I got to the dunes a little before sunset with clouds on the horizon. Despite recent frosty mornings on the Bluecircle the Lake Michigan mosquitos were still around, although too sluggish to pose a real nuisance. The colors shifted to an Autumn blend as the blue water turned to copper. A distant band of clouds threatened to obscure the partial solar eclipse entirely, but just at sundown patience was rewarded with a glimpse of the lunar shadow. 
The unnatural light of the moon
A “blood moon” in eclipse
Last week’s lunar eclipse was blessed by good weather at the lake and inspired some late-night camera work. The leaves are nearing peak color and the eclipsed moon added a seasonal touch.
An old post on this blog complained about light pollution from the neighboring condominium’s unshielded sodium lights. The electric company provided an unsympathetic response when challenged on the topic, so this light trespass continues. Like the full moon, these lights make moving about at night on the Bluecircle easier. They also contribute interesting effects to night images.
Barn bathed in the full moon and aglow with sodium light filtering through the poplars
At this posting the leaves are raining down in gusts across the lake and the night is starless. The moonlit grove of black locust below will soon be stripped and ready for the changing season.
Raising a ClearSpan in mushroom season
Recently a variety of mushrooms have taken advantage of the cool, damp mornings and plentiful rain to burst into the autumn sun. We decided to add outdoor storage to the Bluecircle and ordered a 20’x28′ fabric-covered ClearSpan “garage” early last month. From the catalogue its white fabric made it look a little like a giant mushroom, so the timing looked good. We began with a bed of crushed concrete, added a base of treated lumber, watered the whole thing down and waited for the delivery truck.
Construction lesson #1: The 3′ x 8′ coffin-shaped box of steel tubes that make the building frame weighed just a little less than the capacity of the Bluecircle tractor’s pallet forks – so far so good. However, the box and its pallet were loaded lengthwise on the truck – only its 3′ dimension could be manipulated from the rear of the truck and there was no room to turn it sideways to pick it up. With the driver anxious to keep his lunch date we gingerly pulled and slid the box onto a short stack of empty pallets behind the truck and he drove away. A practical, but noisy solution.
Construction lesson #2: No matter how many times you look through the 20-page assembly “guide” you are still going to mistake some hardware for something that looks like it, but just doesn’t fit. My reliable friend and neighbor George was my partner on this assembly job and between us and our wrenches we fit and re-fit until the right parts were in the appropriate places.
Rear wall of the garage with anchor legs in place
Construction lesson #3: Significant storm winds sweep over Paw Paw Lake so we decided to attach hinged steel feet to the base of the building rafters. This results in a very solid build, but the design of the mounting feet raises the entire building more than an inch off the ground. The end rafters of the garage are joined by a steel pipe that spans the entrance, and this “lift” meant a cement threshold had to be added to the design to allow equipment to drive into the building.
Construction lesson #4: Alignment of the large roll-up door was critical to the installation of the front wall covering and challenging to accomplish. Better instructions might have helped, and a temporary brace at the peak should be used even though not mentioned in the instructions. Adjustable mounting hardware for the vertical steel tubes that align with the door edges could have saved a lot of time.
So watering the crushed concrete and cool Fall mornings didn’t let this building “mushroom up”. It has already weathered its first thunderstorms and a lunar eclipse. Next up, lake effect snow!
Five-Star afternoon on Paw Paw Lake
Michigan inland lakes are glowingly described by Realtors as “all-sports lakes”. But on July and August afternoons the choppy waves criss-crossed by racing ski boats makes them fit for little else until sundown – or even later if a Sheriff’s patrol is absent. The intrepid kayaker risks being swamped, fishing is folly, and swimmers are banished to shallow coves. Only the broad platforms of pontoon boaters can cruise with some comfort unless they too are equipped to pull guests on wake boards or tubes. Perhaps our lakes should be called “motorsports unlimited lakes”.
Jet skies at sunset on Paw Paw Lake
Sailing Stars
To be fair, the year is more than two months long. A more balanced use of Paw Paw Lake begins in September, and the Paw Paw Lake Yacht Club recently sailed its fleet of five Star class sailboats. There is more fishing from small boats. Even the remaining ski boats have slowed – perhaps to enjoy the changing season.
Flies you see and stings you flee
Late summer – the nightly serenade of the cicadas and the daytime buzzing of cicada-killer wasps. A vocal cricket has taken up residence in the studio, and a new colony of yellow jacket warriors has an underground bunker beneath a struggling grape vine. I found these nasty defenders – or rather they found me – armed only with a string trimmer with shorts and a T for “body armor”. As I scurried away from multiple stingers I left a hat, sunglasses, then the trimmer in my wake. Must have looked like (a large clumsy) Peter Rabbit leaving the McGregar garden. The tall weeds in this row will have to stand undisturbed till cold weather comes.
A relatively unusual fly found its way to our deck yesterday. According to Buggide.net (http://bugguide.net/bgimage/recent/28001) this is a Peacock fly, Callopistromyia annulipes, about 10 mm in length. It comes from a family of flies known as the “Picture-winged flies” . Besides displaying its wings in the peacock mode it can rotate and fold them on its back, looking more like a regular fly but far less interesting.
Peacock fly on the deck rail
Green and gold in the Bluecircle garden
Potato flowers on a summer afternoon
This year the garden moved up the hill in hope of more sandy loam and less clay. The early vegetables spinach and broccoli were mediocre but snap peas and bush beans grew well, as did onions, green peppers and tomatoes.
Neighbors Bob and George invested their sweat and coin in several rows of potatoes. They have flourished, with an abundance of blossoms and only one attach of the dread Colorado potato beetle. The bright “alarm” orange of the beetle’s larvae made them easy to spot and fortunately no one had an opportunity to see any of the full-grown beetles – at least not this year. The speck of white insecticide on the bug’s back was very effective.
Attack mode, potato beetle larva
A surprise came from the “Summer jackpot hybrid zucchini ” seeds from Gurney’s Seed and Nursery. Besides the dark green, pale green and deep gold varieties of zucchini that grew on well-behaved bushy plants, an unusual vining squash threatened to take over a corner of the garden. It produced dozens of 4-6″ pale yellow fruits striped in gold. The inside was pale green and buttery-sweet when steamed. It will take until next year to find if we can regularly grow these attractive squash, but it would be hard to pass them off as zucchini!
The vining “Bluecircle hybrid” squash
The mystery of the green beads path
Most Bluecircle months yield discovery. In March the melting drifts finally gave way to brown sand and sticks, but colder than usual weather delayed the first bits of green that promise the growing season ahead. On cloudy days the Conservancy woods looked as much dead as alive. Toppled and broken trees, victims of storms or disease, mutely block paths or place heavy burdens on their standing neighbors. But swaying of still limber treetops in the afternoon wind argues that the broken grove will survive.
Green beads turned from a sandy path
So what about the mystery? A day or two after St. Patrick’s Day the thin roots of an uprooted tree bled green, dripping glassy beads into the sandy crater where it recently stood. If it had not fallen at the edge of a walking path, and if its limbs and branches had not obstructed other ways up the hill the beads would not be seen – unknown they would have washed back into the sandy subsoil.
There were no holes in these beads so they would not have come from a broken string. There were too many to have decorated lost jewelry, or a sash.
To be entangled in roots of a substantial tree they must have been lost many years ago. Their past is a unknown – but those that remain on the path have already rejoined the woodland cycle of growth and regeneration.
Planting completing, mowing ongoing
A class of 2014 baby poplar
The end of May and the last of this year’s hybrid poplars, pines and oaks finally made it into their assigned spaces. Competing priorities this year included staying ahead of rapidly growing grasses throughout the Bluecircle, thanks to regular rains, and a new garden plot. Another project, new oak flooring in the kitchen addition, came from “sustainable Appalachian forests”. It’s premature to claim success with oaks, but at least some of our tiny red oak seedlings survived the onslaught of hungry rodents under our now-departed snows.
Tree flags keep the tiny trees mostly safe from mowers and sprayers. 
Frigid waves of ice and sand
St. Joseph Lighthouse
Few beachwalkers leave prints in the icy sand this season, but steady westerlies sculpt mountains of accumulated lake ice into frigid, static waves on the Lake Michigan shore just west of the Bluecircle. South of St. Joseph the ice shelf is narrow, but to the north it stretches to the horizon. The wind has stacked the shelf ice, then partnered with February sun, a transient thaw and blowing sand to create a unique landscape at the foot of the dunes. Most years this scene soon would be melted, but current forcasts for at least another week of subnormal temperatures mean it will persist and evolve.
Snow tracks in the woods and on the lake
The warming February sun has been unable to stay ahead of daily bursts of lake effect snow. Conditions for cross-country skiing have been excellent both on the edges of the Bluecircle and at the nearby Sarett Nature Center. Although most of the Center trails are less than a mile long they loop together through a pine stand, several meadows, and above the Paw Paw River east of Coloma. Showshoe trails are separate from the groomed ski trails.
Pine Tree Loop, Sarett Nature Center
Paw Paw Lake is used by a few skiers, often taking advantage of snowmobile tracks to provide a path through the drifts. Today’s changing weather featured a fleeting “cloud rainbow” probably produced by the icy winds aloft.
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