Library display

The public library has a display window that attracts more viewers than the one in the Jasper County Historical Society. This month it features the knit and crochet guild.
I think that knitting takes two needles and crocheting takes one. If you have anything interesting to add, please use the comments.

Just garbage today

In Rensselaer, the city picks up garbage. Outside the city limits, a private contractor does. In the city there is a wide range of garbage cans, but in the country there is uniformity. Or is that conformity?
This picture was taken along Bunkum Road. This may sound strange, but I thought these garbage cans were rather pretty. With their bright red color they resemble Christmas presents. Or is that taking the idea that one man's trash is another man's treasure a bit too far?

Yup--it is a slow day.

White pine

I have been planning to do some posts on trees, especially the conifers, which are easier to identify in the winter than in the summer, and the freezing rain and the resulting ice that has covered everything has greatly increased my supply of pictures. A logical place to start after the ice storm is with the eastern white pine, a tree that suffered a lot of damage from the ice and one of the few native pines in Indiana.
The white pine is fairly easy to spot. First of all, it looks like a pine, not a spruce tree. It has long needles, and if you look closely at the needles, you will notice that they come in bunches of five. One of the keys to identifying pine trees is to notice how the needles are packaged. Some pines needles come in bundles of two, others three, but if there are five to a bunch and you are in Indiana, it is almost certainly an eastern white pine. The other key to identifying a white pine is the pine cone. It is long and rather ugly and no other pine tree (or conifer) around here has one that looks like it.
There a quite a few large white pines in Rensselaer. An impressive couple stand on the corner of College and Milroy, in front of the old Kannal House.

I took the above picture just a few days before our December ice storm. Here is what the scene looked like on the morning after the freezing rain.
If you start looking for white pines, you will be surprised at how many you can find. There are many on the west side of Sparling by St. Joseph's College, and there is a row along Bunkum by Weston Cemetery. They looked a bit strange with their coating of ice.
They lost a lot of branches due to ice and rather unceremoniously dumped them on one of the graves.
Below is a line of white pines that are south of Justin Hall at St. Joseph's College. Note the deposit of branches and needles under each tree. I did not see any white pines that did not lose at least one branch. The fact that they are native says that either they regenerate very well, or that the type of weather we have just experienced is not very common.
The white pine is commonly used as a Christmas tree.

Canadian geese

Checking out Lake Banet after the ice storm, I noticed a large number of geese on the ice. At least I think they were on ice--I do not think there is open water out there, but I am not going to walk out and find out.
Click on the picture to get a larger version, and then count the geese. How many are there?

Update: I was told that the proper term is Canada geese, not Canadian geese. I hope I did not offend too many Canadians.

Ice storm

On Thursday night and early Friday morning Rensselaer had an ice storm. It was predicted, but freezing rain is a tricky thing, and a little change in temperature changes it into sleet or rain. This time the forecast was right.
We lost power early Friday morning, as did large parts of Rensselaer and the some of the country side. We also lost TV cable and our Internet connection. We got power back mid morning, but TV Cable and Internet were out until Saturday morning. The telephone did not fail--the problem of land lines is not reliability, but obsolescence.

The crash of breaking tree branches started before dawn and continued for most of the morning. There was a lot of tree damage, but it was tree branches, not whole trees, and I only saw one case where a branch hit a house, and that only hit a porch.
City crews were removing branches, and they will have several days of work before they have gotten them all.

Not all trees were treated equally. The eastern white pines took a terrible hit and I will write more about that tomorrow. You could identify them simply by looking for the huge piles of branches under them. The birches showed their flexibility by bending over, but sometimes it was not enough.
Here is a willow at SJC that found the ice a bit too much to bear.
I am not sure what kind of tree this was--it might be an elm--but it was not a good kind of tree to have this week.
Here is another.Sometimes the problem was not with fallen branches, but branches that were down so low that they might be a problem for passing traffic. Here is an ornamental pear, a tree I have been planning to write about.

Nature attacked the Christmas decorations both with ice and falling branches.

What has been remarkable about this ice is how long it has lasted. Usually when we get freezing rain, the ice disappears pretty quickly. But more than 24 hours later and it is all still there.

This morning (Sunday, Dec 21) we are waking up to a bit of fresh snow, temperatures below zero, and howling winds. We are getting a real winter this year.