Maple light

Moon phase: Waxing gibbous
Weather: Unseasonably warm

The red maple (Acer rubrum) in my back yard in late summer.

Reflection

Moon phase: Waxing crescent
Weather: Cold

Trees reflecting in Rock Creek.

Sugarloaf

Moon phase: Waning crescent
Weather: Windy

The view from Sugarloaf, with the Potomac River below and the Blue Ridge in the distance.

And the view of Sugarloaf, a lucky shot due to construction in the road.

Turkey vultures

Moon phase: Waning gibbous
Weather: Cool

Last month I made a trip up to Sugarloaf Mountain in Dickerson, Maryland, which is one of my favorite places. I spent a couple of hours just watching the turkey vultures flying around — they got so close sometimes I could see individual feathers.

I also saw a raven at one point, identifiable by its wedge-shaped tail, although I didn't get a picture. Since ravens shun civilization, the closest they come to DC is the Appalachians, and Sugarloaf is just a little east of the Blue Ridge. Still, I was surprised to see it since I've only seen them in Wisconsin and Maine before.

Spider Flower

Moon phase: Waning crescent
Weather: Cold & rainy
Phenology: Maximillian sunflowers are blooming

Wild lupine (Lupinus perennis) Spider flower (Cleome hassleriana) in Rock Creek Park.

Jewelweed

Moon phase: Waning crescent
Weather: Cold

Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), aka spotted touch-me-not, is my favorite flower. Nothing else has such a weird shape or that bright orange color. And the juice is a poison ivy antidote.

Witch hazel leaves

Moon phase: Waning gibbous
Weather: Cold

Blogger wasn't working for the last month, so I've got a lot of photos to catch up on. Here's some witch hazel leaves (Hamamelis virginiana) in Rock Creek Park.

Ted Haggard and Internalized Homophobia

Moon phase: Full moon
Weather: Cold and windy
Phenology: Maples are turning

Yet again, another right-wing asshole who's been calling queers immoral and fighting against same-sex marriage has been outed as gay himself. Ted Haggard always seemed ultra-creepy to me — I first saw him in Tom Brokaw's series on Evangelism in America last year, and more recently I saw him in Richard Dawkins' The Root of All Evil (where he summed up evolution as an "accident" and then kicked Dawkins out for "calling [his] children animals"). I thought he was a typical, deranged Fundie. But I'm not surprised that he's gay. It's true again and again that the most virulent homophobes are so up in arms about it because they're gay themselves: their religion has convinced them that they're perverted sinners, so they hate themselves, and then they take all that hate that's focused inward and spew it out to the rest of us in the form of sermons.