WTF-Beta

Just as the Midwest heads into tornado season, hurricane season is coming up as well…

My colleagues and I are talking about this article. It's truly distressing. And some of them didn't have any sense that this is happening to the extent it is.

I started changing a lot of the assessments I do in fall 2023 because of ChatGPT, but what I do doesn't work in all classes, and then some instructors haven't even adapted any of their classes....

But anyway, yeah, things are bad and they're going to get worse....

Cantaloupe

Daddy-o

History suggests that the systems will not be maintained until there are several disasters. But the disasters could be avoided if voters understood the importance of their water supply, and made clean water a priority.

We will probably have to go through the former before we get the latter.

BTW talking with Mr SK just now about the info in those links, he said he suspects that the problem is probably from the harsh winter we had this past year, and the invader is just a coincidence.

That seems pretty likely.

It doesn’t necessarily change what we have to do though.

Thanks for those links @wtg I googled about that the red stem and my uneducated conclusion is, it’s inconclusive

@wtg said in Gargening help! Can my weigelia be saved?:

The fact that it looked good last year but didn't leaf out on one side might be related to something that happened during the winter.

That was my original guess as well, but based on the location of the invader, I wondered if that could be choking out the roots on one side. But I wasn’t sure if that would make sense, in other words, if something is choking the roots, would it affect the whole plant or could it be localized like that.

TBH, given that one half of the shrub has leafed out and is blooming, and the other side looks like it does, I think that side of the shrub is dead and I'm thinking you'll have to cut the dead branches to the ground and hope that you get new growth from the base.

This is what I suspect to be the case, whatever the cause

Another note - the weigela hasn't been pruned properly over the years. It looks like the ends of the branches have been pruned to maintain the desired size. This results in witches' brooms, with all the new growth at the ends of the older branches coming up from the ground.

Mr SK has been trying to learn more about this kind of thing. I don’t think our hydrangea had been pruned well either, so he cut it back in the fall and it seems to be doing well at this point.

Here's a guide to pruning weigela:

https://horticulture.co.uk/weigela/pruning/

Thanks!

Here’s what it looked like last July before Mr SK shaped it.

@Bernard said in Gargening help! Can my weigelia be saved?:

You might cut the whole thing down to the ground and see what comes up?

Yeah, I was just reading about that. Oof, cutting the whole thing down to the ground might be the thing to do, but it will make such a hole there...

I'll have to see if I can find a pic from last year, it was so pretty.

My weigelia looks like it's dead on one side, the other side is greened up and flowers are out. This has been such an odd spring, with warm days and cold days, I thought it was just coming out lopsided because of the weather, but now I'm afraid my weigelia is either dying, or being attacked. Let me go grab some photos.

Here's the bush:

See the random branches on the left? As far as I can tell, that's coming out from the bottom middle of the left side, it looks to be entwined to me.

This bush was so beautiful last year, I'm afraid it may be a lost cause

Here's what it looks like on one side right now, IOW what it's supposed to look like all over:

Here's what I assume is the invader:

My plant identifying app identifies this as a type of pear, it comes up with a few options, including the Bradford, which I know is super invasive. Mr. SK said he'll try to get in there and take that part out, but does anyone know if there's anything we can do to save the weigelia bush?

Also, I'm not confident we'll be easily able to extract all of the invader, so if anyone has any advice about that, please share!

thank you in advance!

Yep. And this:

they’re not going to find success by searching for a “more perfect form of socialism or progressivism.”

And this:

When asked how the Democratic Party could realign itself, Scaramucci argued it should “overarchingly be a pro-Constitution, pro-democracy party” to reject Project 2025 and “unitarian executive power.”

I have to say, I also agree with his comment about not going too far to the left as well.

It sounds like very sound advice.

Will anyone heed it?

@wtg Wow!!

Yep. As @Steve-Miller points out, there are lots of ways to make cuts without jeopardizing vulnerable people.

Also re homeless, affordable housing etc., what about all the studies showing that subsidizing housing ends up costing less than having large populations of homeless?

This country has the ability to take care of its weakest members, it just doesn’t have the right mindset.

Thanks for the link @wtg interesting stuff… also the possible research use cases (not discussed in the article) are interesting. Some of my colleagues do research thst uses eye tracking and you can only do it in a lab because you need big equipment. If you could do it just with a pair of glasses (and say, a smart phone app to record it) you could expand your research in so many ways!

Back to the article…

currently the thinking is that these will be priced not like bifocals (which you can buy in shops for under $10), but like consumer electronics, comparable with “a high-end iPhone” at first.

My progressive lenses are already expensive enough, I want the same vision quality for less, not more!

The use case, they say, is to make it easier for different segments of bad-vision consumers: for those who need to have glasses to see up close and far away, to have only one pair of glasses instead of carrying multiple pairs of glasses; for those who already use varifocals but have found those progressive lenses clumsy to use and wear; and, it seems, even for those who have in the past opted for laser eye surgery to correct their vision.

I am one of those people who needs to have two pairs of glasses: one pair with progressive lenses for general use and one pair with mid-distance single vision lenses for piano and computer. It’s a pain in the rear. But I can’t use progressive lenses at the piano, or at the computer for that matter, because the view area is too small. At the piano, my progressive lenses make it look like the keyboard is curving… and at the computer, my progressives require me to move my head up and down and it’s awful.

So the single vision lenses are great for vision, but if I’m on my computer in my office and someone comes to my door, I have to change my glasses…. Or if I’m at the piano, like in the recital last week, and I look up, I can’t really see the people in the audience clearly.

So that’s annoying. I suppose those cases make me a good candidate for some kind of autofocus lens, but I’m skeptical for now…

I get a lot of my news from NYTs, CNN, AP and then Japan sources (NHK, Japan Times, and the three papers)

I love that!!!

I’m really sorry to hear this @Cindysphinx , I can only imagine the stress of it all for you.
Keep us posted on how things go as you figure out your next steps!

@Big_Al said in Valerie has been rescued!:

Vaalerie had som mad survival instincts.

This cannot be stressed enough! A teeny tiny dachshund, survived on her own for what was it, a year and a half? That's crazy!!!

@wtg said in Valerie has been rescued!:

She managed to escape from the playpen.

Dogs gonna dog I guess!

@wtg said in Valerie has been rescued!:

I think there were a lot of volunteers who helped in the search and rescue efforts.

that makes the story even more charming!