Tummy Thursday

Or “never trust a recipe over experience”.

Last year, the blackberries fell victim to a hungry deer that ate all the flowers. This year, they#re getting ripe and are delicious, so I decided to make muffins.

I googled a basic recipe for cream cheese and blueberry muffins and came up with the following:

  • 1/2 cup of oil
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 4 oz cream cheese
  • vanilla
  • 1 egg
  • 1.5 cups flour
  • 1.5 teaspoons baking powder
  • 0.25 teaspoons salt
  • 1/2 cup buttermilk
  • blueberries

OK, I exchanged the oil for butter and the buttermilk for Greek yoghurt (which was only a quarter cup), yet still it seemed to be a lot of liquid, but well, that#s what the recipe said. The taste was delicious, but they did what muffins do when they are too wet: they crawled all over the baking tray.

Next time, less yoghurt.

unbaked blackberry muffins in a tray

Looks good
© Giliell

Baked blackberry muffins.

Tastes good
©Giliell

Jack’s Walk

Barachois, Gaspe Peninsula©voyager, all rights reserved

This is one of two public beaches in a small community that sits on the northern edge of the Malbaie Salt Marsh called Barachois, which fittingly means salt marsh in French. We don’t come to this beach very often because it is mostly sand an I find sandy beaches pretty boring. I’d much rather go to a stony beach where you can beach-comb for treasure. I’ve found all sorts of interesting things on the beaches of Gaspe; fossils, agates, seaglass (I have a large collection of this), pretty stones only some of which I can identify, bones and driftwood. I collect and then negotiate with my husband about how much I am allowed to take home. As a result I have collections here and there. At home I’ve made a little beach that grows year by year, but here my treasures mostly live in jars because the real beach is so close by. I say you can keep your groomed white sand beaches. Give me the sticks and stones and bones on a beach full of treasure.

Wednesday Wings

This week’s Wednesday Wings come from avalus, who writes:

Usually I can not take pictures of birds with my cellphone cam due to the lack of good zoom. But last week a friend and I helped this little fellow to escape the architectural nightmare and birdkiller, that is the our chemistry departent building. It is made of lots of glass and with windows in odd places and every so often we find birds that have flown in but could not escape again and died. This one was already pretty exhausted, as I doubt we could have caught it with the box otherwise. It did not put up any resistance.

This story had a happy end, we released the little one a minute or so after taking this picture: We took away the cardboardpane we used to cover the box, the little one looked at us puzzeled, left droppings in the box and flew away.

 

I do have no idea what kind of bird this is.

Young bird sitting in a lab

©avalus

 

I think it’s a juvenile Redstart that got caught in the lab.

Jack’s Walk

Weighty things on his mind today, ©voyager, all rights reserved

Jack did a lot of swimming at the beach today. Usually he’ll go after a stick a few times and after that he prefers to just paddle around close to shore. Today, though, he couldn’t get enough. Again and again he wanted us to throw out a stick for him to bring back. He kept it up for close to half an hour which is a lot of exercise for a 10 year old puppy. By the time we got home he was totally exhausted. He followed me into the bathroom, laid himself down and proceeded to sleep for the next 2 hours just as you see him here.

Anatomy Atlas Part 20 – Lungs

Our amazing breathing sacs, evolved from an invagination of our gut. Had that invagination been dorsal rather than ventral, we might be spared that awkward crossing of tubes that makes eating and breathing at the same time so dangerous task.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Id did not go too much into detail here, but I did outline the branching of bronchi and bronchial tubes somewhat. Which is an interesting issue in and of itself.

The tubes do not simply split willy-nilly, the branching is really intricate and is optimised so that at every fork the air pressure stays the same, thus guaranteeing that all tubes contribute to the air exchange and there are no (ideally) pockets of stationary air. This is no easy task for engineering, piping is difficult to make and ventilation systems in buildings often need additional ventilators added to the pipes at various places to compensate for pressure drop at some junctions.

In our lungs this is partly achieved by the fact that there are no right angles anywhere and partly by the fact that the forks are arranged in such a way as to reach all the alveoli with the shortest possible amount of piping. In modern engineering such tasks beyond certain level are allegedly sbest solved by evolutionary algorithms, because there are too many variables involved for simply designing them right of the bat.

Itsy Bitsy and Very Lively

I dug out more spider pics, because, why not?

I have made these pictures last year, but I never got round to send them. These were one of the first macro shots I have made, when I still did not know what I am supposed to do (I still do not, but slightly less so).

This spider is slightly translucent and very small – that mesh is just a few mm across, it is the texturing on a sheet of extruded polystyrene that I have used to make thermally isolating covers for my sewage treatment facility.

I love the copper colour of the abdomen contrasting with the translucent green of the thorax and the legs. It looks like made from glass or gemstones and precious metal. Actually it could be a nice inspiration for a jewelery, if it were not a spider. But maybe there is a market for spider shaped jewelry?

I just could not get a good shot at its face. It was running around constantly and in all possible directions, not staying still for a moment. But I noticed that under certain angles its eyes seem to reflect light like cat’s and I managed to catch that on a few shots. Then I have let it scuttle away, taking care to put it in a place where I will not squish it.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Tree Tuesday

Our tree this week comes to us from down under. It’s an almond tree is glorious bloom sent to us by Lofty, who says,

With our crazy seasons the almond trees think it’s spring already.

The photo was taken several weeks ago which is definitely too early for spring blossoms. I sincerely hope the trees will settle into a good growing season despite the premature start. I’ve never seen an almond tree before and had no idea they were so pretty. Thanks so much for sharing, Lofty.

©Lofty, all rights reserved

©Lofty, all rights reserved