ritaxis | (no subject)

Degeneriaceae

What a great name for a family of plants.

< a href="http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/newgate/cronang.htm">Found while trying to find out if the ipomoeaceae are related to the solanaceae. Still working on it.

On another front, we went to the back of Cowell and found: 2 small and 1 large shrimp mushroom (the nice fellow's gone to bed so I can't confirm that these are the only russulas we think are worth eating) and 1 funny-looking little king bolete. It had a tiny head and a big trunk, but sometimes boletes do that.

The forget-me-nots are about as long as my hand. It sprinkled on Wednesday but other than that it hasn't rained in a long time, but the ground is damp.

I hate desktop wallpaper in general, but I found the astronomy picture of the day and I couldn't find a feed I could stick in lj like I do the botany picture of the day (you can get it too at the bpod lj profile. What you can get, and I did, is a program that downloads the astronomy picture of the day to your computer as wallpaper. The first picture wasn't all that inspiring, but I just got a new one that sends chills down my spine. The one bug I see is that setting the preferences to show the explanation (that is, an icon you can click for information) doesn't seem to stick at all, and you have to keep going into the program to reset it and get the explanation.

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http://syndicated.livejournal.com/apod/

I had it friended for a while, but it tended to break my friendspage -- I think it may be a hand-fed thing rather than real rss, and sometimes the html is wrong or the image is just too big to fit.

I also have

apod friended. What I do is have my journal style set to one that can resize individual entries -- the one I like is called "Flexible Squares". That way if they post a big APOD it doesn't hurt the rest of the page.

it hasn't rained in a long time

If you're missing rain, I'd willingly send you some of ours. We have plenty and to spare! Oh, and rainbows. I'm sure we don't normally get rainbows in November.

I don't think we're seriously behind at this point. Recent years have had the rainy season kind of slow to kick in. Why wouldn't you get rainbows in October? I would think that a low sun would increase the frequency of the sun being at the right angle for rainbows.

I would think that a low sun would increase the frequency of the sun being at the right angle for rainbows.

Well, yes. But normally at this time of year it's either totally overcast and wet or bright and dry. Thus there is usually no sun to shine and on the rare occasions when there is, there's no moisture. These showers feel unusual in that the sky is partially clearing between them.

Ooh, neat -- I hadn't seen the Botany Photo of the Day before. Thanks for the link!