The Sunken Gardens

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I went with my brother and children to the Sunken Gardens in San Antonio last week. It isn’t officially called that, but rather the Japanese Tea Gardens. More about that in a moment, but under any name it’s a lovely place, and a fine example of land re-use, since long ago it was a quarry.

A view from the “sunken” portion of the gardens, looking up at the pavilion, whose columns are remarkable stacks of stone, a bit like manmade hoodoos.

Coming from the pre-spring landscapes of the North, we appreciated the spring lushness of the place. Of all of San Antonio, actually.

At its web site, the city of San Antonio briefly tells the story of the Sunken Gardens, which is part of the larger story of Brackenridge Park, crown jewel of San Antonio municipal parks. “The restored garden features a lush year-round garden and a floral display with shaded walkways, stone bridges, a 60-foot waterfall and ponds filled with koi,” the site accurately says.

I call it the Sunken Gardens because that’s what everyone called when I was growing up, and maybe people still call it that, despite the official renaming. There’s nothing wrong with the official name, since it honors the pre-WWII history of the garden, but I see no reason to change.

This woman took a better selection of pictures of the garden than I had the patience to make.

San Antonio Missions National Historical Park

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People remember the Alamo. Mission Concepcion, not so much.

I hadn’t visited any of the San Antonio missions — formally San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, est. 1978 — in about 20 years, when I took Yuriko to see them. During our spring break, it was time to take my children.

Lilly seemed positively excited about Mission San Jose. Well, maybe. We also made it to Mission San Juan, which was an interesting enough structure, but not as interesting as the crucifix in the cactus patch.

On the other side of the cross, we noticed straps for arms and a place to rest one’s feet built into it. We figured that in a few days — we were visiting not long before Good Friday — someone would be on the cross.

San Antonio ’13

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We, that is Lilly, Ann and I, went to San Antonio last week to visit my mother, both brothers, a nephew, an aunt, and a cousin — from my point of view. For Lilly and Ann, they got to visit their grandmother, two uncles, a cousin, their great aunt, and another cousin.

We also saw a few places. Not much new for me, though including some spots I hadn’t seen in years, but new places for them. For them, San Antonio will always be, I hope, that interesting city where their dad grew up.

More about all that later. For now, though, prayers for my mother, their grandmother, who is recovering from a fall last Friday — a few hours after we left — that broke her hip. She had surgery over the weekend, and is still in the hospital.

R.I.P., Eleanore Triplett, whom we learned had passed away in Dallas while we were in San Antonio. She was my late sister-in-law Deb’s mother, Jay’s mother-in-law, and my nephews’ grandmother.

Spring Break

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Had a weird interlude recently during which this entire blog vanished. Found some 404s and one of those ads offering the domain name for sale. That was unnerving. Then it came back, as if nothing had happened. (And what happened? I like to imagine some guy tripping over a cord at a server farm on Malta.) For all its faults in the end, Blogger never did that. Guess the lesson is, don’t run your mouth for years and years at any one site.

And do some backup. Also: if you’re look for this site and it’s gone, it isn’t because I pulled the plug.

But enough of the mechanics of Internet posting. That’s like telling someone else about your dreams: dull, unless they’re in them, and I’m not sure how someone else would be involved in my posting.

This year, spring break for the school-aged among us coincides with Holy Week, and I have much to do so that I don’t have to do as much as usual next week. Back again around April 1 — Easter Monday, which we ought to have as a holiday, as many other countries do. We could secularize the name, if that would make it more palatable.

Longitude John

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I’ve been reading Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (1995), which is about John Harrison, solver of the Longitude Problem, and I came across this passage: “Sometime around 1720… Sir Charles Pelham hired [Harrison] to build a tower clock above his new stable at the manor house in Brocklesby Park.

“The clock tower that Harrison completed about 1722 still tells time in Brocklesby Park. It has been running continuously for more than 270 years, except for a brief period in 1884 when workers stopped it for refurbishing.”

Wow. I had to find out if that was still the case, and it seems that it is. That’s a clock tower I would go look at, if I were in the neighborhood. I saw the Harrison chronometers at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich before I had much inkling of what they were or what he did, but finding out things sometimes works that way.

Naturally, specialists are busy revising the legend of John Harrison, including this fellow, who asserts that the clockmaker might have farmed out some of his brass parts. Could well be, though I’m in no position to pass judgment on the matter. But even if it were true, that hardly takes away from Harrison’s achievement.

There’s even a song about John Harrison. That’s what we need more of, songs about generally obscure but remarkably important people, places or events.

Hints of Spring

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Despite the nearness of the equinox — which will inevitably be called ‘the first day of spring” when it arrives — winter grinds on here. Can’t call it spring. Large snowflakes came down much of this morning, though it wasn’t quite cold enough for them to last. Subfreezing temps expected at night for days and days to come.

The latest gas bill arrived the other day to drive home the fact that we’re still warming the house using natural gas. For the period February 12 through March 14 (30 days), 245.38 therms went for that purpose (including a few for cooking), or roughly 24.5M Btus. The bill also tells me that the average temp was 33 degrees F. for the period in question, compared with 54 degrees for roughly the same period last year. Natural gas prices are up, too, at least as reflected in the statement. Not sure what to make of that; last I heard, there was a glut.

I did see the tips of a few croci today, though not in my yard. And not long ago I heard a woodpecker, pecking at a tree in search of a meal. Only hints of spring, but better than nothing.

Bang, Zoom! Straight to Pluto!

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Comet? What comet? Can’t see no stinkin’ comet. Of course, it’s been overcast for a while hereabouts, but maybe when things clear up, I’ll go look for it. Trouble is, suburban lights have a way of washing out the sky, including stray comets, unless they’re really bright. I was amazed to be able to see Hale-Bopp, but it managed to be visible even on the North Side of Chicago.

What’s up with that name, Pan-STARRS (which I’ve also seen as PANSTARRS)? I checked, and it was discovered using a telescope of that name. I was under the impression that comets are named after their discoverers, but perhaps an automated system uncovered this one, though you’d think whoever was directing the research would be honored with the name. Then again, if the scan were really automated, you could call the telescope a sort of discoverer.

Today’s odd bit of information (space related, because checking on Pan-STARRS took me on some tangents): the New Horizons spacecraft, now much closer to the planet Pluto than Earth — 6.76 AU v. 26 AU — carries a visible and infrared imager/spectrometer called Ralph, and an ultraviolent imaging spectrometer called Alice.

Time for Three

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Lilly and I went to see the Elgin Symphony Orchestra play Tchaikovsky recently — Symphony No. 5 in E minor, part of the program called “Time for Spring” — and they did a fine job of it. But the astonishingly good part of the concert was the half-hour or so Time for Three was on stage. The trio, two violins and a double bass, set up in front of the orchestra and went to town, accompanying the orchestra on Concerto 4-3 by Jennifer Higdon, who apparently wrote the piece about five years ago with Time for Three in mind.

The trio – Zach De Pue, violin; Nick Kendall, violin; and Ranaan Meyer, double bass – were more than just energetic, technically adept young men, though they were certainly that. They went well beyond good musicianship, exuding their joy in working together, which wasn’t lost on the audience, who applauded frequently and stood for the three at the end (until they came out for an encore).

More about Time for Three is at the PBS Newshour web site, and while this YouTube video doesn’t really do them sonic justice – I’m not sure anything but seeing them live could – it still shows their range, and how they approached working together, and how enthusiastic the audience was. And of course it was filmed in the same hall as we saw them. In fact, it’s from roughly the same vantage point, except we were to their left, rather than their right, on the second row (which are the cheap seats at the ESO, but acoustically just fine).

The Slow Decline of the Yellow Pages

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A book of yellow pages showed up at our door the other day. Fewer of those arrive with each passing year, but arrive they do. It’s a little hard to remember when they were essential reference works for the house, but so they were.

And like any good reference work, it was good to browse through them occasionally. Almost 30 years ago, in Nashville, I remember thumbing through one edition – it must have been an “official” one by one of the Baby Bells – and coming across a quarter-page ad for a roofing contractor that promised DEATH TO ROOF LEAKS, complete with skull-and-cross illustrations. Who knows, maybe the Republican Guard was getting into the roofing business in those days.

The edition we just got covers a big chunk of the Northwest suburbs. It has some standard reference information in the front, including a map of North American area codes. The metro New York and Los Angeles insets are very crowded with numbers, and metro Chicago could probably stand its own inset, too, but doesn’t get one. Are there still any states with one area code? Yes. Quite a few, actually: Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.

Next are “City, County, State and U.S. government offices” pages, which were blue in some yellow pages, but white in this one. These are always good for finding some oddities, such as a toll-free number for information on adopting wild horses and burros, a number of the inspector general of the Peace Corps, and a general information number for St. Lawrence Seaway Lock Operations.

My packratish nature won’t let me throw it away for a while. But I doubt that I’ll need it to use it to call the St. Lawrence Seaway or anywhere else.

Come May, We’ll be in Clover

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Winter refuses to go quietly. Today was windy and raw, and just before dark, snowy. Not a vast amount, just enough to re-whiten the ground. But even so, winter is losing its grip. Before the snow started, I walked by a front yard that had the remains of a snowman: a lump of unmelted snow, a hat on top of that, and a carrot and some apples on the ground nearby. (Ann told me the apples were the snowman’s “buttons.”)

Got a note from a friendly yard-care company rubber-banded to my front doorknob the other day, offering its services in the spring. The note featured a checklist of “undesired weeds” in our yard, and according to the checklist we have chickweed, henbit, dandelions, and clover. How did this company know what I have in my yard? Yard spies wandering down the sidewalks last summer, making notes? It’s too soon yet for drones to do that, but someday no doubt they will.

Never mind. Those last two are easy enough, but I had to look up the others. Chickweed refers to a lot of different plants, so it’s one of those unhelpful common names that spurred Carolus Linnaeus to do what he did. Henbit is Lamium amplexicaule. I’m pretty sure we do in fact have henbit, dandelions, and clover in the yard. But they missed our pockets of mint, maybe because most of those are in the back yard, and yard spies who go there are trespassing.

But why are those three weeds? I’ve written about dandelions. As for clover, it’s clover. We’re not talking kudzu here. Clover is good. The expression “in clover,” though a bit old-fashioned, reflects that.  The OED puts it this way: “to live (or be) in clover: ‘to live luxuriously; clover being extremely delicious and fattening to cattle.’ ” We don’t have cattle, but who can look down on those little green plants mixed in with other grasses, with their three leaves and hardy constitutions, and think weed?