Orchid Borealis

Happy Holidays!  The day length around this time of the year is pretty short in Fairbanks, Alaska. Around the winter solstice, we get about 3 hours and 40 minutes.  My 6-year-old son started to attend a kindergarten this fall, and he is learning a lot.  He recently started to correct my English pronunciation, and "solstice" is one of the words which he corrected my pronunciation!  3 hours and 40 minutes sounds pretty dark for people who haven't lived in high latitudes, but actually we get long twilight, so it is a beautiful time of the year.  But many of us get excited that a half of the winter is over, and we will be gaining day light quickly. Ice fog in Fairbanks, around the noon, close to the winter solstice. There are several Japanese traditions to celebrate the winter solstice.  One of them is called Yuzu-yu.  We put oranges, called Yuzu ( Citrus junos ), to the bath.  We can't find this particular orange, so we just put normal orange...

Hymenorchis javanica is endemic to western Java at elevations of 900-1000m (Parsons & Gerritsen 2013, p.518-819).  It is a tiny plant (leaf length is about 2cm), but it gives a disproportionately large display of crystalline flowers.  The flowers are jewel-like especially with a little bit of back light. This plant is originally from Ooi Leng Sun.  But I purchased it from another person in June 2014, and he accidentally shipped the plants via USPS First Class (current USPS Retail Ground) instead of USPS Priority.  USPS Priority takes only 3-4 days for the delivery to Alaska, but USPS First Class can take a long time.  The First Class packages usually (but not always) get shipped to Federal Way, Washington, and then they travel to Alaska via a boat.  So it took 16 days.  Some of the orchids were dead on arrival, but majority of them were highly stressed and I lost many of them subsequently.  I wasn't sure if this one is going to make, but i...