Amaryllis in Winter

 

We have two huge amaryllis plants that we grew all during the Summer and that bloomed near the end of the Summer. Conventional wisdom dictated that we give the bulbs a rest in the summer and let them dry out in a dark place so they would bloom in the winter. We kept watering them all summer and were rewarded with huge blossoms. We brought them in the house in the Fall and continued to water them but quit watering them for about a month in November-December. By this time, they both had lost all their leaves but shortly after we started watering them again, they began to grow and both bloomed profusely in January. Quite a treat. I also gave them a little general-purpose fertilizer in December. We aren't sure how long they will last. They have grown so large they probably need to be repotted. The lesson here is don't always believe conventional wisdom. 

Sun Dog

 

I got a call from one of my daughters who told me to go outside and look at the sun dog. This turned out to be one of the brightest and most distinctive sun dogs I had ever seen. Most people are not aware of this phenomenon but it is not uncommon. What is uncommon is to have the sun dog almost as bright as the sun itself. If you don't know about sun dogs see the following Wikipedia article, "Sun dog." Here is a quote from the article.

Sun dogs are commonly caused by the refraction and scattering of light from plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals either suspended in high and cold cirrus or cirrostratus clouds, or drifting in freezing moist air at low levels as diamond dust. The crystals act as prisms, bending the light rays passing through them with a minimum deflection of 22°. As the crystals gently float downwards with their large hexagonal faces almost horizontal, sunlight is refracted horizontally, and sun dogs are seen to the left and right of the Sun. Larger plates wobble more, and thus produce taller sundogs.

Sun dogs are red-colored at the side nearest the Sun; farther out the colors grade through oranges to blue. The colors overlap considerably and are muted, never pure or saturated.[4] The colors of the sun dog finally merge into the white of the parhelic circle (if the latter is visible).

The same plate-shaped ice crystals that cause sun dogs are also responsible for the colorful circumzenithal arc, meaning that these two types of halo tend to co-occur. The latter is often missed by viewers, since it is located more or less directly overhead. Another halo variety often seen together with sun dogs is the 22° halo, which forms a ring at roughly the same angular distance from the sun as the sun dogs, thus appearing to interconnect them. As the Sun rises higher, the rays passing through the plate crystals are increasingly skewed from the horizontal plane, causing their angle of deviation to increase and the sun dogs to move farther from the 22° halo, while staying at the same elevation.

It is possible to predict the forms of sun dogs as would be seen on other planets and moons. Mars might have sun dogs formed by both water-ice and CO2-ice. On the gas giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—other crystals form clouds of ammonia, methane, and other substances that can produce halos with four or more sun dogs.

By the way, the sun is on the left.  

Funeral?

 One of the things that you do when you have been a genealogist for most of your life is to visit cemeteries. We have been walking recently in the Provo City Cemetery in Provo, Utah visiting a few of the grave markers of my relatives and using this quiet place to exercise. I ran across this sign and could not resist taking a photo. 

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Hollyhocks

 

From Wikipedia: Alcea, 

Hollyhocks are annual, biennial, or perennial plants usually taking an erect, unbranched form. The herbage usually has a coating of star-shaped hairs. The leaf blades are often lobed or toothed, and are borne on long petioles. The flowers may be solitary or arranged in fascicles or racemes. The notched petals are usually over three centimeters wide and may be pink, white, purple, or yellow. The fruit is a schizocarp, a dry disc divided into over 15 sections that contain seeds.

 

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Remembering Flowers in Winter

 

As I sit here looking out the window at snow on the ground, I remember the flowers of spring and summer. The whole issue actually comes from the fact that I lived most of my life in the low desert of Arizona and now live 5000 feet up the side of a mountain in Utah. We always had flowers in the desert. In fact, Winter was when the summer flowers bloomed in the world outside of the desert Southwest. This lovely water lily reminds me that there are places where it is warm. 

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Koi

 Here is a description of these fish from Wikipedia Koi:

Koi (鯉, English: /ˈkɔɪ/, Japanese: [koꜜi]) or more specifically nishikigoi (錦鯉, [ɲiɕi̥kiꜜɡoi], literally "brocaded carp"), are colored varieties of the Amur carp (Cyprinus rubrofuscus) that are kept for decorative purposes in outdoor koi ponds or water gardens.

Koi is an informal name for the colored variants of C. rubrofuscus kept for ornamental purposes. There are many varieties of ornamental koi, originating from breeding that began in Niigata, Japan in the early 19th century. Several varieties are recognized by the Japanese, distinguished by coloration, patterning, and scalation. Some of the major colors are white, black, red, orange, yellow, blue, and cream. The most popular category of koi is the Gosanke, which is made up of the Kohaku, Taisho Sanshoku, and Showa Sanshoku varieties.

Gold on Quartz

 Gold is commonly found in association with quartz. However, large gold nuggets such as this one are exceedingly rare. At the time of this post, gold was selling for $1,855.62 an ounce. Historically, the official U.S. Government gold price changed only four times from 1792 to the present. Starting at $19.75 per troy ounce, raised to $20.67 in 1834, and $35 in 1934. In 1972, the price was raised to $38 and then to $42.22 in 1973. Since 1968, the price of gold has been free to fluctuate.