Idle Minutes

It has been in the high seventy’s and low eighties here in Georgia for a couple of weeks now. We even broke a record high for March one day.

This warmth has caused the grass to grow. It has also caused everything to take on a pale greenish yellow cast. That’s because dang near anything that is exposed has a thick coat of pollen on it.

This natural chain of events means I have to once again start cutting the dad burn grass. I did so Wednesday evening.

Can Something Be Learned From Cutting the Grass?

Of course! As I cut the grass, I noticed I was leaving a cloud of yellow billows behind me. Sometimes, this is due to flatulence, but not this time. It was the pollen.

By the time I had finished, complete with blowing off the driveway with my high powered, professional leaf blower, I had created a mystical wonderland of swirling pollen clouds and sent them traveling towards the neighbors’ homes. (I’m always finding ways to create stuff).

So, seeing as how the pollen was invading my life, causing myself and others to sneeze, cough, and wheeze, I decided to find out about this stuff and see if I could determine what a grain of pollen actually looked like. Google to the rescue.

Some People Have Unusual Interests

Electron beam microscopy provides images of eeensy, weeensy things in great detail. The link above takes you to one of those off the wall scientific research places where a group of people has bothered to make it their goal to photograph lots of different grains of pollen with an electron beam microscope. How interesting eh? Sounds like a great idea for a date.

Well, oddly enough, some of these little grains are quite unusual and interesting.

I chose to sketch this particular pollen grain because it looked “itchy” and “sneezy” to me. I mean look at it. Get a few hunerd thousand of those thingys up your nose and you’re going to sneeze pardner.

So I now know what is going up my nose during pollen season. It helps to know one’s enemies.

In the process of sketching it, I decided to see what plant creates the little buggers. Turns out it’s a “Henbit Deadnettle” (who names these things?? What do they smoke??). I found some photos of it here and a photo of a bunch of it’s seeds. The seeds were equally as interesting as the pollen grain so I sketched one of those as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen seeds that were spotted like a Hereford cow.

So there you have it folks. Another day of learning by sketching the mundane things of everyday life. Now if I could only stop sneezing.