Crisis (Narrowly) Averted

As you may have noticed, the days are getting longer. (The hours of sunlight actually. Again, there are always 24 hours in a day.) This means that it gets dark later. Where I am it doesn't get dark until about 6:15, which I LOVE!!!! And even better, the hours of sunlight in the day increase every day and will keep doing so until about June 20th when we will get a full 12 hours of beautiful beautiful sunlight. That gives me something to look forward to every day till June! (I know, I'm simple that way)
So you can imagine that I was upset when I heard about the Chilean earthquake knocking the whole earth off its axis and thus decreasing the hours of direct sunlight it receives. (And just to be clear, this wasn't the most upsetting thing to me about the earthquake. I'm not that shallow. I was also really concerned about the increase in the cost of Chilean produce we are bound to see. Kidding!) Anyway, for somebody who is as excited about sunlight as I am this was bad, bad news. However, the sunlight crisis of 2010 has been narrowly averted. How narrowly, you might ask? By approximately 1 millisecond. That is how much less daylight we will see because of the shift in the axis. Impressive to a scientist, to be sure, but I think its something I can live with. 8 milliseconds is a dealbreaker though, so lets cool it with the earthquakes for awhile, eh mother nature?

Going Private...

Is not something I am going to do. Just thought I would let you know, since it seems to be the trend as of late. Maybe someday that will change but for now my readers (all three of them) can breathe easy and keep viewing without logging in : )

PS- This is not a jab at those of you who are going private. I just felt a little left out : )

More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Seeds

Or maybe just as much as you wanted to know. If you make it through the end of this post you'll have to tell me which it was.
After the post about the unexpected sunflowers I got a lot of questions about seeds and flowers and the like.
(Incidentally, my plans for roasted sunflower seeds never came to fruition {Ha ha, fruition, how appropriate}. There were several reasons for this , the main one being that the seeds never got very big. Maybe about half the size of normal sunflower seeds. Also, there were only two flowers so there weren't that many seeds in the end. Also I was lazy. Mainly I was lazy. It just didn't seem worth the effort to harvest, dry them, look up how to cook them and do so when I could go a few blocks and get a huge bag of ready to eat sunflower seeds for a couple of bucks. And in a variety of flavors like ranch and bacon. [Really and truly. They have bacon flavored sunflower seeds. To me they just taste like salt though, so they aren't my favorite.]
Anyway, back to the seeds. For lack of creativity on my part (I blame it on my un-stimulating job but it could be something I was born with. Or without, I suppose) I'm just going to list the questions and answer them.

Q1: How do you tell the difference between types of seeds?
A1: Well if I knew the answer to that I would be eating watermelon right now, wouldn't I? However, since the mishap with the sunflowers I have since learned that there are two other ways to identify seeds. The first is that they tend to look like the plant they grow into.

Case in Point

Mmmm. Gotta get some of those. However, the most reliable way is to consult an expert (read: not me), either a gardener or a book or maybe the internet. Whichever you prefer.

Qs 2&3: Can you eat raw/uncooked seeds and can you plant cooked seeds?
A: Yes and no, respectively. That is to say that, yes, you can eat raw seeds (with caution. More on that later) but you can't plant cooked seeds. Well, I guess you could plant them, but don't expect anything to grow from it. (Except maybe weeds. They seem to be the only things that are subject to spontaneous generation.)
Subjecting seeds to high heat (aka cooking) destroys their reproductive abilities, so planting cooked seeds would only be worth your time if you wanted to fertilize the soil.
As for the caution in eating raw seeds, some of them contain high levels of phosphorous, which through a complex physiological process that I won't go into detail about (meaning, I don't know ;) causes calcium loss in the body. (Actually, I vaguely recall something like that from physiology. That's not saying much though. Physiology itself is a vague recollection for me.)

Q3: Are there sunflowers without petals?
A: No. I have never seen one and couldn't find an example of one anywhere so I am making a cataclysmic decision that they don't exist. I mean, the first thing people generally notice about a flower is its color. Which is found on its petals. So if it has no petals it isn't really a flower, right? Sounds plausible, no? So that's what we'll go with.
However, there are a few flowers I found that if you squinted real hard and had really bad allergies and maybe some optic nerve damage you might mistake for a sunflower without petals.

Example AThis is a sunflower that has lost its petals. It had them once but they fell off. This has been known to happen from time to time and when it does people might think that it never had them to begin with. Hence, the petal-less sunflower.

Example B
(And the most likely, in my opinion)

This is called a yellow cone flower. It looks a lot like a sunflower and if it lost its petals I think it might just look like a sunflower without petals. Just maybe.

Example C

This is called a pineapple weed and its a stretch. But again, optic nerve damage can do funny things to your eyes, so maybe somebody could mistake this for a sunflower without petals.

Q4: What kinds of garden plants grow in Logan?
A: The person who asked this question isn't going to live in Logan after all so I am assuming he/she doesn't really care anymore, therefore I am not going to answer this question. Ha Ha Ha!
I will tell you though, that a hardiness zone is a geographically-defined area in which a specific type of plant is capable of growing and that a certain college town in northeastern Idaho is in hardiness zone 4. The zone number depends on the harshness of the winter and a 4 means an extreme winter low of -30 to -20 degrees Fahrenheit : ) So you can look up a particular plant's number and as long as it can survive that kind of cold then it will thrive in your area. Too bad people don't come with those numbers too.
Well, we have reached the end of this post and I have pretty much exhausted my knowledge of plants, so if you have anymore questions, you'll have to askSomeoneelse :)

Not Forgotten

Just wanted to say that I have not forgotten about your very interesting questions and I do plan on answering them. Soon. I just have been a little busier than I was expecting lately. So, be patient. In the meantime, tell me your favorite word (or words). For some reason I have been thinking about mine lately and one of them is penguin. I also like it in Spanish: pinguino (pin-gwee-no). Maybe more in Spanish, hard to say. Anyway, that's all for now. Thanks for continuing to read : )

Generally Not A Fan...

But for these I'll make an exception.

As a general rule, I don't like leggings. There are very few fashion trends from the 80's that should ever see the light of day again and in my opinion leggings are not one of them. Leggings in church, especially over dresses that are essentially long shirts, were once on my "things that must go" list. Just because they cover your legs doesn't mean they are appropriate in that setting. I mean, skin does the same thing right, so really why bother wearing pants at all? That being said, I think there are a few ways that they can be worn tastefully, though you will never see me demonstrate those ways. (I'm sure you all look to me as a fashion icon and take what I have to say about the subject very seriously, right? :)

Anyway, I randomly came across these skeleton leggings on the inter-web and there is only one word for them: Awesome! I so wish I had known about these when I was taking anatomy. Maybe I would have gotten a better grade :) Actually they're probably not really anatomically correct, but I still love them. Maybe because they remind me of this guy:

Did anybody else watch this show as a kid? I think I was a little too young to really get what he was teaching about the body but I thought his suit was cool, in a creepy sort of way. Apparently he still tours the country and does educational assemblies in elementary schools. (Sidenote: I would love to get his opinion of the full body scan machines at airports. Wouldn't it be kind of ironic if he were against them?)

Anyway, in conclusion, if any of you would like to wear the leggings shown above you have my express permission to do so and the official AskLinds Seal of Awesomeness, which I just made up but will now use in the future: ) Just make sure your shirt-dress covers your butt when you do.

A Lesson in Botany

This is a sunflower

More on that later. First, a few items of business. (Random information you probably don't care about knowing: Every time I spell the word business I pronounce it BUS-EE-NESS in my head, as in the big yellow bus. I do this because I used to have a hard time remembering whether it had one s or two. I also always say BEE-EE-AE-YOU-TIFUL when spelling beautiful, for much the same reason.) Anyway, the business.

Um, I have been a slacker. Every time I think about writing something on this blog it works up into such a monumental task in my head that I lose any sliver of interest I had. This wouldn't be so much a problem except that I have been doing it with many other things in my life as well. Such as communicating with my friends. If this is you (and it most likely is, because I think anyone who reads my blog is pretty cool and I would be your friend even if I don't really technically know you right now) then I apologize. I don't know why it is that when I feel most isolated and really need to keep in touch with people it becomes the last thing I want to do. Strange.

Anyway, I apologize and propose that as a partial solution we examine the name of this blog. That is, AskLinds. Now, if you separate the syllables in this name, you will see that it becomes two words: Ask Linds. Crazy, I know! But, in order to help me get out of this funk of slackerness and apathy, I propose that you the readers ask me some questions : ) (I know my track record for answering questions promptly is pretty poor but I think that the quality of my answers somewhat makes up for that, right? And I promise I'll try to do better) Anyway, like I tell people, I may not know everything (and definitely don't), but if I don't know the answer I'll make up something that sounds plausible to me :) So if you have something that you've always wondered about but never really gotten around to finding out, send me your thoughts and I will see if I can come up with something. I think it will be good for all of us.

That concludes the business portion of this post. Now back to these guys.

These sunflowers are about two feet tall and growing in my bedroom. This is due to a project that my dad conducts every winter to stave of his slackerness during the cold months, namely a mini-greenhouse. Being as how my bedroom gets ample sunlight from the two windows (which also allow ample cold in) the greenhouse is set up there. This has never really bothered me because I was always at school in the winter so I never saw much of it. This year, knowing that I would be living in the greenhouse, I decided that I might as well participate. So I decided to grow some watermelon.

This was a bit of an afterthought actually. My dad happened to notice some volunteer watermelon plants growing in the crack between our patio concrete and the grass. We figured maybe they had sprouted from people spitting seeds from the back porch. It seemed more sanitary than volunteer tomato plants and I don't like tomatoes anyway, so I brought them inside, visions of ripe watermelon in my head.

I was a little surprised after a few weeks to see that they grew straight up, rather than spreading like a typical vine, but I figured maybe they were trying to attach themselves to the blinds. But when they started to sprout big yellow flowers I suddenly remembered the bird feeder hanging from the back patio. The bird feeder which we stock with sunflower seeds.


Not exactly the juicy watermelon I had envisioned. Then again, it does brighten things up a bit. And maybe I'll get some roasted sunflower seeds out of it :)

I Get The Point

But I had to wait a good 4 or 5 years for you, so you're just gonna have to be patient little guy.