Birds, Butterflies, and Books

Stepped out onto my front porch yesterday and saw four gorgeous little yellow birds, two a bright, bright yellow, clinging to my Pincushion Flowers (Scabiosa) and delighting themselves with the seeds. American Goldfinches! Two males, two females. As I've been relandscaping, I've been trying to use a lot of bird- and butterfly-friendly plants -- how cool that it works!

Also, about a week ago, saw a beautiful little butterfly on my bed of native yarrow. The undersides/outsides of its wings were slate gray; the topsides/insides were an intense lilac blue. When it fluttered about, it looked like a flower in flight.

Am sick as a dog: Doug went to Origins in Columbus, Ohio, to sell games and brought back a virus with him. He's been sick, too. Bleh. That's really a pain because . . .

I'm currently working on six books with another arriving Monday and more in the pipeline after that. Not a good time to be sick! Just finished editing a book with a lot of organic chemistry in it. I don't know the first thing about organic chemistry, so it was very challenging, but I think that with the help of Google, I ended up doing a good job.

Sarah Palin is an utter flake. Here's just one of the analyses with which I agree; this one is by Ruth Marcus.

When not working, have been enjoying Wimbledon. Amazing women's semifinal between Serena Williams and Elena Dementieva. Amazing quarterfinal and semifinal between Andy Roddick and a resurgent Lleyton Hewitt and co-favorite Andy Roddick, respectively, and then yet another classic Wimbledon final, this time between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer. Being sick, I dozed off early in the fourth set. Woke up quite a while later, saw the score line, and went WTF!?!? and was wide awake. Federer finally won 16–14 in the fifth set. This is his 15th Grand Slam title, and he's now one of a handful of men who have won the French Open (on clay) and Wimbledon (a few weeks later on grass) in the same year.

Funny dog stuff: AJ is perfectly capable of pushing through the swinging kitchen door. She does it from the kitchen side all the time, and she'll do it from the dining room side if I'm standing right there with her. Nonetheless, when Doug is making a snack and she wants to follow him (or rather his food), she never fails to charge into my office, make it very clear that I am to follow her, and lead me to the door, which she makes very clear I am to open for her. Sometimes even when the door is propped wide open, she insists I escort her through it. Funny!

Fun:

• You must view this slideshow at the public radio show Speaking of Faith Web site. A male polar bear encounters chained huskies in northern Canada. The animals proceed to play with each other. The bear came back every day for a week to play with the dogs. Other researchers have observed the same behavior between grizzly bears and wolves in the wild.
• There is a World Worm Charming Championships. It is held each year in Willaston, Cheshire, England. The record now stands at 567 worms. Something to aspire to?
• Therapy chickens! Like therapy dogs, but poultry. This brief article will make you say, "Awwww."
• "Male hummingbirds, swooping in an effort to impress females, achieve speeds 'faster than fighter jets,' [as measured in body lengths] according to a study." Photo below by C. Clark.
  
  
  
  
• Stickleback fish have been determined to use a "hill-climbing" learning strategy. Individual fish learn to find food faster from the failures and successes of their peers. Geez, I could have told them fish do this.

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.
  

Baby Bunny! Pain Free?!

Looked out my office window yesterday and saw a baby bunny under the birdfeeder. Yes, feed them and they will come . . . and make more of them. This bunny was about one-third grown, so the adults got busy a while ago. I'm sure this baby, in gratitude for the yummy birdseed I supplied, will never eat my Asian lilies, my Dutch tulips, or my veggies. Never! (Hah.)

But s/he's so cute!

Am currently working on an ambitious, and lengthy, book for school leaders. I've encountered the underlying theory -- Kegan's model of psychological development that posits the potential for growth throughout adulthood through six stages -- before, in a leadership class for women that was quite cool. So it's fun to read its detailed treatment and application to real-life situations here. Next week, I'm expecting three Advanced Placement test-prep books to come in. One will be on macro- and microeconomics, a subject with which I had no end of trouble in college because of all the pesky acronyms; we'll see if I can finally get a handle on it!

Due to some rescheduling, my final training class for Kaplan Test Prep was Thursday night, and my graduation will be this coming Thursday. I taught-back what I knew would be the toughest section for me, the math that involves drawing three-dimensional figures on the board without (a) making such a mess of them that they're more confusing than enlightening and (b) boring the class to death while I sketch. It didn't go great, but that was kind of the point -- and I learned what I need to do to make sure it does go well next time. I also did a second teach-back, this time with a two-dimensional figure, and it did go great, so I feel that I've got it. Another shout-out to our awesome teacher, Kristin Anderson, future immunologist extraordinaire, who holds so much intellect, beauty, and positive energy in one body, it's just not fair. :) Between now and the end of the month, I'm going to try to go in when the classrooms are empty and teach a couple entire two-and-a-half-hour sections to make sure I've got any wrinkles ironed out. I want to make sure I don't disappoint my students.

Got all the Friends School Plant Sale plants in the ground, and I think everything's still alive. Fingers crossed it stays that way! My seeds in the veggie patch are starting to come up, too -- the soil's finally warm enough for them to germinate. Last Saturday night, we had a frost advisory, and I was putting buckets over everything tender; by Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, we were breaking the record highs for the days with temps in the 90s. So as the saying goes: Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes!

What we really need now is rain -- we're 3.2" behind for the season, almost 2" behind for the month -- but the forecast doesn't look promising. I've got the plumbing problem with the garden hose fixed with duct tape -- yes, duct tape! Wonderful, glorious stuff. It's holding up really well. So no more watering a bucket at a time for now.

Politics: U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) rocks my world. She's so smart and so sensible. She was on MPR's Midday program the other day, and I just enjoy listening to her so much. I would love to see her be our first female president.

I may have licked my ankle-nerve-pain thingie!!! For the last . . . year? shorter? longer? . . . I've had -- on top of the chronic demons-with-flamng-pitchforks-are-stabbing-me-behind-the-ankle-bone thing, which I can basically manage (keep below the pain threshold) by not doing certain things -- severe pain in the left heel whenever I stand up. I put this down to being out of shape, getting older, being sore from a workout, blah, blah. Finally it got to the point where I thought, hey, maybe this is an actual thing. So I used the ever-friendly Google . . . and lo and behold! It's an actual thing. I have plantar fasciitis. And as long as I rest the foot on ice after exercise or prolonged standing, I have no pain whatsoever. And -- the chronic ankle-nerve-pain thingie seems much less active below the pain threshold. Yay for self-diagnosing via the Internet! Yay for ice! Yay for being pain-free! Yay for being able to work out every day without worrying about pain!

Doggies got their annual blood panels (we get full panels along with their heartworm tests), and they are both completely normal in every way. Nice to know.

So now it's a totally freaking awesome gorgeous day outside, and I'm going outside to be out in it.

Fun:

• Why I'm reluctant to try repairing the old pipe that feeds the garden hose myself: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/17blunders.html?_r=1&th&emc=th .


• Fascinating county-by-county electoral college map that lets you slice and dice the data many different ways.


• I think I like the French: "The French spend more time sleeping and eating than most people and also live longer, a fresh study by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has shown."


• A millefiori ("thousand flowers") bowl like the one in this picture was found in an ancient Roman cemetery in east London. It's the only surviving one known from the Western Roman Empire. The design "is a mosaic of hundreds of indented blue petals with white bordering." At one point, it had a car park built on top of it.

Friends School Plant Sale!

Picture this: The huge maple tree in back is blooming, showering the yard with a steady dusting of yellow flowers. Cubby Bear goes outside and comes back in covered in flowers clinging to his fluffy coat. A total springtime doggie! I didn't have a camera in hand, so don't have an actual picture to post, but here's an old photo of Cubby in the backyard. You can fill in the flowers.


Next I want to whine about weather. I know . . . I live in MN and really shouldn't gripe, because once one starts, there's no end to it. But . . . this really sucked. We've had a dry spring, and the plants need rain. My new plants (see below) with their little bitty root systems really need rain. Massive storm system sweeps across the entire Upper Midwest. I watch it on radar. It gets closer, it gets closer -- and the little piece of the front that passes over our house fizzles out just as it reaches us, then reforms. We got 0.01 inch of rain. Bleh. So whine, whine, whine.

And the pipe that the garden hose hooks up to has finally lost all its threads to corrosion. I couldn't find my Amazing Goop, which I used on it last year, but I did find some outdoor adhesive compound. I used that, let it cure, and it worked long enough for me to give everything in back a good soaking. Now I've found the Amazing Goop, but it was too cold for it to cure today. The plants in front couldn't wait any longer, so I ended up hauling water to them by the five-gallon bucketload -- close to 20 buckets? It was worth it, though, so that (a) the plants would survive and (b) I would stop worrying about them.

Plants! OMG!!! Last year, I missed the Friends School Plant Sale because I'd been up working all night and been putting in 18- to 20-hour days before that and didn't grok how long the lines would be and just couldn't deal with it. This year, I was up all night working but was determined to do the sale . . . and I did . . . and I went crazy!!!!! Holy cats. I probably got 150 plants. Lots of natives -- their selection seems to get better every year -- and nonnative perennials/shrubs I've wanted forever to fill in my front yard and boulevard. The tear-out-the-lawn-and-replace-it-with-more-interesting-stuff-that-doesn't-need-to-be-mowed project may finally be nearing completion. It was never intended to take however many years it's taken! Much of the last week has been devoted to figuring out where everything should go and putting it in the ground. I'm nearly done. If everything survives, it's going to look so cool! As a side note, I had good survival over the winter, so that's got me feeling all optimistic and sunshiny. I also got some tomatoes, peppers (Cubby Bear better not eat them this year!), and peanuts (apparently you can grow them here) for the veggie patch and a couple dozen annuals for here and there.

The Friends School Plant Sale is worth a shout-out for its amazingness. It was organized 20 years ago to raise money for a local K-8 private school run by the local Quakers. The first year, it occupied a few tables on the school grounds, and two volunteers helped 100 customers. Today, it overflows the grandstand at the State Fairgrounds. Over 800 volunteers help up to 15,000 customers shop over 2,300 plant varieties. Over $200,000 is raised for scholarships. It's a good thing that gardeners are polite, patient people (you kind of have to be patient to deal with plants, which do everything on their own inscrutable schedule), because we were wall-to-wall with no room to take more than one free-swinging step before needing to stop or shuffle. While some customers are men, the vast majority are women, and the estrogen energy was palpable. While waiting in line to get wristbands, a bunch of us bonded and shared life stories. I have to give special acknowledgment to the Friends School kids who volunteered at the sale. They were amazing: hard working, polite, articulate, and possessed of initiative and intelligence and can-do spirit. Also, if you're at all interested in gardening, the sale catalog (PDF) is totally worth downloading and perusing -- it's an education in itself, and one can always plug a plant's name into Google to find out more about a particularly intriguing species.

Whew! Got that out of my system. It's pretty dang exciting, that plant sale. Doug just shakes his head in bafflement at all this. He looked at my five flats of plants and said, "Hmm, green things," and then later, "That cost $xxx?!" But he's very patient and supportive of my mania. Only other thing that happened gardeningwise is that the adorable bunnies whom I fed birdseed all winter ravaged my new tulips as they came up. I think most have enough leaves to gather strength and come back next year, but I sure got a lot less flowers than I was expecting. Feckin' bunnies.

Life is not all plants and more plants. Kaplan Test Prep training is going well. I have my last teachback session tomorrow evening, and then we graduate on Tuesday. Exciting! Of course, I knew the test content and the Kaplan methods from the work I've done on Kaplan's books the last few years. However, now I've been learning to teach it so that a class of students of various abilities and with diverse goals can maximize their scores. The amount of resources students get is terrific, and the Kaplan methods for each question type really do work great -- they even make the test easier for someone like me who already does well on it. I've really enjoyed the camaraderie with my fellow trainees and hope we'll continue to see each other after graduation. Our trainer is awesome -- she's getting her PhD in immunology and is a master teacher who knows all the tests. She has fabulous energy. I hope to emulate her at least a little bit.

Also, I attended an event put on by the Minnesota Book Publishers' Roundtable for the first time. Two editors discussed developmental editing. It was good to learn more about the publishing industry outside of the narrow slice I see from my freelancer's viewpoint, and I enjoyed chatting with the folks at my table. Lunch was tasty, too! And it was held at the Open Book, a cool renovated old building dedicated to books, publishing, writers, and book arts (making handcrafted books). I'll probably go to more of their events.

Life is not all about work, either. I've actually had time to read in the last month. Finished Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan, a fictional imagining of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright's common-law second wife. Horan does a great job of bringing the characters and the period to life. If things didn't actually happen the way they do in the book, they should have. It has that kind of "truth" to it. The part of the story set at Taliesin (south-central Wisconsin) was extra interesting because we toured there last summer; I could visualize everything that happened.

And I've started The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell, a deeply historically grounded retelling of the Arthurian legend. I'm only on about page 50, but so far, it's freaking awesome!!! I'd already read his Sharpe's novels (Napoleonic era) and his American Civil War novels, which were all good. But here he takes his craft, as a writer and as an historian, to a whole different level. We've got the pagan and Christian religions, a bunch of competing political interests, and ethnic strife, plus a cast of fascinating characters who are alien due to their separation from us by time yet very human. The level of detail with which the material and social culture is rendered is worth the read in and of itself, even if there weren't a plot.

Fun: The fun this time is all courtesy of NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!. How would I stay up-to-date on important news without that program?

• "Weisure" time: "The line dividing work and leisure time is blurring right before our eyes, says one expert, and it's creating a phenomenon called 'weisure time.'" I completely agree with what sociologist Dalton Conley says, but does he have to call it weisure time? That's horrific! Of course, I thought blog was a horrible word, too, but it's here to stay and I've even gotten used to it. But weisure? Ughhh!!!
• Louisiana Walmart employees adopted a stray nutria (and named it Norman). A shopper is suing for damages.
• Be really, really, really careful if you decide to clean out the fridge at work lest a hazmat team descend on the scene, as it did at an AT&T office in San Jose, California. A number of people were hospitalized due to the combination of cleaning solutions and god-only-knows stuff-that-once-was-food.

Got Refinanced -- Training Going OK I Think -- Two by Two -- Mini Vacation Soon?

The value of our home has certainly taken a beating in this market, but (a) it had gotten ridiculously high during the bubble and so is now merely reasonable and (b) was enough for us to refinance and get our bills more organized and less expensive interestwise. Plus this interest is tax-deductible. So there is great rejoicing. And the place is mostly clean—wowza!

Had my first "real" training session for Kaplan yesterday, where we spent the whole time doing "teachbacks" -- we teach a section of the test and get feedback. It went so much better than I thought it would. (When I told Doug that, he just rolled his eyes. Then I said, to be funny, "I don't think I flunked," because that's what I said all the way through grad school every time I had a test . . . then got 100 percent. He doesn't understand my insecurities, which is very sweet of him—not to understand why I wouldn't feel confident about my abilities.)

I'm also working on a GRE book for Kaplan Publishing right now, so I'm getting a GRE immersion experience!

Two by two: I saw two bunnies under the birdfeeder at the same time the other evening. That means baby bunnies! Also, last summer we had a small reddish squirrel join the big gray ones we're used to seeing, and the other day, I saw two red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus; see also the U of Mich site here) chasing each other along the fence. That means baby red squirrels! Still not seeing many birds, just the ubiquitous house sparrows, a pair of house finches, a male cardinal, and the odd robin looking for bugs.


Photos © Patriot Plaistow John
I desperately need a change of scenery, and although Doug travels for work, he'd like to get away without working for once. I think we're going to go on a little jaunt to Madison, WI, for a couple of days. Enjoy the restaurants on State Street, cruise the art galleries, walk around the lakes, visit the Oldrich Botanical Gardens . . . As long as we can work our schedules so we can both get away when the weather is good there—it all needs to come together . . .

Haven't updated about the fish for a while. Maybe it's about time for another long, geeky tropical fish update?