Welcome back, sun!
The Sacramento area has had the strangest weather this past spring. Temperatures 20-25°F below normal; rain and hail in the valley, and snow in the mountains; thunderstorms and even funnel clouds. These are not weather phenomena we see here very often at this time of year. In fact, an editorial in today’s Sacramento Bee compared our May weather to—gasp!—Portland, Oregon and added that by “exporting their weather” Portland may be “exacting some kind of cruel retribution” for “the flood of Californians that have moved there in the last decade.” That made me laugh because Californians are indeed considered a suspect bunch by many Oregonians.
Today, however, the sun is out and the sky is full of puffy white clouds. While some of them do look a bit menacing, the weather is supposed to finally return to normal, with temperatures in the 80s forecast for later this week.
I grabbed my camera during lunch time and snapped some photos in which the sky features prominently. It’s so good to see some blue after what seemed like weeks of incessant gray.
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| Black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra) |
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| Emerging culms of pigskin bamboo (Phyllostachys viridis) |
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| Baby Blue bamboo (Bambusa chungii ‘Barbellata’) |
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| Black Lace elderberry (Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’) |
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| Two coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) across the street |
Oh, how I wish it would only be in the 80's... Glad you got a break from the clouds!
ReplyDeleteI hate the nickname "pigskin bamboo". Ick.
Alan, I saw that you are in the high 90s. Yikes! But the humidity is great for bamboo, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI don't like the name "pigskin bamboo" either, but I'm always trying to use the common name if one exists because the Latin names are hard to remember for most people. I guess it's called pigskin bamboo because of the slightly dimpled culm surface. Not that THAT reminds of the skin of a pig, which in my very limited experience is hairy :-).
Pigskin bamboo, sounds macabre, hehe! Glad the sun's out for you :)
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