Friday, 27 May 2022
You would not know to look at the photo above but I raked leaves a couple of days ago. When the mango tree that hangs over my yard starts shedding, it really sheds.
I try to be diligent about it and rake them at least once a week, usually on Friday in prelude to my cleaning the pool filter.
It looks pretty nice for a few hours and then the mango takes over again. There has to be some metaphor about life in there somewhere. In everyone’s life a few mango leaves must fall?
More bad news for Florida on the Covid front. The Sun-Sentinel reports nine counties at high risk for Covid. As you might guess, they are concentrated in the high population density areas. Of these nine, five are showing infection rates of over 20%. As far as the number of cases, Miami-Date leads the state with Broward County as number 2. As of 25 May, the state of Florida has seen 74,466 deaths from Covid. I suspect that is severely under reported. The statistics are from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta but they only report what the state of Florida reports to them.
Florida has a population of approximately 21.5 million souls. Based on my calculations that 2.8% of the population in the state is dead from Covid. As I’ve written before, I don’t believe the data from CDC or Florida.
Diane Rehm, on her podcast today “Diane Rehm: On My Mind”has an episode called “Untangling the Mystery of Long Covid” and what was most concerning was how little we know anything about long Covid. It’ll be years before any of this is figured out.
On a brighter note, I spent a little time yesterday organizing my photos from my recent trip. I snapped 642 photos and 28 videos. I think back to the time when I was a kid with my first camera and mother berating me for taking so many photos of flowers. She, of course, was angry about paying the development costs. It took me a while to get over that and it wasn’t until Sara Hurdle gave me a camera for my graduation present for my masters degree that I got back into photography big time. That Canon camera was also a film camera but I had started developing my own photos back then because I had access to the dark room for the professional photographer for Ole Miss.
Digital photography was a revelation. I could snap as many photos as my memory card would allow and I’ve pretty much snapped everything in sight. Since most are photos of plants (sorry mom) I keep all the shots. Not only do I photograph the flower or fruit but also leaves, stems, and any other part of the plant that will help in identification. They are not pretty in the esthetic sense but are invaluable in identification – such as hairy stem, opposite leaves, etc.
My plant checklist is up to 1,748 plants and that does not include this trip nor the plants I collected and identified for my thesis (over 2,000). It’ll take me some time to identify the plants on this trip but it will be a little easier for me this go around since I’ve photographed many of the plants before.
Sadly, when I had to replace the hard drive on my iMac, it kept the photos but lost all the metadata which included the identification of the plants. I’ll have to use my checklist to go back and assign the names again – a project that should only take me three lifetimes to do. Gotta keep busy somehow!
Stay tuned!