A playful bookshelf*
Stopped by Al Johnson's Swedish Restaurant in Sister Bay, Wisconsin. There are three shops surrounding the restaurant, packed with Swedish tchotchkes and Swedish-flag emblazoned items. Amidst the typical tourist-trap stuff, there were a few things that caught my eye -- women's footwear, beautiful plates and mugs, women's socks, several non-digital kids' toys, like the "Domino Race" game in the photo at the right. But my favorite item was this clever bookshelf made with (what I'm guessing is) a 1"x6" board. Maybe even 3/4". The "shelves" get bigger as you move upwards. The boards are held in place simply with screws from the reverse. The box frame is part of it.
Thoreau’s journal process*
Nov 16, 1850: (Journal, vol. 2, November 16, 1850)
My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of. I have no more distinctness or pointedness in my yearnings than an expanding bud, which does indeed point to flower and fruit, to summer and autumn, but is aware of the warm sun and spring influence only. I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can't discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seedtime with me. I have lain fallow long enough.
Thoreau’s writing went through several stages and many drafts before it became the works that you read today. A basic flowchart of his writing would start with field notes, which were then recorded as journal entries, next transformed into a lecture, afterwards an essay, and eventually part of a book. Though we often think of journals as recording our immediate experience, in Henry’s case the journal was a more deliberate creation. He took his field notes with him on walks in nature but typically did not record his experiences as journal entries until that night or even a few days later. The thoughtfulness and quality of his journal writings enabled him to reuse entire passages from it in his lectures and published writings. In his early years, Thoreau would literally cut out pages or excerpts from the journal and paste them onto another page as he created his essays.
Microclimates*
Toft Point contains several outstanding native plant communities concentrated on a 1-mile-wide peninsula along Door County's Lake Michigan coast. The natural area is bordered on the north by Moonlight Bay, and on the south by Baileys Harbor. There are more than two miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, with areas of wave-cut dolomite cliffs. Stretches of limestone cobble beach, mixed with marly soil, are exposed during periods of low lake levels.
The vegetation of the eastern shoreline, influenced by the cooling effects of Lake Michigan, consists of a narrow strip of relict boreal forest dominated by balsam fir and white spruce. The majority of the peninsula is wooded with a mesic forest of sugar maple, yellow birch, hemlock, balsam fir, and scattered white pine.
To the north, along Moonlight Bay, is an extensive calcareous sedge meadow that grades into shrub-carr and wet-mesic forest dominated by white cedar with occasional paper birch and black ash. Pockets of tamarack swamp and alder thicket are embedded in the wetland.
Extensive stands of hard-stemmed bulrush grow offshore in 1 to 4 feet of water offering cover and spawning sites for a variety of fish. The natural area provides a habitat for more than 440 vascular plant species and is one of the most diverse bryophyte (mosses and liverworts) floras in the state. Toft Point, along with the adjacent Ridges Sanctuary, contains many area-sensitive bird species including seventeen species of nesting warblers.
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