Sparky! And a hawk!

It is my great pleasure (and surprise!) to announce the addition of Sparky to our family. I really have no idea how we went from me looking at cute pictures of kitties at Petfinder.com to filling out an adoption form at the Animal Humane Society. It just happened (like some pregnancies -- LOL!) Doug and the 9-month-old Sparky took to each other right away, and I thought he was a nice kitty, so home he came. Sparky's been living mostly in my office until Bootsie gets used to the idea, and I adore him. Starting about Day 3, couldn't imagine life without him. Today is Day 8. He loves to sleep on my book or keyboard with his head on my hand. Or slung over my shoulder with my hand supporting his bottom. How can I possibly push him aside to work? Cuddling him is a much higher calling.

Need to give equal visibility to Bootsie. Here's a picture Doug shot a couple of years ago, I think. She loves the back windows in summer when the ivy grows over them, giving her a "jungle screen" to lurk behind as she watches the birds and furry critters that visit our backyard. She is sort of OK with Sparky as long as he doesn't try to play with her or enter her domain upstairs. Unfortunately, he wants to do both those things very much. So they're going to be separate for a while.



AJ is very interested in the new cat, and Cubby Bear is absolutely over the moon at having another kitty friend. Sparky was wary at first, but now he has discovered that Cubby's huge brush of a tail makes a great toy.

This summer, we were visited for about a week by a juvenile Cooper's hawk. He perched right outside my office window for hours! I've always joked that my utter lack of care of the backyard and its subsequent run to weeds was an effort to create an ecosystem. Well, I guess it worked! The hawk eventually caught a baby rabbit! Then s/he took off. They like to nest in Douglas firs, apparently, and our next-door neighbor has a beautiful one, so fingers crossed that s/he remembers that tasty bunny and the nice tree and maybe comes back someday to raise baby hawks. Photo below by Gerry Dewaghe.



Otherwise, life has been about working . . . and working . . . and working . . . and . . . Did I mention I've been working a lot? I'm guessing about 70-80 hours/week. So much housework and yardwork isn't getting done, it's not funny. But with the economy the way it is, and the way it's likely to be for a while, I'm not complaining. One of my clients sent me a chilled box of See's Candy for working on a series of challenging projects -- how sweet! Do you know that See's Candy comes with a nutritional leaflet? That's just wrong! It went into recycling unread.

Wrapped up my GRE class for Kaplan Test Prep. Enjoyed teaching very, very much. It definitely got me the interpersonal contact I needed and used the presentation skills that would otherwise atrophy. Plus I met remarkable people and got to know their dreams and goals and maybe help them a little toward them. I hope they all do great on the test!!! Now I am tutoring a wonderful guy, also on the GRE. I hope to teach a class again in November, but that will depend on enrollment. I'm looking forward to fine-tuning my teaching and continuing to improve in my next class.

It hasn't all been work. At the end of August, we did go on a sort of vacation to Kansas City, where we met Doug's parents for a couple of days. Visited some museums, ate some barbeque. I alternately worked and crashed, worked and crashed. Afraid I wasn't exactly the life of the party. I'd lost 5 pounds since May, but I gained 3 of it back over that vacation -- bleh. How discouraging.

Also carved out some time to watch the U.S. Open. Men's champion Juan del Potro seems like a really nice guy with a great game, so glad he won. And Kim Clijsters -- good grief, just her third tournament back from "maternity leave," and she wins a Grand Slam! I remember her as being mentally fragile, but she was incredibly focused here. And now Justine Henin is planning a return. Hurray for women's tennis!

Garden update: Bunny ate most of what would have been a great crop of broccoli, but tomatoes are producing like crazy, despite the drought. (We've had only 0.01 inch of rain so far in September!) Without time to cook, I've been just slicing them up on a plate and sprinkling salt over them.

It rained! And I fixed the pipe! And the plants still live!

Graduated from Kaplan teacher training! Really looking forward to teaching. It'll be fun.

Now working on a book to help high school students prepare for the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. government and politics. I follow policy and politics pretty intently, but it'll be fun to see how much of the formal knowledge I remember from high school.

The big news of the last few weeks has been my battle to keep my 100+ baby plants alive despite (a) no rain and (b) no working garden hose. We're somewhere between "moderate drought" and "severe drought." (The Drought Monitor map, as well as the other info at this University of Nebraska—Lincoln site, is pretty cool.) The threads for the hose to screw onto had corroded so badly, no amount of Plumber's Goop would keep it on, plus there were leaks from the spigot and another connection. Duct tape actually worked for one watering per wrapping before it fell off -- duct tape is awesome. I ended up hauling more water than I want to think about one 5-gallon bucket at a time. Have I mentioned I'm not big in the upper-body-strength department?

I read up on taking apart old pipes and flinched every time I encountered the words propane torch. Finally at the crack of dawn one morning, I ventured out with my midsized pipe wrench in hand to see what would happen. The bad section of pipe came right off! Doug dimly remembers, and I think I do too, that we had the same problem shortly after moving into the house and had our handyman at the time fix it. If the pipes had only been together 17 years instead of 71 years, that would explain why they didn't act as though welded together. A quick walk down to the corner hardware store for replacement parts and plumber's tape, and it was all fixed and worked great!

And it finally rained last weekend -- over an inch! Lovely, lovely, lovely steady soaking rain!!!!! I could feel the waves of relief coming from the plants -- I swear I could.

I don't think I lost a single plant to lack of water.

Now the big news is that I think I'm going to have over 30 tomato plants. Yikes. So here's what happened. I got 6 beautiful heirlooms from the Friends School Plant Sale. Then Jung Seeds offered a collection of 16 sweet pepper plants at a great end-of-season price, and they came with 16 tomato plants. (I think I didn't read the fine print very closely. I was just excited about the peppers.) Then, weeks ago, I tossed some old tomato plant seeds in the ground in case one might germinate. Well . . . a whole bunch just came up. Yikes. If they all grow and fruit and the rodents and dogs don't eat them, I'm going to be begging people to accept bags of tomatoes!

Seem to have a soil fungus -- verticillium -- afflicting my dogwood tree, causing all the leaves on one branch after another to wilt. Hopefully, I can prune it back and save it. Hopefully, it won't infect all the barberry that covers the hill starting 15 feet away. If it does that, I will cry!!!

The Emerald Ash Borer has come to Minnesota. Its larvae have started killing ash trees in St. Paul. Our block has lost quite a few elm trees in the last ten years, and the city forestry department chose . . . yup, green ash trees to replace them. I don't find the trees that attractive -- I could take them or leave them -- but I really don't want to lose the time it takes to get mature trees lining the street. The ashes are just starting to be a mature presence and offer a smidgen of shade. The critters are really pretty; it's a shame their larvae are so destructive.

Fun:

• Well, it's not fun that she died, but it is fun that I learned about her: Koko Taylor, "Queen of the Blues." What a voice! What a career in the male-dominated world of blues. How cool that she performed shortly before her death at age 80. Must acquire her recordings.
  
• Sharks in captivity can learn visual and audible signals to know when it's their turn to come to their trainer and eat. Some can even be picked up and cuddled after responding to the cue, knowing that food will be the reward. This article says the "brightest sharks" will be trained in three months. Based on what I've seen of my tropical fish, I doubt it will take that long; when it comes to food, fish can be pretty quick on the uptake.


• The news is that fingerprints don't increase the surface area of our hands and don't increase friction when we grip things, so that's not what they're for. But what I found fascinating is that New World monkeys have "tailprints"; that is, ridged areas of skin on their prehensile tails.


• I'd embed this, but you really have to watch tennis full-screen to follow the ball and get the full enjoyment. Here's a "greatest hits" compilation of French player Fabrice "the Magician" Santoro running his opponents around the court and hitting shots between his legs to win points. Roger Federer breaks into a grin at one point as he's being pulled from net to baseline to net . . . Fun stuff.


• Cute Nike ad celebrating Roger Federer's 14th Grand Slam victory, which tied Pete Sampras's record. He won the 14th at the French Open, held on a clay (crushed brick) surface, which was the one major he'd never won; thus, he also achieved a career Grand Slam at the same time as tying the record.
  

Diversicon, Drought, and Depression

First things first: Jusqu’au Dernier Mot is translating a bunch of my Writing World articles into the French. They have five of them up now. And I wrote two haiku! Wowza!!! It felt ridiculously good. AJ the Rottie caught a baby bunny in the backyard and killed it a few feet away from me. First time in 15 years of big dogs chasing bunnies that anyone’s died. [shrug] That is the natural outcome for a baby bunny. Very few survive to adulthood and get to make more baby bunnies. If they did, we’d be overrun with bunnies. AJ seemed mystified as to why the bunny didn’t get back up and play. I gave it a burial and wrote a haiku about it. Then I wrote a haiku about my very dry garden soil. Which takes us to . . .

. . . the weather report: Not nearly enough rain. Doug went out and bought me a sprinkler. It’s not nearly as efficient as directing water at each plant’s roots with the hose -- you lose more to evaporation, and you water ground where no plants are -- but it sure is nice to set it up and be able to walk away. Effortless! Like magic! (Yes, I take pleasure in simple tool use. You should see me when I’m reading something in dim light and Doug turns on a lamp. Wow! The words leap from the page. Like magic!) One good thing about drought: hardly any mosquitoes!

Diversicon went well this year. We got mostly positive feedback from the attendees. Guest of Honor Anne Frasier’s suggestion of a Flash Fiction Contest attracted some great entries, and the awards ceremony was fun. The vibe was awesome: intelligent and thoughtful and warm and friendly. The location, with a variety of affordable, healthy eating options within five minutes’ walk, was great. One downside was that the hotel dropped the ball at numerous points (e.g., telling people the room block was closed when it wasn’t, not being able to direct people to the con when they showed -- indeed, not being aware the event was at the hotel, losing our catering order for the Auction, “checking out” our suite space a day early, charging our Guests’ rooms to their cards instead of mine, not having the expanded suite available that they said would be built in time for our event and then charging us the wrong amount for the space they did give us). Each individual hotel employee seemed dedicated to giving great customer service; however, the communication didn’t seem to be in place to allow them to do so. Another downside was that attendance dropped. It’s a real little gem of a convention, and we simply have to get better at attracting people to it.

Had a thoroughly icky major depressive episode for about eight days starting during the con. I guess technically eight days isn’t long enough for something to be classified as a major depressive episode, but I know one when I feel it. I’m worthless, never done anything right, everyone hates and despises me, want to slash myself all over to let the pain out, can’t see the point of doing anything, no appetite, crying for no reason, can’t focus on anything -- that last bit was really pronounced this time and made working hard. The good news: This lapse of brain chemistry had a specific trigger -- I knew I was being triggered as the triggering event happened -- I could literally feel the brain chemistry starting to cascade out of balance, like a chain of dominoes falling -- and I figured that if I gutted it out, my serotonin levels would climb back to normal eventually. And they did. I’m still kind of tired, but I’m feeling good about myself and hopeful about the future, and I’m enjoying my work and gardening, etc.

Politics: I’m delighted with Senator Obama’s choice of Senator Biden for vice president. Biden was my top choice when the Democratic primaries began, so I’m thrilled to see him on the ticket. On the other hand, I’m disgusted with our stance with regard to Russia -- we haven’t seen this coming for, like, at least six years? I’m sitting here in Minneapolis with no information except from TV and newspapers and MPR/NPR, and I could see that Putin, the former KGB head, is taking the country back to its imperialistic, autocratic past. Why couldn’t the Bush administration?

Workwise, I’ve got a bunch of live projects, but with all of them, I’m waiting for something from the editor or from the author. Which means there’s absolutely nothing I can work on this weekend! Whee!!! Although living without pressing deadlines takes a bit of getting used to. I have to structure my own day? I can do anything I want? How do I do that? LOL!

Very entertaining book: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. There’s lots of history in it, but it’s her asides and ramblings that bring it to life in a deliciously funny, ironic, truth-telling way.

Summer Olympics: I’m too wary of doping scandals to let myself get excited about most of the sports, and being decidedly not thrilled about China’s human rights record takes away a lot of the luster for me, too. I did enjoy the tennis, oddly enough. I used to think tennis shouldn't be an Olympic sport -- they've got pro tours and four Grand Slam tournaments each year, so what do they need the Olympics for? But a lot of the players clearly brought a lot of passion to it and it was really meaningful for them, and there were a lot of good matches. I loved that Roger Federer got a gold medal in doubles. I feel terrible for the female Chinese gymnasts -- I'm sure those girls had zero say in being put on the team despite being too young, and they've clearly worked like crazy and sacrificed a lot and are outstanding gymnasts. If they'd been allowed to wait until 2012, they could probably have won Olympic medals legitimately. As it is, even if the results are allowed to stand, they'll always have an "asterisk" next to them.

Fun:

Arienne Cohen writes in the NYTimes about a woman, with the stature of a superhero and the personality of a nice person, and a remaining barrier of difference in our society.

Check out the Cornell University Library Witchcraft Collection, “an online selecton of titles from the Cornell University Library's extensive collection of materials on Witchcraft. The Witchcraft Collection is a rich source for students and scholars of the history of superstition and witchcraft persecution in Europe. It documents the earliest and the latest manifestations of the belief in witchcraft as well as its geographical boundaries, and elaborates this history with works on canon law, the Inquisition, torture, demonology, trial testimony, and narratives. Most importantly, the collection focuses on witchcraft not as folklore or anthropology, but as theology and as religious heresy.”

For when you desperately need a way to procrastinate, there is the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. Try typing in your last name and finding out what sequences other people with your last name have discovered. Or type in a series of numbers and find out all the sequences they might be part of. It’s fascinating in a thoroughly geeky way.

A fishie pedicure sounds like fun! I love sticking my fingers in my tanks and feeling the fish nibble-nibble looking for food. It feels really good.

Whatever the NYTimes’s problems, its health reporting remains top-notch. I found this multimedia presentation on bipolar disorder, featuring the voices of people with the illness, gripping and helpful in understanding the effects that chemical imbalance in the brain can have.