Welcome to a potpourri of fun! On this page you’ll find the latest comics by Jari Thymian, a motivational quote, a crossword puzzle contest, and whatever else we decide to throw in here. Be sure to check back for the latest!
- Earth Corner – With Pat Walsh
- Star Stories – by Kelly Ricks
- Riding the Santa Fe Trail – by Laura Brewer
- Every Day Should be Earth Day – Editorial by Laura Brewer
- Find the Differences
- Frank Mahannah – Gallery
- Exploring Climax Canyon by Mauricio Meneses
- Madi’s Kitchen
- Quotes & Riddles
Quotes & Riddles
Earth Corner – With Pat Walsh
Green Grass Lawns
Posted March 2, 2025
Years ago, I lived in a cute little bungalow with a white picket fence in Takoma Park, Maryland—a quaint suburb of Washington, D.C. Our house had a small green lawn, and the grass grew without any help, no extra water or chemicals needed.
Now I live in Raton, and as spring approaches, I know the sound of sprinklers, lawn mowers and weedwhackers is not far behind. Which raises a question. Why are we so determined to have the perfect green grass lawn? Especially here, in a place where rain is not a common occurrence?
Americans have been obsessed with green grass lawns for some two hundred years. One of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had a hand in this. In the 1780s, Jefferson traveled widely and “was favorably impressed by the large expanses of green turf on English country estates,” according to the book Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, by Virginia Jenkins. Jenkins goes on to say Jefferson is “credited with being the first to try to create an English-style lawn on his country estate, Monticello, in the Virginia Piedmont in 1806.”
Meanwhile, wealthier Americans sought to escape from crowded cities. Indeed, the first railroad suburb of Washington D.C. was Takoma Park, founded in 1883 and “advertised as a healthy place to live and raise children,” Jenkins writes. She notes that even by the 1850s, suburban communities were promoted as places where a working man could own a house “with a grass plot on which your children can play.”
As lawns took hold, they were made of non-native grasses, because native grasses didn’t lend themselves to a smooth, even look. Take Kentucky bluegrass, common across the United States. It is native to Europe and Asia, and many plant specialists believe it was brought here by early settlers. Garden Guides | The History of Kentucky Bluegrass
While we may see a neat green lawn as the American ideal, the truth is a lawn is considered a biological desert because it doesn’t support wildlife with food or shelter.
“Dominated by a single species of non-native grass, these manicured expanses offer little to the vast web of life that thrives in a healthy ecosystem,” says the website Medium. Beyond the Green Monoculture: Rebuilding Biodiversity in the American Lawn | by Nstephens | Medium
In addition, maintaining green lawns often involves using chemicals, fossil fuels (via gasoline lawnmowers) and lots of water.
These days, many folks are rewilding their lawns and shifting to native plants. At our house, we converted part of our yard to native plants like Rocky Mountain bee plant. We have less grass to mow and water, we avoid pesticides, and we have switched to a wonderfully quiet, battery-powered electric lawnmower.
Next time you notice part of your lawn that is tough to maintain, consider shifting that patch to drought-hardy natives that will attract butterflies, bees and hummingbirds to your own little wildlife preserve.
Samples of Xeriscape Landscaping
Star Stories – by Kelly Ricks
Total Lunar Eclipse
Posted March 2, 2025
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge… how much sooner man could have walked on the moon… had we listened to a child’s fantasies. It is truly a pity that so many lose their gift of imagination to the steady hum of the status quo. – Albert Einstein, born March 14th, 1879
Our moon is full of stories. Ever since ever since we have looked up at our faithful celestial companion and wondered why its shape changes and how it got it’s spots. Is a hungry dog nipping at its edges? Did a rabbit throw gobs of mud onto its face? Is the moon a huge mirror reflecting Earth’s oceans and continents? All our stories about the moon are efforts to make sense of what we see and experience, and sometimes teach a lesson. Albert Einstein knew this too: science and understanding begins with wonder, imagination, observation, and investigation. And there are few things as full of wonder as an eclipse.
After thousands of years of observation scientists can now predict the movements of the moon with pinpoint precision.
- March’s full moon will be near apogee—its greatest distance from Earth—and will appear smaller than average. Some call it a “micro-moon.”
- March 13 @ 11:09 pm: the full moon will begin to enter the darkest part of Earth’s shadow (umbra).
- March 14th @ 12:26 am: totality begins. The moon is fully covered by the umbra.
- 1:31 am: totality ends as the moon starts moving back into the sunlight.
- 2:48 am: the moon will be free from the umbra
- During totality, the sun’s light spectrum will be refracted by Earth’s atmosphere till only warm colors remain, causing the moon to take on a rusty reddish hue.
This is the “Full Blood Moon.” An eerie sight in the wee hours of morning. Most old stories about eclipses imagine the moon being devoured by animals or demons, and ancient tales told under its red gaze might leave you with a sense of foreboding. But in this case, reality is even more fantastic and beautiful than myth. Let’s take a page from Einstein and imagine standing on the eclipsed moon looking back toward Earth.
You’re standing above the Sinus Medii, the “Middle Bay:” a small basalt plain at the center of our Moon’s near side. The terrain is not unlike the high volcanic plains of northeastern New Mexico…minus vegetation. An impossibly black circle surrounded by a shimmering ring of red, orange, and gold hangs high in the sky. You can see every sunrise in England, Spain, and West Africa, and every sunset over the open Pacific in a single glance. Their combined colors bathe the moon’s surface in a wash of fiery hues. Countless stars—normally invisible in the bright light of lunar day—shine like pinpoints across the sky, while Saturn, Venus, and Mercury—much brighter than surrounding stars—flank Earth’s reddened atmosphere. The lights of civilization are still too dim to make out, but somewhere down on that jet-black disc, there are a few people in northeastern New Mexico looking back in wonder.
And I almost forgot…Happy Birthday Mr. Einstein!
Help our Earth – Editorial by Laura Brewer
Every day should be Earth Day, but officially we celebrate in the U.S. on Monday, April 22, 2024. Below is a graphic of some of the things one can do to help our Earth.
Posted February 23, 2025 – Provided by Laura Brewer
Madi’s Kitchen
See additional recipes on Madi’s Kitchen page
Coffee Jelly
Posted March 2, 2025
I don’t really like coffee, but despite that, even I wanted to take a crack at this historical dessert not very well known outside of Japan. Other than the handful of people I’ve met that have had this dessert, popular in cities with a large Asian-American population, most Americans haven’t tried coffee jelly, or even heard about it! In fact, I didn’t hear about it until a year or two ago, and that was from an anime (The Disastrous Life of Saiki K) where the main character’s favorite dessert is coffee jelly! If you have the time to give it a watch, then I would totally recommend doing so—though be warned that only the first season is dubbed in English. However, all three seasons do have subtitles in English, so if you don’t mind reading you can follow them all. I will also warn you that it can get pretty weird at times.
The cast of characters are a funny and charming group, and all quite different from each other. First there is Aaron, who used to be in a gang and quit that life, who’s now trying to have a peaceful high school experience and not succeeding very well. Then in contrast there is Teruhashi, the most popular and beautiful girl in school. Almost everyone sees her fall in love with her, either wanting to date her or at least be friends! There are lots of other charming secondary characters, but what ties the main plot of the show together is Suki K. The problem is that Saiki just wants to be a normal high school student and can’t because he has psychic powers. Throughout the show his friends get into antics, and he has to use his unique abilities to help. Saki pretends to be too cool and acts as if he doesn’t really like them, but I’m quite sure that he secretly does—even if they annoy him a lot of the time!
Part of what helps Saki keep his cool is his coffee jelly breaks. On the surface, the idea of coffee jelly is certainly off-putting. This coffee jelly is not really jelly like you’d put on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, though. It’s jelly like 1950s housewives made Jello jellies: more like a gummy, but not quite as stiff. The key to this is the gelatin, and with it, you can make a ton of different flavors, from sweet to savory. I haven’t tried to make any other ones yet, but I’m excited to keep experimenting with the technique. I was asked by my mom to cater some of these later this spring, and I think a cherry flavored, candies cherry bloom jelly will be fun to put together.
While I probably will eventually share that recipe, in the meantime I hope you enjoy this coffee jelly. While you do, I think you should give The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. a try too.
Enjoy!
Coffee Jelly Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons unflavored gelatin powder
- ½ cup water to bloom the gelatin (cold is best)
- 2 cups of water (room temperature is fine)
- 2 tbsp instant coffee – (can adjust according to your preference)
- 3 tbsp sugar or according to your preference (can substitute with any sweetener of your choice)
Instructions
BLOOM THE GELATIN
This is a super important step so don’t miss out on it!
- Add unflavored gelatin powder to a bowl of ½ cup cold water, stir it once and leave it to bloom for about 10 minutes. Make sure you use only cold water.
- We can go ahead and make our coffee while the gelatin blooms.
MAKE THE COFFEE
Let’s make some nice hot coffee!
- Over medium-high heat, heat 2 cups of water in a saucepan.
- Once the water comes to a soft gentle boil (it doesn’t have to reach a rolling boil), reduce to medium heat.
- Add 2 tbsp instant coffee powder and 3 tbsp sugar to the hot water. A regular cup of strong coffee could work also instead of the instant coffee.
- Stir the hot coffee (I use a small whisk, makes things easy!) until the sugar has dissolved completely and everything has mixed together really well.
- Now turn off the heat and let the hot coffee stay in the saucepan.
MIX THE COFFEE AND GELATIN TOGETHER
- Wait for your hot coffee to cool a little for a minute or two. You don’t need to wait a lot; the coffee doesn’t need to cool down completely. Just wait until it’s not super-hot anymore.
- Now add in the bloomed gelatin (only once the 10 minutes of blooming is done!), add slowly in parts, while stirring the coffee gelatin mixture with a whisk. Stir gently so you don’t get too many bubbles in your coffee gelatin mix.
- Once you’re done adding the entire bloomed gelatin to the coffee, give everything a gentle stir using a whisk or a spoon until all that gelatin has mixed well with the coffee.
- Wait for the coffee gelatin mixture to cool down just a little more, no need to wait until it reaches room temperature, just so it’s safe enough to pour into your molds or whatever you’re using to set your coffee Jello in.
- Now you need to make your mind up on what you’d like to pour your coffee gelatin mix into. Here are a few ways you can enjoy your coffee jelly to help make your mind up on what to pour your coffee gelatin mix into:
- 1) You can pour your coffee Jello mixture into different-shaped silicone molds and get the prettiest shaped Jello or even cupcake molds – use molds you like!
- 2) You can use pretty serving bowls or glasses, let the coffee Jello set in there and serve it like that or super easily with some condensed milk cream on top.
- 3) You can pour your coffee gelatin mix into a glass tray and can slice your coffee Jello once it’s set into cubes and serve it mixed with the condensed milk cream – pour your coffee gelatin mixture into a glass tray you prefer. You can switch the size of your glass tray depending on how thick or thin you want your coffee Jello cubes to be. The smaller the tray, the thicker your Jello cubes, the bigger the tray, the thinner!
- After you’ve poured your coffee gelatin mixture into whatever you prefer, you may notice a few bubbles. If these bubbles are bothering you, you can always pop them with a toothpick or scoop them out using a spoon.
- Keep your coffee gelatin mix in the fridge and wait for it to become a delicious Jello! You can cover it with a plastic wrap too if you want.
- It’ll take about 2 to 4 hours for your coffee Jello to set. This depends on the brand of gelatin you’re using and your fridge
Find the Differences – Search by the Sea
Find the five differences in the two images above.
Exploring Climax Canyon by Mauricio Meneses
Artist Mauricio Meneses (D’MAU) is creating videos highlighting sights in and around New Mexico. Visit his YouTube channel to see more. Click on the image below to go to the YouTube video.
