The Week of the Yellow Dandelions

Wednesday's riddle:

What has four letters, sometimes has nine, and never has five

The answer is "yes, that's right." Our friend Darlene answered correctly and she wins five life points. (Life points are Oren's system of cosmic reward. I don't know what they are redeemable for, but I assume contentment, vitality, serenity, satisfaction, et cetera.)

I spent too many hours researching SD cards yesterday—way into the night—and learned a lot, including how long it's been since I last did so. I can't quite get over that. As near as I can reconstruct, it's been eleven or twelve years since I bought six cards that, in my mind, are somehow still a "recent" purchase. I don't know how that got so out of whack in my head. My remaining supply of cards is sorry and old and clearly in need of a refresh.

I didn't quite finish the post yesterday, but it's 66% finished as I get to work today. It's taken me a while to get up to speed. It will be along in a bit, so check back a little later.

Forget-me-not
By the way, the temperate season has started here in the beautiful Finger Lakes of New York, and the weather is amazingly gorgeous. Yesterday was nothing less than a masterpiece by God. One of those "peak" good days. "Forsythia fortnight" is over already, and it's now what I call "the week of the yellow dandelions." The sweet cherry trees are fully dressed out in white blossoms. I need to get up the hill to check out the peach tree that stands by the side of the road. I saw two foxes on the road into town yesterday, and the Mama robin outside my back door has already hatched her first brood of the season. It amuses me how many critters scramble when Butters and I burst out the back door. Squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits and a variety of birds all go into Mayday mode and light out for safety. The human! The canine! RUN FOR IT!!! There are snakes this year too, but I haven't seen any gophers or woodchucks or whatever used to live under the shed.

Dandelions (the greens of which are very healthy in a salad, by the way) are one of nature's oddest plants, aesthetically speaking. They go from beautiful to ugly, from a joy and a treat for the eye to a blight on the landscape. A transformation almost on par with the caterpillar and the butterfly but in the wrong direction. I don't know if they stay yellow for just a week of if that's what it feels like. As long as they're yellow they're delightful.

Woodland forget-me-nots on West Lake Road

Tomorrow (which is usually my day off) we'll have a guest post about the Kentucky Derby, another sign of Spring, written by Bryan Geyer, the now-retired founder of Really Right Stuff. The race is tomorrow, on NBC and Peacock from 2:30 to 7:30 ET, with the main event commencing shortly after 6:45 ET. I know a few people don't approve of horse racing, so in case that's you I'll put it behind a "Continued" wall to avoid mussing your ruffle. If you'd rather not read it, all you have to do is not click through. I have horse racing in the family—my uncle Smokie is a past President of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Breeder's Association and he bred a Belmont winner. I rode throughout my youth, and the fact that I had to stop (because of a bad back) makes me more sentimental and nostalgic about it, not less. The horse is the most beautiful of animals. It's odd how few people now have seen a horse race in person.

Now back to work on that post. (This post was supposed to be two short paragraphs as a placeholder, by the way. I just get going. You do something long enough....)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Comments

[Farhiz]

Hmmm when you’re with your group of friends, are you the quiet one, the talkative one or the one in-between?

[Mike Plews]

Last year we tried "no mow May" in order to make life easier for the local pollinators.
We got to May 15 before the lawn just had to be cut.
This spring feels earlier and with the massive amounts of rain in the last couple of weeks the dandelions just exploded so I have a date with the Cub Cadet.
I'm not much for fussing about our lawn. When we built on 1994 I threw a bunch of rye/bluegrass/fescue mix out gave it an initial watering and after that just cut it.
Seems to be ok. We have weeds but I don't care. I am not going to dump chemicals out there. We live on a farm so no close neighbors and the president of our HOA is a possum so no problems.
I believe George Washington Carver said "a weed is just a plant in the wrong place". In that perspective I like to think of our place and a green refugee camp.
As for SD cards, at one point the TV station I worked for switched out cameras from Sony proprietary XDCAM EX to much cheaper SD cards.
A month later I had a jar full of failed cards on my desk.
They really like to split open if they get handled too much. If you can work around that they are fine. You just need to recognize they are not as tough as say a CF card.

[Thomas Rink]

In German, the dandelion is called Löwenzahn, which means, well, dandelion or "lion's tooth". When I was kid, however, we called it Pusteblume, from pusten, "to blow" and Blume, "flower". Reason: When the seeds are mature, shortly after the lovely yellow flower has disappeared, the former flower turns into a furry ball around a small white sphere. If you pick it and blow hard against it, the seeds will come off and fly through the air like tiny parachutes. I happily passed this tradition on to my own kids as soon as they were old enough ;^)

[MarkB]

I rode in my youth, as well. My uncle in Pennsylvania had a horse ranch, so visits were always a delight. Never saw a racehorse up close, but at one point he did have a beautiful grey Arabian stallion that was gifted to him by some Saudi prince after he retired (from the US Dept. of Defense, ahem) in the 80's. My uncle joked that the horse flew first class to the US, landed, and immediately was introduced to snow, never to recover his senses.

[Peter Jeffrey Croft]

In a country* which has none of these, what's the difference between a squirrel and a chipmunk? And a gopher and a woodchuck?
*Yes, Australia.

[One's a varmint and ta othern's a critter. For more detail, Google's your friend. --Mike]

[Thomas Mc Cann]

If you pick the dandelion you will wet your bed. The French call them le pissenlit which if your schoolboy french is a good enough is a translation of sorts
If you count the number of times it takes to blow off all the white seed heads that will tell you the time.
I told my grand children these tropes so hopefully they will last another generation

[Bill Tyler]

Mike writes, "This post was supposed to be two short paragraphs as a placeholder, by the way. I just get going. You do something long enough...." reminding me of a thought that's variously attributed to almost every famous writer of the past, but that found its earliest known expression in 1657 in a letter from Blaise Pascal:

"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." or in the original French, "Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

(Found at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/)