searching for sunlight

I needed this reminder today.

gerald of wales: The weasel also, when its young are dying from any hurt, recovers and restores them to life by the use of a yellow flower. We are told by persons who have witnessed the fact, having put the whelp to death to make the experiment, that the weasel brought the flower in its mouth, and first applied it to the wound, and then to the mouth, nostrils, and other orifices of the little animal, that it might inhale the odor, by which, through the efficacious touch of the plant, breath was restored, though life seemed extinct, some slight and imperceptible vestiges of it only having remained.

aberdeen bestiary: it is said, also, that they are skilled in healing, so that if by chance their young are killed, and their parents succeed in finding them, they can bring their offspring back to life.

thomas of cantimpré: Accordingly they are said to be expert in all the arts of medicine, so that, if they find their offspring dead, they make them naturally recuperate by means of a herb

also in marie de france's lai eliduc, guildeluec uses a flower she got from a weasel that was resurrecting its weasel friend to resurrect guilliadon

conclusion:

behold, a necromancer

If I say "just let me just get to a good stopping point," that is the devil speaking through me. If I get to a good stopping point, I wrap up a big chunk of a project, I put everything away, mentally and physically. Getting to a good stopping point means finishing up all the easy stuff you already figured out how to do, so the next step when you try to get back to it is all hard stuff, AND you have to get all the Tools and Materials out again? Nothing will come of this. One million quilt blocks be upon ye, and no finished quilt.

And if I say "I'll power through and finish now, and then I'll be done," this is an even bigger and meaner devil. I know I CAN work when I'm getting progressively more tired, hungry, or frustrated, but I also know my efficiently is going to start dropping rapidly. There is NO POINT in pushing through that, if you aren't in high school. Adult deadlines aren't real. File for an extension on your taxes and do that shit whenever. Don't finish Now. Finish in the morning, finish after lunch, after you've taken a little walk. You have to fight the demon that really really REALLY wants to be Done, because when you force yourself to work while not at your best you cause it to take twice as long and make you four times as miserable. I know you're thinking "but if I don't finish while I have motivation I might never finish", and that's true, but only if you stop WRONG

When people discuss the importance of using things, such as special plates, candles, special clothes- they will say that it's best to use them all the time, and that this makes each day special or something like that.

Which is only part of the picture if you ask me.

It's good not to hoard things forever, but if you use everything all the time, it also leaves certain special times as kind of indistinct from anything else. Like having a Christmas tree up all year kind of takes something away from it.

So here's my rephrasing: special things should have a concrete time of use, not an abstract one.

If you have an outfit you love but have it dedicated to only wear once a year on a specific day? Totally fine! You are using it, and it is contributing something to your life.

If you have plates that you'll only use 'for a special occasion' but haven't touched them in years? Evidently you don't know how to recognize a special occasion and should try and think of more specific qualifiers.

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

The infrastructure to make the county more "spongy" is also used in the dry season to remediate contaminated groundwater and to return recycled water to the aquifers.

Rain gardens are just shallow depressions, usually 6" to 12" deep at most, designed to to hold water for 24 or 48 hours until it soaks into the ground. All you need is a shovel and plants native to your area that have deep roots. I made a rain garden in my front yard that takes the discharge from my sump pump as well as a gutter. Even in a big storm, I have no runoff from that side of the yard. I have been know to take videos of my rain garden in a storm and send them to my gardening friends. Check out the rainscaping page at Missouri Botanical Garden for more methods of managing rainwater.