Tag Archives: Nature

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Hail’s Scales

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Some unfortunate Minnesotans had their homes and cars (and heads!) damaged by hail Tuesday evening. Bummer. I hope all repairs and recovery go smoothly.

Most of the weather reports I heard last night kept to the standard American sports scale of measurement – marble sized to golf ball to baseball to softball. That’s assuming you consider marbles a sport.

But I wonder – is that our entire athletico-spherical vocabulary? What about handballs? Raquetballs? I’ve never heard a weather forecaster try to parse relative hardness of hail, though it does vary. If your job is to encourage people to take cover, you would naturally go with the most impressive choice and baseballs and billiard balls are more motivational than tennis balls.

A lacrosse ball is smaller around (7.5 inches) than a baseball (9 inches), could offer a useful distinction, but you never hear meteorologists talk about “lacrosse ball sized hail’. I assume In England and India a handy frame of reference would be “Hail the size of cricket balls.” Try that over here and people would be confused. Cricket balls? Aren’t they very, very tiny?

Not everyone follows sports, so sometimes we use the vegetable scale, starting with pea sized hail and going to … well, that’s about it. I guess we’re just not a vegetable-loving people. Has anyone ever reported brussel sprout sized hail? Hail as large as neatly trimmed radishes? And what about the rest of the grocery store? Hail the size of eggs? Lemons? There’s a report on this page of hail as big as walnuts. Has any spot on Earth ever received Personal Watermelon sized hail, and if so, did anyone live to tell about it?

Not that all hail is perfectly round. In fact, it can be flattened and oblong, but I’m still waiting to hear about a storm that dropped “hail the size of Vienna Fingers” or “cell phone sized hail”.

Then there’s the monetary scale. Dime, penny, nickel, quarter and even half dollar sized hail have been noted, but why stop there? What about “hail as destructive as bundled sub-prime mortgages”? I would run from “Bernie Madoff hail”, and cower at a report that claimed: “hail just swept through Eden Prairie like a mammoth Ponzi scheme, leaving no one untouched.”

What’s the biggest hail you’ve seen? And how would you standardize the measurment?

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Open House

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Now that it’s finally beginning to warm up, it’s wonderful to get out and examine the post-winter landscape. Congratulations! You made it through the dreary season, so now it’s time to daydream – consider changing everything by upgrading your abode! The economy is beginning to gain some momentum and attractive homes are flooding the market. On a walk yesterday, I saw several on display right here in my neighborhood!

Home #333

Wait til you see the back yard!

This warm and cozy split level built into a south facing hillside is surrounded by lush cooling grasses during the hottest part of summer, but in springtime its graceful rounded profile reaches out to capture the sun’s warming rays, providing a beautiful elevated view of the nearby shrubs as they come into bloom. Every family member will want to poke his or her head out the front door to welcome visitors and/or sound a warning about intruders. This earthy charmer is move-in ready!

Home #838

Just a hop from all the action!

Fantastic curb appeal is just one of the attractions of this roomy single level home, and wait until you see the rooftop deck! Note the detailed craftsmanship of the tooth-carved entryway, which opens into an expansive wind-protected too-tight-for-the-dog-to-get-in living area. Generous upstairs neighbors occasionally have lavish food-dropping parties, providing a delicious rain delivered right to your main living area! This family home has sheltered 5 generations of hearty rabbits, and that’s just in the past year.

Home #83

Best of both worlds!

This stunning penthouse apartment has been extensively remodeled to work more comfortably as a single level walk out. No more climbing with your arms (and cheeks) loaded full of groceries! Live close to the earth with an easily accessed garden and quick emergency egress. It’s the best possible combination of the breezy treetop lifestyle everyone wants with the solid grounded foundation that everyone needs!

Wow! All these places look better (and cheaper) than the place I’m in! Still, moving is a huge project, and I’m afraid I might suffer from buyer’s remorse (especially with home #83)! Maybe I wouldn’t be so interested in a change if I just vacuumed the space I’ve got and re-arranged the furniture I already have.

When has the grass only seemed greener on the other side?

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Bird is the Word

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It’s the season for bird songs – the kind the birdies sing for themselves and the sort of song people sing about the birds. I’m sure a few titles will occur to you after a moments’ worth of thought:

Red Red Robin, Rockin’ Robin, Skylark, Lark in the Morning, Three Little Birds, Free As a Bird, Gonna Find Me a Bluebird, Be Like The Bluebird, When Doves Cry, Dupsha Dove … you get the idea.

A loon was spotted on Lake Calhoun yesterday, according to Bob Collins and Jayne Solinger at the MPR blog News Cut.

I can’t think of many songs about loons, even though loon and Calhoun both fit so comfortably into the classic Moon / June / Croon rhyming scheme popular with songwriters of the golden age of romantic word-rich ditties. It’s no surprise that local songwriter Ann Reed took note a few years ago and gave us this, which, alas, I can only offer you here in the form of lyrics. The song is on her 2009 recording Where The Earth is Round.

Loons on Lake Calhoun
words and music: Ann Reed • © 2009 Turtlecub Publishing

I’m riding on my bike
Gliding along
The light is early morning
It’s pretty and half-awake
This city that has
The lakes as its reward

I stop all my inner debating
And waiting a minute, it hovers and fades

Ducks talking, coots check in
Chalking up routes
They’ve been on their migration
Then floating up above
The soloist does her stuff
With carbonation

It’s a melody picked out
To tell how a tickle would sound if given the room
There’s loons on Lake Calhoun

They’ve dropped in to see a show
Stopped to see grebes they know
From a long, late winter
The people lift eyes from the ground
Seeming surprised at the sound
Of grace, delivered

I never expected a miracle
Here I’ll admit: Oh, I rarely — do you?
There’s loons on Lake Calhoun

And they’ve made it from far, far away
Before takin’ it northward, but before they do
There’s loons on Lake Calhoun

I contend that any songwriter can put a classy nightingale or a colorful oriole in their lyric, but you need someone like Ann to write and sing about loons, coots and grebes.

As for other migrations, it looks like at least one Ruby Throated Hummingbird made it into Wisconsin yesterday. And was immediately stripped of its collective bargaining rights. So it goes in the northern climes this year. And still the migratory beat goes on. Lots of things are cropping up – Robins, Earthworms, Whooping Cranes, Barn Swallows, etc.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, they face an exploding population of feral chickens. This isn’t a migration, it’s a multiplication. But it might cause some cock-a-doodle-doo intolerant people to head north.

And in Canada, it’s Canada Geese, who are not only proliferating, but are threatening (to the not-so-quiet alarm of some scolds) to become our northern neighbor’s official bird!

What have you seen or heard lately that indicates a migration is underway?