The weather forecasters are unanimous. This weekend–Mothers Day!–we are to be visited by rain turning to sleet turning to s#%@. Mama Nature will have her little joke. This raises the troubling question, what of Joanne and Tom, who are on their way here on their bicycles? Will they wish they had packed YakTrax?
Not to worry. They are still deep in the Deep South, pedaling along in oppressive heat, dodging thunderstorms and floods and speeding trucks. (You can follow their progress on the new page on Torch Lake Views: The Great Bike Trek of 2010. It resides at present on a tab up there next to Ourstory. After it’s finished it will move inside Ourstory, so if you’re reading this in the year 2050 or something you’ll just have to go there to look for it.)
By the time the Trek finishes up at Blue Heaven we will all be lolling about on the deck or the dock or the boat, take your pick, admiring the blue skies and the blue, blue water. OK, so this weekend isn’t looking so great. Fine. We’ll go out and about without our YakTrax while we can.
Myrtle twines about the stones that are meant to keep my house from sliding down the hill (so far so good). It is blooming with abandon, and the sight of it pleases me every time I walk past. Interspersed with the myrtle there is a lot of Yellow Archangel. I’m pretty sure it’s trying to invade the entire yard, but there are a lot of things in my yard that are trying to take over, and they’re giving it a good fight.
The Archangel has a certain feral look to it. Very Little Shop of Horrors. Meet Audrey. Lamiastrum galeobdolon to you, buster.
I am landlord to a variety of tiny creatures who do not acknowledge my ownership of the premises in the least. Take the midges for example.
Those miserable little black helicopters are everywhere, littering the beach, getting in the way of the Archangel’s closeup. I never did figure out their proper name last spring (we settled on “midges”) and now I don’t care. I just want them to go away. Given the weekend that’s coming, they will.
I know I showed you the forget-me-nots before, but I left out the white ones, so here you go.
That should hold us until it gets nice again.
Torch Lake Views 
P.j. grath
May 6, 2010
Yellow archangel and midges!!!!!! Gerry, you have outdone yourself. Is the archangel (do you name individual flowers, e.g., Gabriel?) an orchid, or what?
I refuse to focus on the coming weather weekend joke. It won’t last. It won’t even (I’m betting) accumulate. The you-know-what.
Gerry
May 6, 2010
(1) I don’t name them, but if I did I would have called the whole lot turtleheads. Unfortunately, that’s taken by an entirely different plant.
(2) They’re in the mint family.
(3) You’re probably right about the, you know . . .
Kathy
May 6, 2010
Snow…is…evil…at this time of year. I have to drive to Marquette Saturday. It can’t happen! Please contact your sources and tell them.
Gerry
May 6, 2010
Y’know, whenever I go to the Keweenaw, when it’s time to head back, I think, well, I’ll have a nice little stop in Marquette. It’s just down the road. Ha. It takes 11 hours to get from the pow-wow grounds to NW Detroit. Nine of those are eaten up getting to Marquette.
All this is leading up to saying, leave Friday morning. Spend a three-day weekend in Marquette. It’s a great place. You like it, I know you do. And the trip back, unaccountably, takes only an hour. Pack your YakTrax. Be of good cheer. We will all get through this together.
Scott Thomas Photography
May 6, 2010
You really should swap with Father’s Day. Much better weather then. 🙂 Don’t worry, this to will pass. BTW, my daughter in North Dakota did get the you-know-what accumulating so it could be worse.
Gerry
May 6, 2010
Gasp! The poor lamb! Is she rethinking her career options? That reminds me – ask her if she has a good recommendation for getting microfilmed newspaper records transformed into searchable newspaper records. I would like to find things in the Elk Rapids Progress (1870-1930) without blinding myself.
The Father’s Day swap has merit, except that we always have the Fly-in at the Torchport, and I think that’s sort of a guy thing. Mind you, I wouldn’t miss it, but it seems right that it should be on Father’s Day. (Can you tell that I just got back from the day job, which runs well into the evening, and that I am a little punchy?)
Krystal
May 7, 2010
LOL – Microfilm can get quite blinding huh? Does the library have a digital microfilm reader yet? I find using a computer screen is a little less harsh than the old-fashioned readers and more green, you can just PDF the screen and then email it to yourself.
As for making them searchable, the current trend is to digitize it all and then OCR it which makes them around 70-80% reliably searchable. Though OCR is getting better all the time especially for typed, printed material like newspapers. Think how the New York Times has set up their digital archive. Certain vendors will scan the microfilm for you and deliver up archival TIFFs which can then be processed down to JPEGs for ease of use. Sadly, that’s really the only way to go about it at the moment in terms of being able to keyword search a microfilmed newspaper.
Gerry
May 7, 2010
Hi Krystal! You’ve given me some good ideas here. Thank you.
Local history maniacs have had one local paper–the Central Lake Torch–turned into TIFFs that I can read on CDs at the library. I’m told the project cost $15,000 a few years ago. Wuff.
The Elk Rapids Progress is another story entirely. The microfilm exists. It has never been scanned.
It’s fascinating to see how eccentric OCR results can be. I’ve learned to search on a lot of different keywords when I’m on the trail of one of my Civil War vets. Sometimes, of course, I have to resort to page by page reading. Sigh.
Katherine
May 6, 2010
We are leaving for Kentucky on Sunday. Hopefully we’ll drive out of the S&*$%# in short order. Highs in the upper 70s there by Monday! YEA! Yeah, I know, I am rubbing it in. Sorry
Gerry
May 6, 2010
You are rubbing it in, but I can live with it. Enjoy yourselves. Come back refreshed and thinking about canning Pepper Water again.
Katherine
May 6, 2010
Love the photos by the way!!
Gerry
May 6, 2010
Thank you!
Preston
May 7, 2010
Them some nasty looking bugs however, nice capture.
Gerry
May 7, 2010
Thank you, Preston. They are extremely irritating bugs and there are gazillions of them. Fortunately, they’re only around for a short time. It just seems like a long time.
torchlakedays
May 7, 2010
SNOW??? Hmmmm….Maybe I’ll be a nurse in TL just in June, July and August… 🙂
Gerry
May 7, 2010
Please, no swearing on Torch Lake Views. 😉
I’ll tell you a secret. The very best time of all around Torch Lake is autumn. Don’t tell anybody else, though.
flandrumhill
May 7, 2010
Snow would be quite a shock to us all at this point. The myrtle (which I call periwinkle) are in bloom next to my house. The sight of it blooming gives me great pleasure too 🙂
Gerry
May 7, 2010
I hope you do not receive a shock. I hope that our shocking developments are fleeting. I have many unrealized hopes, alas.
Cindy Lou
May 7, 2010
I just took some forget-me-not pictures yesterday and they didn’t turn out near as good as yours! Beautimous spring flowers today!
Funny – I spelled s*@# almost exactly like you did in an email yesterday 😦
Gerry
May 7, 2010
Great minds, great minds. I find that my photos turn out more or less well depending largely on how frisky the dogs are and how busy the clouds are, shifting the light in a moment. OK, and sometimes–just sometimes mind you–depending on my aim and steadiness . . . !