I stopped under this thing this morning on my way in to the office. There is a new high-rise going in where Hooter's used to be on South First Street and Barton Springs Road. Interestingly, this little triangular shaped piece of land was owned at one time by the Estate of Charles Schultz, the guy that did the Peanuts comic strip. It seems he just bought up land here-and-there, and I do not really even know if he ever visited Austin. Interesting things about land speculators, you never know who they are. So, there I was, stopped for a traffic light, under this crane, and it gets you to wondering if I you will be the next headline in someones morning paper. Either that or a mass shooting victim or a drive-by or something. It is kind of weird the things that cross your mind when you have an hour-plus commute each way, every day. The world is going crazy, and I just wonder how many of us can survive.Xeric -- Adjective. characterized by, relating to, or requiring only a small amount of moisture. "As water restrictions were enacted through the metro area...the three display [plant] beds filled with xeric varieties that don't take much water flourished." Austin Briggs, The Denver Post, August 6, 2015
Did You Know? By the late 1800s, botanists were using the terms xerophyte and xerophytic for plants that were well adapted for survival in dry environments. But some felt the need for a more generic word that included both animals and plants. In 1926, a group proposed using xeric (derived from xeros, the Greek word for "dry") as a more generalized term for either flora or fauna. They further suggested that "xerophytic...be entirely abandoned as useless and misleading." Not everyone liked the idea. In fact, the Ecological Society of America stated that xeric was "not desirable," preferring terms such as arid. Others declared that xeric should refer only to habitats, not organisms. Scientists used it anyway, and by the 1940s xeric was well documented in scientific literature.
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