Rock Cut State Park

Two weekends ago, my wife and I went out to Rockford, Illinois to help my in-laws with some different things around their house.  I ended up creating a dry-well for one of their underground drainage pipes to drain into.  It was not as hard as I thought it would be, because after digging a hole about four feet deep, I hit sand.  That was a wonderful surprise considering the fact that if I was going to do the same thing in my yard, I would have hit clay at about two feet deep.  I also moved some gravel and added it to different places.

While I was doing that, my wife went to a local orchard there and came back with a good six bags of apples (which later turned into several quarts of very tasty apple sauce).  When both she and I were done with our different activities, we were able to go to Rock Cut State Park and observe how fall was hitting the state just about and hour and a half west of us.  (Interestingly enough, they are in a different zone than we are for growing plants).  There were a lot of cool things that I saw there...here are some of them:

This is a fungi of some sort we saw at the beginning of the walk.  Perhaps the Nature Nerd, Chicago Gardener, or someone else will know what type of fungi this is.  It reminds me of that egg-shaped building in London.

The Rockford area was definitely further along in the autumn season than where we live was.  There were a lot more leaves on the ground than in the forest preserve by our house.  That being said, there were several trees like this one.  The colors of certain trees (usually maples it seems) have been amazing this year. 

I loved the shape of this tree.

It was really a day to see different types of fungi.  I think this is another version of the one pictured above.  Maybe after it has started to open, but I could be wrong.










There were shelf fungi all over the place.

Finally, to find this was quite a surprise to me.  I didn't expect to see flowers and berries on a tree.  They were really beautiful.  If anyone knows what type of berries these are...

All in all, it was a nice walk.  We saw a few other things, such as a mass of what looked like milkweed bugs all over a rusted railing.  We also found a path that was supposed to be a bridge turned into a ford of sorts.  If I had had my boots, we would have gone across.  Maybe next time.  Rock Cut State Park has a lot more to explore.

Beauty - Invisible

People who know me, and some of the jobs I do, would probably find it a little surprising that there are many times that I find technology to be invasive and disillusioning. Times like that bring to mind a song from Marillion:

This is the 21st century
I heard everything you said
The universe demystified
Astronomy instead
This is the 21st century
Can't you get it through your head
This ain't the way it was meant to be
Magic isn't dead...

There are definitely many times technology seems to demystify and take the wonder out of the world. Life just seems to speed by.

Then technology - and astronomy - will bring across something like this.

Beauty can be seen in many things: the large, the small, the close, the far, the growing, and the There is a type of magic to it all. Now, with the help of technology, we can see the beauty in the dying and invisible.

The picture here was taken by the Chandra X-Ray observatory. It is of a dying star called a pulsar. This spins around extremely fast and spews forth x-rays in all directions. The high energy x-rays are colored blue, mid-range green, and low-energy red. The whole scene is 150 light years in size and is 17,000 light years away from us - so we are seeing something that is 17,000 years old!

The beauty of it all is quite evident, and we would never be able to see it with the naked eye. It is an invisible beauty that I was truly surprised and happy to see.