24/03 A witch once laid the Doom of Daffodils upon us, that everywhere we would ever call home would be haunted by that Accursed Yellow. And now it is spring and the Doom is upon us: daffodils in the gardens, the forest, the swamps, lining the driveway taunting us as we escape and beckoning to us as we return. We cut them by the hundreds, anonymously donate them to community events, and run away quietly, before the daffodils can hear us.

The Enormous Feathery Accountant says: don't trust the daffodils.

23/03 Creeping woodsorrel in the dome. Pretty much every greenhouse has it. We thought we'd been lucky so far - we received a plant with a woodsorrel stowaway and immediately fed the woodsorrel to the chickens, but alas, here it is, springing up from the ground itself.

Reasons every greenhouse gets creeping woodsorrel eventually, and can't eliminate it:

I don't know what kind of Ineffable Device the creeping woodsorrel infesting every greenhouse in the world is intent on forming, but our dome is part of it now.

22/03 Behold, the titanic struggle between the Last and Best Descendant of the Dinosaurs, and A Particularly Oburate Single Blade of Grass.

21/03 We are very excited about this year's first citrus bud, on one of the Trifeola (Poncirus trifoliata and Minneola tangelo hybrid) trees!

In entirely unrelated news, Lazy Evaluation Ranch is excited to announce our new sponsor, the Institute of Signs and Portents! Big thanks to them for making this Moment of Culture possible. Today's Very Cultural Selection is this line spoken by Vladimir from the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot:

20/03 It's spring! The kiwi vines are awake!

Last year we ordered some kiwi vines to help control temperature in the dome. They'll climb up the south side of the dome and offer some partial leafy shade in summer, but let the sun in during winter when they've dropped their leaves.

Kiwis have male vines (which create pollen) and female vines (which bear fruit). We ordered one male and five females, but somehow received five males and one female, so the kiwi vines are enacting some sort of Vegetal Reverse Harem Anime.

20-03 Enormous Feathery Accountant

The Blue Haired Girlfriend and I sometimes say that the Enormous Feathery Accountant is the most sensible of our three Accidental Roosters, which is true, but only in the way that "Mercury is the planet in our solar system that most resembles a 1989 Suzuki GS500E motorcycle" is true.

Still, the Enormous Feathery Accountant usually only crows when Something Is Wrong, and we usually go outside and try to Fix The Wrong Thing. Sample Wrong Things:

The Enormous Feathery Accountant was making a racket today, so I went out and removed some sawdust from the feeder, re-centered it, and patiently explained that there had been no recent major mathematical breakthroughs on the Nonexistence Of Other Roosters.

The Enormous Feathery Accountant continued to yell, so I gave up and headed back toward the house, shouting over my shoulder in the general direction of the henhouse that I was still not able to delete all juncos from the world, and could the Enormous Feathery Accountant please █████ ████████ █████████████ cram it?

So anyway, as I came out from behind the woodshed, I saw what the Enormous Feathery Account was yelling about: some nice young missionaries, who had for the first time in the six years we've been living here, braved the long steep dirt road to invite us to Easter. Oops.

18-03 The weed situation in the geodesic greenhouse dome is totally reasonable. Evolution sends us so many very normal friends.

17-03-2024 Vulture.

The turkey vultures spend the winter in Venezuela, fly North along the mainland, and circle in groups above the shoreline. In the air they mostly lock their wings open and glide, not flap. So where the land ends they must circle at the water's edge and wait for the wind to be right to glide across to the islands in a group.

For months there have been no vultures, and then suddenly yesterday the wind opened their way home and the island's whole population is here, all at once. It's like someone found a giant knife switch labeled "Vultures" in a cave and shoved it to "on" with a satisfying "KA-VULTURE" sound.

The house is perched atop a stony ridge. The sun falls on the bare dark glacier-scraped slope behind the house and warms the stone, and from the warm stone a column of warm air rises. The vultures enter this invisible pillar of air and circle around its edges, upwards, upwards, around and above the house on ink-dark wings that glow where the sunlight comes through the edges of the feathers.

Sometimes they leave this air-column and glide over to the next stone ridge, the next invisible column of air, and the next beyond it, the next beyond that. Watching the vultures trace out the locations of the pillars, you get a sense of a whole vast structure of warmth and wind, like some grand invisible temple rising hundreds of meters into the bright brazen sky.

It's always here, I think, the huge columns, the invisible temple the glaciers built, made of air and light. But I can only see its structure when the vultures trace it out for me, like architectural drawings. Glad someone found the KA-VULTURE switch this year.

12/05/2023 I have news so momentous that it can only be shared via the Destiel meme. The Forms Must Be Observed.

Dijon's Grainy's favourite snoozing spot is in the tray full of tachibana seedlings. She enjoys watering time, climbing things, eating pine borer beetles bigger than she is, and geodesic polyhedra.

09/05/2023 We are normal, nonhazardous chickens. You can trust us around your delicious succulent fingers.

08/05/2023 Generally speaking, I enjoy how otherworldly the dome is. The way the skin of the dome focusses sound so your own footfalls come to you from a meter or two away from you unless you stand in the exact center. The way the dome bends wind around itself, so you can stand in motionless air and watch all the trees bow away from you. The iridescence of condensation on its skin.

However, this week the dome has decided the otherworld it wants to be is Venus. We've hit fifty degrees twice.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend, the Bearer of the Jabberwock Tattoo (staying with us and helping out over the summer), and I have been taking turns opening all the dome doors for ventilation and standing guard outside it to keep hungry chickens out.

Here is an experience you can have in the Imitation Venus Dome: Human skin uses several different ion channels to detect heat. If the air is 36 degrees, TRPV4 wakes up and sounds off like "yeah, it's kinda warm here." If it gets warmer, TRPV4 just gets louder. Same nerve signal, but more and more of it.

But at around 45 degrees, a new challenger appears. TRPA1 wakes up and sounds off, and it's Different. This is the channel fooled into going off by the capsaicin in hot peppers, put to its intended use at last. If, like me, you have mostly lived in pleasantly ocean-cooled climates, this is a New Experience. It's warm... it's warmer ... it's even warmer ... it's ẅ̷͉̟̰́͜a̸̯̥̰̭̘̭̝̺̯̿̓̀̒͂̊̐ȓ̷͎̓͐̋̽̕ṁ̵̥͇͖̝̱̳̻̊̀͋̂̓́̊̏̂͆̆͗͌.

06/05/2023 Caterpillar making Nonstandard Life Choices.

Marmara arbutiella is a tiny caterpillar that lives inside arbutus leaves. It leaves the waxy top and bottom layer of the leaf intact for shelter and eats a tunnel through the juicy middle layer, writing a gleaming silvery spiral into the flesh of the leaf.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend found this Caterpillar of Nonstandard Life Choices living in a salal leaf instead of an arbutus lead. These eccentrics turn up occasionally in a small area that includes our island.

We know the salal-dwellers are Marmara arbutiella, because someone sent a salal leaf with a caterpillar in it to Charley Eiseman (see @lies's Charley Eiseman Appreciation Post) and he got it DNA barcoded.

But nobody has observed a salal-dweller outside the leaf. We don't know if it has morphological differences from the arbutus-dwellers as an adult moth, like maybe a new subspecies is starting to branch off here.

So we picked the leaf and put it in a jar with a little moss to hold moisture. Hopefully there's still a Caterpillar of Nonstandard Life Choices in it, and the caterpillar will crawl out of the leaf, make a cocoon, and emerge into an adult we can send to Charley Eiseman.

The cocoon is pretty exciting too, described in the poetic words of Wagner, Loose, Fitzgerald, De Benedictis, and Davis:

I, for one, am delighted at the prospect of a cocoon containing a moth nobody has ever seen, festively garlanded in silk-wrapped bug farts.

nominative determinism

05/05/2023 It seemed like a good idea at the time.

When we have chicks, we give them descriptive nicknames based on their transient baby spots and stripes. As they grow up, they earn real names based on their devotion to a particular teaching of the mystic arts of Galline Derangement.

One of the batch of chicks eight months ago was yellow, except for a white face and black marks around the eyes. She looked like she was wearing clown makeup.

I didn't want to nickname her "Clown" or "Mime." I wanted to Be Clever About It. So her hatchling nickname became "Homestuck" because I was on tumblr a decade ago when everyone was posting fanart of Homestuck characters with clown makeup.

Today the chickens were making a terrible racket in the henhouse, and I ran out to investigate, and discovered that one of the hens had gotten inside the henhouse wall somehow and couldn't get out.

She was, uh, you know. She was... stuck. In her ... home. Guess who it was. Guess.

I got my arm into the wall and tried to support her, which calmed her. I tried lifting her up and out, but there was a crossbeam in the way. I tried guiding her downwards, but she panicked and kicked her feet the instant I wasn't holding her up.

After half an hour of trying to manually thread individual chicken atoms (all of which were screaming) between the wood atoms of the wall, I went to fetch a hacksaw. When I returned, she was standing innocently on the floor of the henhouse, eating a moth she apparently found in the wall.

As she apparently took her hatchling name as a suggestion, she gets to keep it. Presenting the newly christened Homestuck Q. Clipping-Error the Chicken.

04/05/2023 The Blue Haired Girlfriend spotted a couple morels while we were walking down to the mailbox. Delicious! We've never seen morels here before.