction. They don't stay around nearly long enough but their scent is a clear message that the growing season has begun.

Ping-o-Matic Won't Ping

I have tried using a free service called Ping-o-Matic to send out pings to a raft of directories anytime I update one of my blogs. I know the key word here is that it's free and I shouldn't complain, but here it comes anyway. The service is extremely unreliable. In my experience, about 95% of the time, Ping-o-Matic takes a few minutes to spin its wheels, jams up, then blames the mess on me by delivering an error message that says "Slow Down Cowboy" and tells me that my last ping was only a few minutes ago. Really? Who pinged you guys over at Ping-o-Matic? I didn't, neither did any automatic system on my blogs. So don't you really mean to send me an error message that says, "Oops, our site is down ... again."

To get your pings out quickly and reliably, try Oddpath's service. It's also free. But unlike Ping-o-Matic, Oddpath really does work.

Toughest Month

Blame it on the economy, blame it on a business decision that did not work out quite as planned. Blame it on me. My lease was up at the end of February and I decided there was no point in renewing. It feels like the first step in a dismantling of my business. The end of a long era in my life.

No rescue for me, I'm sure. I'll not expect anyone to ride up and hand me some bailout money. It's a small business, after all, one of many.

But I really don't want that anyway. Just want my office back. Sure, I can work quite comfortably from my home office, a study I built a long time ago and there is the elimination of a long commute to Springfield and back.

But I miss the place. More for what it represented than for what it really was. The office was a stage where ideas were bantered and discussed, many pitched out with the trash but a few really good ones that stuck. And it was a place to have a cup of coffee, share thoughts, fret, converse, laugh, worry, the range of human emotions.

It was only a place, but it was my place. My place in the world.

Songs of Spring

The return of tree frogs is a nice welcoming song to announce that spring is near. I heard peepers the first time this year a couple of weeks ago during my evening walk. They were faint, but discernible in the distance.

Late last week when the weather was warm, it was as if invitations had been sent out. Thursday night, I heard them closer to the road I was walking, concentrated on a few trees in a low spot. Friday night there were more. A lot more. This time they were huddled up in the trees surrounding a field near my house conducting a symphony to orchestrate the arrival of spring.

Officially, the equinox will not occur for another month or so, but don't tell that to the peepers. I am planning to attend several more of their concerts this month.

freshare Podcasts

I decided to start a podcast series on the freshare site and actually produced the first one in late December. Click the program title to listen to that installment: freshare Ozarks Outdoors podcast.

The plan was to create a new podcast every week following a format of introducing listeners to some of our top stories before a segue into the feature: an interview with someone who has close ties to the Ozarks outdoors.

But the format proved to be an awful lot of work to undertake on a weekly basis for a company our size and with a lot already on our plates. Still, I think podcasts are a great tool to reach a new and different audience, and I do like the idea of introducing some very interesting folks to our listeners. Eventually, we might be able to accomplish the weekly interviews but that would be after we clear some of the other items we have going like the t-shirt site, design work, and promting that site, the fresharestore.

So, I think I will take some middle ground and use a format that includes a brief summary of some of the top stories on freshare, a commercial (to promote the store), and a feature that could include an interview but might be a story, or an outdoors related poem or a description of some new photos added to the freshare gallery. I think this format will ease the pressure of researching, interviewing, cutting and editing tape and producing an extended piece every week. Plus, it will mix things up a little so the podcast doesn't get stale.

That said, I think I'll start in on this week's installment.

Odd Backyard Critters

I'm beginning to wonder if we have some mutations in the animal gene pool around my house. Last Spring, a white dove settled in for a meal of birdseed under one of my feeders. Now, a tailless squirrel and and his stubby-tailed cousin are frequenting the feeders.

By the way they move, it seems both squirrels must have been born without the trademark bushy tails average squirrels sport. Neither seems hampered by balance issues unless trying some quirky move so it makes me think the little guys adapted at an early age.

The tailless guy has the oddest appearance at first glance and it makes you wonder if it's a rat you see streaking across the front lawn. His cousin has a bushy tail, it's just that the thing is very short. Abnormally so.

I have a photo of the white dove, but I have yet to capture an image of the squirrels.

I Resolve

I'm usually not much of one for New Year's resolutions and here is my only one for 2009: I plan to write more. Throughout last year, all my writing appeared only on my Ozarks outdoors website, freshare.net, and on a few article sites. But I have missed blogging and resolve to do more of that in 2009. Here, on Amblin Cafe and for a soon to be developed outdoors blog on freshare.

If you check this blog and Amblin, I'll save you a trip today because the same post you are reading appears on Amblin, too.