Janet

We can get some very reddish brown squirrels in Tennessee here in the Nashville area - we had one come around for a few years that was almost strawberry blonde

Close-up of bright green moss forming star-shaped tufts on the forest floor, with slender reddish stalks topped by tiny round spore capsules rising above the moss beneath fallen leaves and a log in a woodland setting.

And some very nice sporophytes

Close up photo of a cluster of Virginia bluebells with pinkish buds and soft blue bell-shaped flowers growing among bright green leaves on a woodland floor, with tall leafless trees and a clear blue sky in the background.

Saw some early bluebells today

We also visited the John Noel at Bon Aqua state natural area and saw some enormous white oak trees that were standing when Christopher Columbus first came to Hickman County. And hiked a bit of Montgomery Bell too. An excellent Saturday

We followed the route his family would have taken to his wife’s family cemetery to lay him to rest in 1878, and we met the distant cousin who still lives on the land where the cemetery sits (he said his family has been there so long he had to marry a yankee to make sure she wasn’t kinfolk 😂)

We drove through the hollers on either side of the area where his ancestor Christopher Columbus (!!) Roberson bought 30 acres of land sometime between 1850-1860. We have a good idea where it was because we looked at LiDAR scans last night

Man, sometimes all of the info you can access on the internet is just so unbelievably cool. A month ago Jonathan didn’t know much about his dad’s side of the family at all and today we visited the graves of his 4th great and 3rd great grandparents

I think I figured out exactly where Jonathan’s great great great great grandfather’s farm was is 1860 and today we’re off to see it and do some hiking on the western highland rim

I guess it makes sense that spending several hours looking at census records before bed would make me dream I was a census worker in rural Tennessee in the early 1900s

I really really want one of these

Have officially reached the point in the week where my highest priority to-do list item is figuring out where we’re going hiking this weekend

close-up of a flower with seven sightly cupped, white, petal-like sepals (there are no true petals). in the center of the flower there are a dozen or so light green carpels which pale to nearly white at the stigmas at their tops. surrounding the carpels are numerous stamens with yellow anthers atop long, slender white filaments. a cream-green budding flower sits behind the blooming flower in the foreground, along with some reddish-green leaf-like bracts with three shallow lobes and a branching network of lighter veins. a spider is hiding behind one of the bracts, with only a few brown legs exposed.

three blooming flowers facing the sky, each with seven white petal-like sepals curving slightly upwards. in the center of each flower is a cloud of numerous stamens with yellow anthers on long, slender, upward-curving filaments surrounding a cluster of light green carpels. the blooming flowers are accompanied by a couple pale green budding flowers each on their own slender flowerstem sharing a common origin; this node also the anchor for a whorl of leaf-like 3-lobed bracts. below this node, the plant's stem is red. these rue anemones are growing up from among a bed of fallen tree leaves.

the forest floor is blanketed in orange-brown and tan fallen tree leaves, with green shoots and leaves of various plants poking through here and there. in the center of the photo, the white petal-like sepals of three blooming flowers are blindingly bright in the sunlight which pours through the still-leafless forest canopy.

🌼 rue anemone 🌿
Thalictrum thalictroides

it is a coincidence that these three blooming buttercup-family flowers all happen to have 7 sepals, the number can vary from individual to individual

#nativeplants #ecoregion71

This is Lance. He may have overreacted a little bit to a leaf, but when you are two inches from the ground, anything could be a potential threat. 12/10 (TT: katiemhartline)

Chuck Borges is a whistleblower who reported the massive theft of our personal data from the Social Security Administration by Elon Musk and DOGE.

I am thinking he should probably have a lot more followers.

Thought the geology would be neat but wow - when we say we store the strategic petroleum reserve in "salt caverns" that means we actually carved giant cisterns into truly massive underground pillars of ancient rock salt that slowly flowed upward through layers of sedimentary rock like geologic taffy

WBAL in Baltimore helping viewers understand the difference between watches and warnings

The Salty History of East Texas Lies Underground Salt domes of the East Texas Basin tell a story of Texas' natural history.

More reading about salt domes and the strategic reserve - texascooppower.com/the-salty-hi...

www.atlasobscura.com/places/bryan...

These underground pillars of salt are salt domes - geologic structures that began as layers of salt deposited by a very early Gulf in the Jurassic (160+ million years ago). As miles of sediment accumulated above them, the salt slowly began to flow upward under pressure as a huge column

Thought the geology would be neat but wow - when we say we store the strategic petroleum reserve in "salt caverns" that means we actually carved giant cisterns into truly massive underground pillars of ancient rock salt that slowly flowed upward through layers of sedimentary rock like geologic taffy

Okay I'm doing the deep dive myself and so far I've learned that they're actually salt domes, and they're the result of something called salt tectonics. Stay tuned, this is already awesome and I will report back.

So fondly remember going to see this on our trip to Disney when I was in HS - my dad, ever the joker, decided to amp up the special effects by grabbing the top of my head

These are all so cool but I really love the shots with trees!

And they look incredible under a UV/black light!

Okay I'm going to need a geology deep dive on the gulf coast salt caverns

My absolute favorite is when I find a post describing my exact issue and someone commented like 10 years ago with the fix, and there's a decade's worth of folks chiming in to say "thanks, this still works"

Reddit remains undefeated as the best place to find advice written by real humans about the very specific and annoying problem you're dealing with. Already this week I've fixed a weird computer thing and found a replacement for my much-beloved and discontinued favorite sports bra.

Yay yay! Very excited to read what's next for Dorothy Gentleman, ship's detective - I re-read the short and wonderful Murder by Memory this past weekend so my own memories would be fresh for the sequel.

What is it about preposterous adventure movies??? The heart wants what the heart wants - to be not bored, and sometimes unreasonably pleased.

Carmen Sandiego from the 90s cartoon

Happy International Women's Day to the original International Woman

The time change is dumb but at least it’s good for deer - shifting the evening commute away from dusk reduces deer deaths from car crashes!