Cactus!

This is a sign of global warming, or the extreme drought we're having, but Youngest Kid and I found a cactus growing in the local park, along the margins of the soccer field. It looks like a prickly pear to me, though it doesn't have any fruit on it at the moment.

Drought seems to be becoming a regular event here in North Carolina. My prayers go out to the people in Greece who are having awful wildfires, because of the drought there. My wife's relatives in Australia are also facing drought.

My in-laws, traveling back to South Carolina, had to a detour around a wild fire there.

Invasive species, and losing our hemlocks

We are losing all of our hemlock trees in the Appalachians to an invasive insect. It was accidentally introduced in 1920, but the cold winters apparently kept it out of the high elevations until now.

The poster in my freshman dorm room was a wonderful Sierra Club poster of an Eliot Porter photo of hemlock trees.

I think we need to take the kids to the mountains to see them before they are gone. This is horrible and sad.

There is No "I" in "Ant"

We have been facing an invasion of our kitchen by little black ants (some people here call them "sugar ants") because of the dry weather, I think. It is interesting to see how determined they are. For some reason, we dont' seem to get the really creepy insects that our next door neighbor gets: leopard crickets (I think that's what they are called), black widow spiders, etc. Although I am certain there must be brown recluse spiders up in our attic, in all our stuff up there, I haven't actually seen one. I guess they are too reclusive. Or maybe it's just my anxiety telling me stuff.

We have had flying squirrels in the attic before, which are not as big as my childhood exposure to "Rocky and Bullwinkle" led me to expect.

Finally, a little rain

We are finally getting some rain here, though only a bit. We are in a "severe drought" according to the US Drought Monitor site.