Dead trees

Moon phase: Waxing crescent
Weather: Warm & sunny

Here's my first picture from my recent trip to Maine. Lots more on the way...

Mugwort leaf

Moon phase: Waning crescent
Weather: Hot and raining

The underside of a mugwort leaf (Artemisia vulgaris). Mugwort has a number of uses: it's a flavoring for meat and beer, it's used as an emmenagogue/abortifacient, and it's used to induce lucid, vivid, and prophetic dreams, among other things. It's a non-native plant, but I still love it.

More info from my herbs site.

Spiderwort

Moon phase: Waning crescent
Weather: Hot & humid

Spiderwort flowers (Tradescantia virginiana).

Hawk

Moon phase: Waning crescent
Weather: Endlessly hot & humid
Phenology: Black-eyed susans are blooming

A hawk on McKinley Street in NW. For a while there were a pair I would see around there occasionally, but I haven't seen them in a while. Based on the tail markings, I think it's a juvenile red-tailed hawk, but I'm far from an expert.

Assateague sky

Moon phase: Waxing gibbous
Weather: Hot

The last photo from Assateague. I'm going out of town for a week, but when I get back I'll have lots of photos from Maine to go through.

Sand shadows

Moon phase: Waxing gibbous
Weather: hot, humid, thunderstorming

Yesterday the Post had an interesting and sad article on a Wiccan army sergeant who was killed in Afghanistan last year, who ought to have had a memorial in his local veterans cemetery in Nevada, except that the US Department of Veterans Affairs refuses to recognize the Wiccan symbol, the pentagram. They gave his wife the option of having a blank memorial with just his name, but she decided to forgo a memorial there altogether. The VA recognizes 38 religious symbols — including one for atheists, an atomic symbol with an A in the center — but efforts to secure recognition of the pentagram in recent years have failed.

This is, of course, completely unfair and unconstitutional. I don't even see why the VA needs to recognize symbols anyway — shouldn't the veterans themselves have the right to decide what they want on their graves, without any of this bureaucratic nonsense? But I also think it's interesting to note that though Sikhs have an accepted symbol in the VA, there are (according to a quick Google search) only about 500,000 Sikhs in the US and more than 700,000 Neo-pagans (note that most Neo-pagans are Wiccans, and even among those that aren't, most use the pentagram as their primary religious symbol). That's not to say that there are necessarily more Neo-pagans in the military than there are Sikhs, especially since many Neo-pagans are pacifists, but it just goes to show that it has nothing to do with Wicca being a fringe religion or anything like that; it's all about prejudice. There's still a perception in our country that Wicca is equivalent with Satanism, and probably the VA just doesn't want to have graves with the pentagram on them.

Dune fence again

Moon phase: First quarter
Weather: Hot
Phenology: Wineberries!

Another photo from Assateague.

Today I had the day off, and I spent an hour picking wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) which are the most delicious raspberry species. Technically, picking them where I did is illegal, but it really shouldn't be because it's an invasive species that the park is actually trying to get rid of, so they can't complain. Of course, I recall that last year there was a case in Montgomery County where people were picking mugwort in parks and the park officials were trying to stop them — and then bringing in goats to get rid of the mugwort. So parks are not always very logical in their rule-making. Anyway, I brought home about a quart and ate a whole lot off the bush as well. They're really best eaten right away; they're even a little warm from the sun.