In today’s Nature Notes, Miz Shoes attempts to illustrate the definitive answer to the age old question: Is it the heat, or the humidity?

The evening before I took the following photo, I saw an avocado on the ground when I came home from work. The squirrels had been eating away at it, and there was a large, clean hole (albeit ringed with tooth marks. The next morning dawned hot and humid, as all summer mornings do in the tropics. When I left for work, the avocado was sporting a festive fur collar, very much like Santa’s fur-trimmed suit. This was the mold growth in 12 hours.

When I reached my office, the heat was up, and the sun was shining in the breezeway of the building, turning the condensation on the windows of the empty restaurant into diamonds. As I turned around to get the shot, I saw where a long-since removed holiday decoration had been. The ghost of Christmas past, in the pattern of moisture on a too-cold window, on a too-hot morning.

As ever, this is part of the Nature Notes meme.