Mycology

 

In retrospect, give my lifelong fascination with fungi of all sorts, maybe I should have been a mycologist. In any case, I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity these before and after shots of the fungus I tentatively identified in a previous post as Brefeldia maxima.

Footbridge

 

I stopped to talk with the contractor responsible for replacing this footbridge. Simple, right? 

Uhm, no. Few things in life are truly as simple as they seem. Part of what made this job more difficult was because it had to be built in an area certified as wetlands. But this area also serves as part of the plan to mitigate the effects of storm water runoff from a nearby housing development. AND, on top of all that, the drainage pipes running underneath the bridge had been crushed. So, of course, they had to be dug up and replaced. 

Fortunately, the contractor had experience in all these areas and was able--amazingly enough!--to get the job done in just a matter of days. He also thought it might have been a nice touch to install solar-powered lights. But, alas, no one wanted to foot the bill for those. So it is what it is, and a very nice change from the rotting footbridge it replaced.

Ox

 

You can almost immediately tell the difference between people who have been raised around farm animals and those who have not by the way they refer to the animal shown above. I have overheard many folks, including well-meaning mothers and fathers, refer to it as a "cow". Well, I guess in the broadest possible sense, they are at least on the farm, if not quite yet in the barn. 

It's actually an ox. While there are many more specific reasons why it's an ox rather than a cow, I like this explanation:

"An ox . . . is a bovine, trained and used as a draft animal. Oxen are commonly castrated adult male cattle; castration inhibits testosterone and aggression, which makes the males docile and safer to work with. Cows (adult females) or bulls (intact males) may also be used in some areas.

Oxen are used for plowing, for transport (pulling carts, hauling wagons and even riding), for threshing grain by trampling, and for powering machines that grind grain or supply irrigation among other purposes. Oxen may be also used to skid logs in forests, particularly in low-impact, select-cut logging." -- Wikipedia