Sunstone

Hot, damn hot. Hotter than a snake's ass in a wagon rut. Hottest thing is my shorts, you can cook things in it. Little bit of crotch pot cooking. - misquoted from Good Morning, Vietnam.

Yep, not enjoying it. Too hot to sleep. Too hot to sit. Too hot to think. Cats don't eat.

Anyway, I went to the ruined church for a... well, goodness knows why. Put on the focus ring.

This is sandstone. One of the stones has these wonderful shell shapes. The stone is local... memories of when this was a sea... the sea makes you think of coolness, but I guess the water level was so high because the poles had melted.

The bark of the... Scot's pines?... looked pretty amazing.

And lichen. This is interesting. I read in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, in an essay by Anne Pringle, that lichens are far more complex than we had thought:

What was once thought to be a mutualism involving two species may be an entangled symbiosis of thousands of species, interacting in every conceivable fashion. A lichen is not just a fungus and its photosynthetic algae. Lichens house hundreds, thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of other species within the thallus, including other kinds of fungi and myriad bacteria. Bacterial diversity peaks at the center of a thallus, while the various edges house relatively fewer taxa.¹ Bacterial communities at the centers of different lichens resemble each other, while edges house more random assemblages.

I do like this picture. I only took a couple of lichens, because it was so hot that I couldn't quite face spending any longer outside, but I might try again on a cooler day.