Drippy, Drippy, Drippy!

  Back in October, I was happily munching on the wild persimmons that grow beside the path near the marsh. These little golden blobs are sort of an acquired taste since they can be quite tart or astringent at times. To me, they are perfect.  It was. also, at this time that I cut open the seeds to see the "weather forecast" for the coming winter months.  There were spoons.  For those who are not familiar with this folklore, cut open the seeds and you will find cutlery.  A knife means stabbing cold, a spoon represents snow (or, in our case, rain) and a fork means warm.  I found spoons....lots and lots of spoons.  Nary another utensil showed.  I pondered this.

  Well, so far this winter, we have had rain...lots and lots of rain.  In fact, I think this has to be one of the wettest winters on record for the Deep South.  It has also been warm.  My old wood-burning stove has only been used a handful of times this season.  I have only burned two wheelbarrows of firewood and some of that was more for ambiance than heat.  

  As I write, it is pouring rain once again.  Our temperatures hover around the mid 60s both day and night.  When it is not raining, it is foggy.  Pea soup thick fog blankets the entire Bayou.  The humidity is a stifling to a point that we finally broke down and bought a dehumidifier for the living room.  It works great if you can get past the idea of having to empty the thing.  The "empty" alarm sounds just about every 6 hours....day and night just to keep the indoor humidity a around a 50% level in that one room.  Honestly...when you hear folks down here say "Its not the cold.  It is the humidity." or, in the summer, "It is not the heat.  It is the humidity.", believe us.  We speak the truth.

Oh, the humidity!

  I have found it chilly for the past few days.  The temperatures  are not bad but the humidity is definitely trying to make us feel winter here.  We have had a good solid rain for two days now our next step of winter, fog, has arrived.  In the mornings, I cannot see the pier from the front steps.  It is almost as if the world ends about seventy-five feet in front of me.  A solid white wall blocks out anything beyond that point.  It is that fog that chills me to the bone.  At night, it creeps into the Little Bayou House like some thief ready to rob us blind but instead of taking anything, it leaves a certain stickiness on everything.  There is not much we can do about it other than deal with it.  Dehumidifiers cringe, shake and cower when meeting our type humidity.

 Early this morning, I took the old dog out for his morning stroll.  Since the pace has slowed to that of an elderly snail, I have plenty of time to photograph oddities along the way.  Once we neared the pier, a Great Blue Heron caught my eye.  Moe had come back to the pier expecting breakfast but none was proffered.  Not only did he go hungry, he had to hunker down against the fog. Poor Moe!  He looked downright miserable!

  Winter mornings complete with fog should be a boon to the herons.  The north wind exposes the mudflats and the fog shields the bird from being seen by its prey.  They can catch plenty of little mullet by just waiting.  This same fog does present its share of problems, however.  The drippy mess muffles all footsteps so larger predators can stalk the herons without a problem.  Coyotes and bobcats would love to dine upon a sizable bird like a heron.  

  Moe was either being lazy by staying on the pier or was being wary of his surroundings.  Either way, he was not catching any breakfast by sitting on the pier.  The old dog and I merely passed him by as we were ready to get out of the fog.  No handouts for the herons today.

Tired...with a foggy brain...

  Here lately, the days are being spent being a nurse to an ailing, aging dog.  Mr. PJ is feeling poorly so he is the utmost priority of each day...and night...a lot of which is just sitting with him.  I think he truly misses his family at this time of his life and so the extra attention is needed.  There is just not much else I can do.  It breaks my heart to see him like this.  Crazy as it may sound, I have fully grown attached to him in the short time he has been on the Bayou.   This hospice care leaves little time for any other endeavors, however.  One thing the old dog still loves to do is walk about the hillside.  Granted, it is a slow walk with many rests but it seems to calm him.  So, I take the camera along on our slow-paced journeys.

  It does not help much that it has been hot and humid for the past few days.  With the air conditioners going full blast inside, the hikes seem to be even warmer than usual.  This morning as we rounded the bend on the sandy path far down behind the shed, I noticed some trumpet vine blooms gleaming in the beams of the sunrise.  Since Mr. PJ was on one of his rests, I decided to get a photograph.  After several attempts and only coming up with weird, foggy pictures, I decided to check the camera.  Yep, just as I expected.  The transition from the cool air inside to the hot, muggy air outside caused the lens to cloud over.  I wiped it clean and tried to focus the camera once again.  Nope, it was foggy again.  Three times of wiping that lens finally did the trick and I got a clear photo. 

  Once inside, it was weird comparing the two photos.  The fogged lens added a golden-green haze to the picture while the cleaned lens gave a clear photo.  What was weird was the fact that I preferred the messy photo over the clear!  It sort of goes with the mystique of the Bayou and seems perfect to my foggy brain. Yep, I do have a quirky sense of what is nice looking.  So, the humidity and heat won out on this photo shoot this morning.

Put on a Sweater!

  It is cold.  Not that I am complaining because next to a good storm, I like the cold weather.  Still, I am a girl from the Deep South and I feel the cold.  I shiver and shake with the best of them.  My nose turns red, my toes freeze and I pile on layers of clothing.  I have no problem with this at all.  For that matter, even some folks from up in the Far North have told me that they find it cold on the Bayou.  It seems that the humidity plays a part in this and since we are sitting at about an eighty percentile relative humidity, perhaps it does feel colder than the just about freezing temps that were our high for the day.  Tonight, the lows will take a plunge to well below that mark sinking almost to the teens.  Yep, the Bayou is cold.  Wet and cold is the rule for the weekend.

  While I like the cold, I also like a good fire going in the old woodburning stoves.  Both have been chugging along steadily throughout the day and will do the same overnight.  This is our source of heat...our only heat save a couple of electric spaceheaters.  That said, you can imagine what our day saw us doing.  Mark cut several trees that were either riddled with woodborers or were storm damaged.  Once cut, the wood was hauled to the house, a good bit was split and then stacked.  My woodbins are filled for the evening's burning.  Hopefully, the Little Bayou House will stay relatively warm...at least, warm by our standards. Others complain incessantly about being cold when here.  "Put on a sweater!" I direct them.  "I have on a sweater!" is often the reply.  "Put on a coat!" is my next directive.  Or...if you are still complaining, go home. Sorry, there is not a lot I can do about the lack of heat which causes some folks' complaints.  I have no problem with the house temperature sitting at sixty degrees.  I fully appreciate having a home, a woodburning stove and living in the Deep South where cold spells are a novelty and not the norm.  Don't like it?  Put on a sweater!  Or go home.  I am good with it either way.

Share and share alike!

  As a rule, tempers flare more often during the heat of the summer. There is just something about being miserably hot that also makes us "hot under the collar".  On the Bayou, we have more than our share of hot days and add to that extremely high humidity, well, you get some pretty uncomfortable days.  Now take two beings that are not extremely fond of each other and throw into the mix and that can spell trouble. This is why I found two of my critters in an rather unusual situation today.

  I walked into the living room on about one o'clock in the afternoon, to find Ms. Ez, the Bayou Dog, and Ms. Put, the Bayou Queen, sprawled out on the floor just inches from each other. On any other day, the two simply tolerate each other.  I am sure Ms. Ez would not mind being friends but the Bayou Queen simply does not abide by commoners. She would just as soon bite or scratch the "nothings'" heads clean off as look at them. The intolerable heat had made the two adversaries become mutually tolerant of one another.  This was the only space in the entire house that had a nice breeze and each wanted their share.

  I enjoyed the truce while it lasted.  Once Ms. Put realized that I was in the same room, she demanded that I open the door to let her escape. She put on airs and pretended to be miffed that she had been forced to share accommodations with a mere dog.  Ms. Ez, on the other hand, let the Queen pass undeterred.  As matter of fact, the old dog did nothing but thump her tail a few times and went back to snoozing.  

  Yep, it is only the first part of June and the heat has already changed attitudes here on the Bayou.  Hopefully, all attitudes will stay as peaceful as these two.  I guess there is really no reason to go fighting like cats and dogs....errr...well, you get the idea.

Its that humidity!

  I don't know if it is or not.  The humidity thing always seems to get in the way when discussing the weather.  If it feels hot in the summer, it is because there is high humidity.  If the temperature feels colder in the winter, it is that high humidity once again.  Sometimes this just does not make a lot of sense to me.  If I am hot, I am hot and the same goes for when I am cold.  I tried asking a few questions about it and the answers all assured me that humidity does, indeed, cause changes in the way we "feel" temperature.  Moist air in the summer time can make us hotter simply because the air cannot absorb our sweat (which is a type of cooling called evaporative cooling!).  Air can only hold so much water and if there is already a bunch floating around out there, our sweat stays with us instead of cooling us.  In winter, since the air has so much water in it during high humidity type days, it takes more of our body heat to warm the space around us.  Thus, heat is actually pulled away from our bodies at a more rapid rate making us feel a lot colder. Whew!  Did you know all of that?  I did not!

The grapefruit trees after the last freeze.

One lone grapefruit hangs defiantly after the last freeze!

  Now, since it all of this has to do with how our bodies react to humidity and temperature, I wondered if the same was true for plants....and I still wonder.  I have no answers.  The reason that I am so curious about this is last year we had ice storms with the temperatures down in the teens.  Yes, my citrus trees froze or at least their leaves did. During the springtime, the trees came back in full force.  (All except for the lemons and limes...they are quite dead!)   I can't say much about that, though.  I expected the trees to freeze with temperatures in the teens.  What surprises me is the fact that, once again, my poor trees have met with a traumatic winter!  We have had several nights dip into the twenties (not teens) and the trees have lost their leaves.  The only real difference beside temperature is the humidity.  The recent cold nights that had temperatures in the mid-twenties were clear with very low humidity.  So did temperatures in the teens with high humidity feel colder to the trees than the temperatures in the mid twenties with low humidity?  Both froze my trees.  Pop always used to want cloudy nights when the temperatures would be forecast to drop below freezing.  He claimed that the clouds would form a "blanket" and keep the plants warmer.  I have stuck with that theory with my garden and it seems to be working.  So...higher humidity keeps things warmer or colder?  Or do I just need a nice warm blanket of clouds to protect my plants? Me....I blame it on that humidity!