Leaves that are green turn to brown

26 September 2009 “Leaves that are green turn to brown.”


Simon and Garfunkle.

There is a sharp seasonal change taking place here.

Thursday's’s high was 87.6 Fahrenheit. We spent about an hour in the pool. Yesterday's’s high was 82.4 F. We spent about an hour in the pool. Today, we expect to the high to be 74, 79 on Sunday, and then a steady cool down for a week with lows reaching down to the mid 40s. Tonight, when we put the solar blanket back on the pool, I turned off the gas heater. We’ve arranged to have the pool closed up for the winter next week.

Mornings this week have been very pleasant. It has been cool enough to walk down valley and back without being sweat soaked when I get back. We’ve had a lot of rain in the area but most of it has gone around us. The cloud bases have been around 300-400 feet, providing a lovely view of the valley walls with gray clouds covering the higher peaks and ridges and spilling into the smaller feeder creek valleys.

The mulberry tree in the front yard has lost most of its leaves already. They’ve turned yellow, grown brown-spotted, and then brown before falling off. Loki, our Norwegian Elkhound/German Shepherd mix rescue, has just chased a squirrel from the mulberry litter up another tree and is looking for the next furry thing to chase. She never catches them but enjoys the opportunity to be a dog.


The hickory trees out by the road have begun to yellow; the higher valley walls show some reds and orange patches. Another three weeks should bring us to the peak for color this year. We’ll get to see the higher peaks all colored out, too. We’ve made plans to go to a dance in Asheville in Mid October and to a concert there in November. That might even mean some snow at elevation. First snow for us was in late October last year and I drove my mother to Charlotte to catch her plane over snow-covered passes. Of course, Charlotte was hot and sticky when we got there and I was happy to leave Charlotte behind.

We awakened to low, heavy clouds this morning. The forecast, 100% chance of rain, is already proven accurate. We’ve had .08 inches of rain since midnight. Although the last week was rainy, we’ve missed the entrained storms that caused so much flooding to our south. The creek is still clear, not swollen, pleasant to hear.

Images taken this morning, 26 September 2009

The image on the left is looking east up Cassi Creek, the shortest leg, ca. 150 meters that bisects our property flowing east to west. The view on the right is of the same segment, looking west just before the creek bends back to the north. Note the heavy overgrowth of knotweed on the banks in the left view. This Japanese plant is an aggressive invader, hard to kill, grows up to ten feet tall and spreads like bamboo. The overgrowth seen here provides some shade to the creek and harbors terrestrial insects that fall and are consumed by the trout., so it is not entirely without benefit. However, the dense nature of the growth makes it difficult to get to the banks of the creek and impossible to wield a fly rod without losing flies and leader to the weeds.

The view to the right shows the rock reinforcement put along the banks by the county after a stalled hurricane dumped several days of rain on the Appalachians. The resulting floods washed out the road in several places. The creek, which once had its E>W segment above the south end of our house was re-routed to its present position. The old channel still exists there The county and the Forest Service did a good job with the channel relocation. Even during the floods in January of this year the old bed was empty. The upper end of our property has a 50-60 foot high hillside entirely covered with similar rocks to protect that portion of the road which runs atop the hillside. Some of the rocks are arm-chair size. Others merely suitcase size. Navigating the banks is tricky when carrying nothing. Add a 6-9 foot fly rod and the difficulty increases. The creek bends to the right and flows northward at the bottom of this stretch. The whole valley is carved by Cassi Creek and its three main forks.

Today, tomorrow and Monday are the last days of “Days of Awe,” Yamim Noraim (Hebrew: נוראים‎ ימים ). The New year, 5770 began on Rosh HaShanah and all over the world Jews will begin fasting Sunday evening at sundown, Erev Yom Kippur. That the day begins at sundown always amuses me. What better way to begin a normal day than to dine, enjoy the evening, and go to bed. It also amuses me that Rosh HaShanah occurs in the middle of the calendar year. The civil new year happens in the spring. Judaism is a wonderful faith for the obsessive compulsives who thrive on rituals, lists, and tradition.

We live about 90 minutes to 2 hours from the nearest synagogue, B'nai Shalom, located in between Johnson City and Bristol. About 55 families support the synagogue, founded 105 years ago. There are no other Jewish congregations between Roanoke VA and Knoxville TN. Because of the distance and time involved, because of the price of gasoline and other factors, we’ve downgraded our level of religious observance. We were heavily involved in a synagogue in Florida, a congregation of about the same size. We wound up as lay leaders when there was no Rabbi. Considering the need to take part in two days of services a week, the necessity of language and theology classes, we spent four days a week in or around the synagogue. We, and the other lay leaders were rapidly approaching burnout. We miss the sense of community that we had there but don’t want to wind up in a similar time crunch here. A synagogue is one of those institutions that demands volunteers and consumes them while demanding ever more of those who give anything. So are other programs such as folk festivals, organizations like Boy Scouting. Both of us have been up to our necks, more than once, in helping such institutions chew us up and ask for more.

Seasonal changes warn us to prepare for the next set of demands.

Next week I need to call a chimney sweep and set up an appointment to have the chimney and wood stove inspected and maintained. I need to find a source of wood, free or otherwise to start splitting and stacking. We expect the pool service company to winterize the pool next week.

I need to call, again, about flood insurance. The federal program has three or four providers in the region. All of them are busy.

I have an appointment at VA with my new primary care provider and Gloria has to take her car into Johnson City for routine service and to have the dealer look for mice nests that we can’t find. We need to end the mouse infestation of her car before the mice actually do serious damage. My Pathfinder can be driven another 1000 miles before it needs an oil change so that will likely take place in late October.

Gloria wants to look at thrift stores for Halloween costume items to wear to the dance in Jonesborough on Halloween. We may get to meet for lunch in Johnson City next week.

We’ve begun to shift into the fall and winter menu patterns. We had a Masaman shrimp curry last night. Large shrimp, extra-firm tofu, sweet potato, baby peas, scallions, onion, coconut milk served over brown Basmani rice.

This morning I pulled two top sirloin steaks from the freezer to use for dinner tonight, I could braise them in wine and treat them like Steak Diane, or some similar means of making select beef, bought from the mark down shelves a bit easier to chew and swallow. On the other hand, it is better for us than the more marbled choice cuts and stretches my skills in the kitchen to make it more enjoyable.
We’ve now had .25 inches of rain since midnight. The eastern part of TN is covered by a solid yellow radar display with 28 storms being tracked by Doppler from Morristown TN. It appears as if the afternoon is a good one for indoor activities. I enjoy being able to pull the radar feeds to my notebook without having to deal with the annoying quasi music that is background for all the television radar feeds. I feed real time data from my personal weather station to Weather Underground http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap and good storm tracking, weather alerts, and predictions as well as real time data from all over the U.S, and Canada. Did I say something about obsessive-compulsive behavior above? I actually have weather data files for this location from the November 2006 to the present. From Florida, I have files saved from hurricane passes showing wind, rain, and barometric pressure for all the hurricanes we were close to. Some came within 10 miles of our house. I was tracking barometric pressure every 15 minutes during those storms. The graphs of pressure vs time and distance were interesting.


Here’s the end of this commentary.

The moose hanger came from BoothBay Harbor ME. The begonias have bloomed there all summer. This is the view from our front deck, looking west