500 Species of Plants

Some of you know that one of my never-will-be-finished projects is to build a database of my photos so I might actually be able to find things. I keep working on it, usually a little bit each day.

One of the categories of pictures is, of course, plants. So yesterday, I hit 500 different species entered. This is out of a total of over 3000 photos entered so far. There will be lots more than 500 ultimately. I thought for today, I'd just pick some of my favorite plant pictures from the photos that are, so far, in the database.

I'll start with this bromeliad from the 2010 Philadelphia Flower Show. Of course, these are used in displays a lot because they are so colorful and showy, but that doesn't keep me from liking them. Genus Aechmea variety 'Blue Tango.'

Not all of the favorite plant pictures are going to be exotic things. For example, here is a large white oak tree, Quercus alba, that is found along the Finger Lakes/North Country Trails. It's named for the family that owns the property it's on, the Yorski Oak. With few of the leaves out yet, you can see the great bones of this tree that is probably 200 years old. Picture taken in May 2010 on the hike on which I finished all of the NCT in New York.

This one is last fall in my rock garden. This is the Sedum 'Dazzleberry' making a large bumblebee very happy. See the full pollen baskets?

This is also last fall with late afternoon sunlight on Ostrich Ferns, Matteuccia struthiopteris, Near Round Lake.

This one is a little more exotic in that it's not commonly found, but I did find some very near my house in 2010. This is a Grape Fern, sometimes this group is called Moonworts. But those are both just names for a whole group of ferns. The Genus is Botrychium, and I think this is matricariifolium, or the Daisyleaf Moonwort. It's one of the more common ones in the group. That said, I've only ever seen two of species in real life. I'm pretty pleased that I found this one on my own. You can see why they are called "grape ferns" because the fertile leaves look like a small cluster of grapes getting ready to ripen. This whole plant is maybe an inch-and-a-half tall.

I'll end this collection with another from last fall. In the database, I've been alternating entering more recent months with older pictures, so the dates are all over the place. This is just Virginia Creeper, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, in full autumn color, with berries, and contrasted with some ash leaves.

Aren't plants great?

Today I found out that I can get the dental work I need started tomorrow! And that I have to only eat very soft food for two weeks. So, I went shopping because I don't want to have to face that if I feel really bad when I get home tomorrow.

Worked on all the usual projects. Vacation from DMS is up to 41,630 words.

See Best Photos of 2020

Of Bees, Bugs, and Bites

 I got obsessed with one of my personal pet projects today. If you know me, you know that means I did very little else all day. No walking. The only other thing I did was edit for an hour this morning.

So I thought I'd take this chance to tell you my latest theory on the "bug bites." I don't think they are bug bites. This may be TMI for some of you.

After all that cleaning and spraying and heating and washing of everything that seemed pertinent to the problem... I got in bed that night and within 10 minutes I had two big welts on my butt. OK, no bugs of any kind could navigate from anywhere through a mattress cover, a fitted sheet and pajamas (all washed in 140 degree water) that fast.

I got up and did some more reading. The only other vermin candidate that might be living in some body orifice would be pinworms, and they cause seriously localized itching. Not like what I was experiencing.

However, hives can manifest in ways other than the small rashy red bumps we usually think of. And they can even be caused by pressure.

Here's what I think is going on. The bees and I have been living in a state of uneasy truce. At least it's uneasy on my part.

As a child I was highly allergic to bee stings, to the point where I went through a two-year series of shots to reduce the allergy. I've been stung a few times as an adult, but haven't yet had a bad reaction beyond the usual type swelling and serious itching. However, one can always become resensitized to an allergy, which is why I've felt a little uneasy.

I have no idea how the bees feel about me in general. But specifically, three bees felt quite violent toward me. That's how many times I've been stung since August 4. Granted, they were each aggravated because I "grabbed" them by accident when they were sitting on something I picked up. I was also stung during this same time period by something unidentified that swelled up very badly.

I think my body is generally on high alert with the histamine reactions. An imflammatory response to anything my skin doesn't like is probably being hyperactive. My best guess is heat and pressure. We already know I don't like to be hot. All of these welts have been on my butt or the backs of my legs which are probably the warmest locations at night, and also subject to the most pressure from my weight.

This is my current theory until disproven by something else.

Sitting all day also increases the itchy spots. Guess what I've been doing all day today. Hmm. Oh, my obsession? Well it involves playing with a database. I'm thoroughly happy, but I suppose I'll have to do some things tomorrow that also keep others happy.

Meanwhile, the warm weather has resulted in a huge hatch of houseflies. Buzzy green ones. They don't bite, but they love to fly around my face and drive me insane.

There's a good chance I'll break out of obsession mode, since I really need to get some groceries.

See The Vermin Inspire a Personal Record

Techie Day

  My brain is fried with concentrating on techie stuff. But I succeeded at two major things, and they were my primary focus of the day, so that's what you get.

For one thing, you may remember that I was given a new-to-me computer, and I started setting it up way back in November (see link below). But that was November. Doing geeky stuff while hiking was never a good idea, and I didn't get back to that project until this week. Ha! The computer would boot up, but presented me with only the background image. No task bar, no login, zilch. I know diddly-squat about Windows 10 (so far). But I went hunting for options. Tried one idea the other day. Nothing.

This kind of problem makes me so frustrated that I just want to throw things. I did a lot of computer programming in a different life, but this isn't anything like programming. The designers don't want you anywhere near that level, and they make it darn hard to figure out anything.

However, this morning I decided that I had some patience to try to find a solution, because I wanted to use the second computer to make it easier to enter info into my database. By displaying the pictures on one computer I could keep the database entry screen open on the other one. This is one of the few times I really wanted a slave screen. Anyway, I found a web page with several options to try. On the third one (fourth counting the one the other day), I managed to get into Repair and Reset. Success. I had to create a new password, and then endure 30 minutes of Windows updates, but I got the computer working. Yeah, me!

The other huge success has to do with building a database. Let me explain that 18 years ago, I was really competent with databases. I built a huge one for an organization I belonged to that had many-to-many relationships, subforms, and a dashboard. However, this is not a skill your brain holds on to if you don't use it all the time.

I've kept all my photos tracked in spreadsheets, but if you know anything about storing data, that is a basic solution, but it isn't very powerful. My brain holds a lot of stuff, but let's say that I want a picture of fireweed. I remember that I have some nice pictures of it in bloom from the Minnesota hike in 1997, but I don't know which hike we saw it in seed with good pictures. Surely something in the fall and probably west of here, but which hike? Or what if I want to find all the pictures that have a particular friend? What if I want to know who all is in a group photo without finding the right storage "unit" (SD card, disk, hard drive, flash drive) and looking at the photo?

So, I decided that with so many pictures from this NCT hike (a quick estimate suggests there are about 10,000 of them), I'd finally build that database I want. Did I mention that it was 18 years ago that I knew what I was doing?

I could remember a LOT, but not some of the finer points. I found some online courses and found one where the instructor's brain works a lot like mine. This can make a huge difference in the efficiency of the instruction. I listened to all the free parts and even paid for a couple of the more advanced lessons.

Here are the results so far: This is a basic form with all of the info about each photo on it. The small boxes below the main form are not true subforms, but they will do nicely for now. By clicking a button on the form I get the green form (not formatted very well, but it works. The format is easy to fix), that will show and scroll through all the people who are in that picture. Click on the other button and you get the purple form that shows all the natural features in that photo. In this case, Highbanks Lake. ( realize you can't really read it in this screen capture, but I wanted to just show one photo that had both a person and a natural feature in it).

As an alternative display, here is the basic form again (the blue one) with the people who appear in this group photo presented as a list rather than one at a time where you have to scroll through them as in the example above.

So, in each of these examples there is one photo and many possible people, or one photo and many possible natural features. Spreadsheets can be fooled into dealing with these kinds of issues. However, databases were invented because for lots of applications you have, say, many photos and many people. One photo can have many people, but also one person can be in many photos. This gets trickier. I used to be able to do it, and could remember the theory of how it works, but I couldn't quite pull the details of how to do it out of my brain, cold.

Now... GOT IT! This example goes the other direction. This is a form with all the people in it. Click on the button on a page for a single person, and you can see a list of all the photos in which that person appears.

Sorry there is nothing from the outdoors or awesome foodie things or even anything pretty or people-y. But this is HUGE, and I am very happy. I also just entered more raw photo data, and now have 423 pictures entered (but not all the cross info- people, natural features, plants, ecosystems, etc... not sure what else I'm going to do.)

Maybe I'll goof off and watch a movie now.

See Push the Reset Button