Frogs and Ravens

Nature-Science-Environment Meme, Part I

Adapting jo(e)'s adaptation of seadragon's meme, part I:

Some Plants I Like:

Blueberries. Blackberries. Most berries. Pumpkins, zucchini, butternut squash. Prickly pear cacti. Cholla. Yucca. Ocotillo. Creosote. Chaparral. Sage. Pothos. Spider plants. Tumbleweeds. Popcorn. Lobelia. Sweet alyssum. Rosemary. Mint. Lavender. Rose. Clover. Dandelions. Poison oak.

Some fall off in your hands, some must be fought for. Halloween, crunchy seeds, and warm roasty goodness. Camping trips and good herbal smells mingled with dust and woodsmoke. Prickliness and soft beautiful blossoms. Quirky and I can't kill them. Yeah, they are exotics, but they are such fun to watch rolling along or swirled high in a dust storm. Amusement and fun in a small package. Small but lovely. Crush them in your fingers and smell the sweetness. Can I find a lucky one, or shall I settle for watching the bees? Bright yellow cheeriness and round soft balls. Not really a favorite, but so adaptable and self-confident it deserves respect.

Some Trees I Like:

Maples. California native palms. Apples. Cherries. Olives. California live oaks. Joshua trees. Ghost gums. Weeping willows and pepper trees. Avocados. Pine trees, spruce, firs. Aspens. Redwood trees. Sequoias.

I like the bright colors of the leaves in fall. I did my research on these, in part. Who doesn't like an apple pie? Or cherries eaten fresh out of hand? I live on olive oil. Many happy childhood hours were spent climbing them and playing in their shade among the prickly leaves and acorns. So strange yet familiar. I love the smell of eucalyptus. They remind me of southern California and of Australia. The long fronds make great hiding places and the red berries are fun to play with. They are great for climbing, plus guacamole is tasty. The smell of evergreen sap is wonderful. Their leaves shake and shiver and remind me of family road trips. They are so tall, standing above the fog and mossy green ground and the tacky fake lumberjack.

Some Fungi I Like:

Puff balls. Corpse flowers. Shelf fungus. Toadstools. Morels. Portabello mushrooms.

Huge and easy to identify, and my parents once traded one for a steak dinner. A giant stinky plant is just cool. So strange growing on the birch bark. Mysterious rings, waiting for fairies to dance in them. Wrinkly and strange, but apparently tasty. Wonderful grilled in butter and stuck in a bun.

Yeah!

I've finished the editing project, and I was only off by five minutes from my original estimate of how long it was going to take!

*does the "I'm such a badass! Such a bad-ASS! Such-a such-a such-a bad, bad, ass! dance*

What? C'mon, don't tell me y'all haven't found yourself doing some variant of it on occasion. *grin*

For What It's Worth

My blog is worth $102,181.74.
How much is your blog worth?

c/o Scrivener

Heh Heh Heh

You are a Revisionist Historian. You are the Clark
Kent of postmodernists. You probably want to
work in a library or in social services. No
one suspects you of being a postmodernist...
until they read your publications!


What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

c/o Scrivener

Old Clothes Meme

Phantom just posted a wonderful piece about her oldest piece of clothing, a much-loved, much-felted, Irish-style sweater. (Go, read!)

Here is my oldest surviving piece of clothing (as far as I know; my mother probably has some baby clothes tucked in a drawer somewhere). Perhaps I should say that this is the oldest piece of clothing I wear regularly and still like?

I got this shirt sometime while I was in high school -- So, '80s, y'all. Not too bad for that era, eh? (Which is probably why I still have it. The rest of my clothes from then -- blechhhhh.) -- and have worn it off and on since. I don't wear it as often as I would like (I love the colors and the design and the cut and it is soft, soft, soft by now), largely because I'm afraid of wearing it out. See those silver stars arching across the front? Well, they are those jewelry stud things, and they used to be accompanied by a few round ones up near the top of the design. The problem is that all of them are held in place with sharp metal prongs, and that's just a bit much for t-shirt cloth to take. I should probably just take them out and darn up the holes before they get irreparably large, but I haven't found the time for that. So I don't wear it as often as I like.

It's sort of fun thinking of clothes that I've outgrown, or, more frequently now, outworn. (You know you're an adult when you wear out your clothes rather than outgrowing them. Especially underwear!) I still miss the olive green shirt with the tree embroidered on it that I had as a kid. The Kliban cats t-shirts. The butt-tight capri jeans in crinkle denim I wore in high school. The satiny yellow polyester bathrobe I had as a grade-schooler, and which I wore for months after my arms were a good six inches too long for the sleeves. (It's arms and legs and hips that have outgrown most of my clothing. I can easily wear t-shirts meant for kids, still.) The white fuzzy jacket I had when I was six. The bright blue and red and white Inca-patterned poncho I wore about the same time. Most of these clothes would probably look horribly dated if I were still able to wear them; perhaps I should be grateful that we parted company before I could become disillusioned with them.

I will wear a big fuzzy sweater today, in honor of all our old clothes. And because it is cold outside.

Work!

Whoo! I have a project! A paying project!

(D's chair needs a rush-job edit of an article he's submitting next week. Oh, the pressure!)

Observations - October 27th

Fall is definitely starting to think about winter here. It's not so much the daytime temperatures (which are staying in the 50-60 degree range) as the nighttime ones; we're starting to see dips into the 30s, though not yet to freezing. (It makes my hair stand up just thinking about it!)

So I'm racking my brains about what to do with the outdoor potted plants. Several of them I know will do just fine indoors, as they are spider plants and pothos, which are hardy and do okay in dim light. The mints will be slightly more tricky, as they are weirdly fussy -- sometimes they do best in the shade, but sometimes they want more light. Most difficult will be the rosemary -- tough though it is, it does need a fair amount of sunshine -- and the bell pepper plant. In a strange spasm of productivity, the plant decided to send out a whole mass of flowers in the last month or so, and now has a bunch of baby peppers hanging from its stems. I'm not sure what to do about it, though perhaps the plant is tougher than I think. (All of these plants did survive a four-day move, including temperatures in the 110s, after all.) The problem is that there are no windows in the house that get all-day sunlight. The windows to the south are shaded by a porch, and the windows to the north are high and lack places to set things. Obviously, windows on the sides are only good for half the day -- and, as much as I want these plants to thrive, I am not about to spend my days moving them back and forth in search of sunlight. What to do, what to do.

The weather has been correspondingly gloomy; Monday it rained on and off throughout the day, and subsequent days, though without rain, have tended to be overcast. Occasionally (like right now, in fact) sun breaks through the clouds in a glorious beam and lights up the trees and grass, but that's becoming less frequent.

The trees in our yard -- three large silver maples and a periphery of oddities (including, I have finally figured out, a tulip tree) and a large bush in front -- are finally starting to turn. The bush is developing an intense red, while the maples are favoring a pale lemony yellow. The yard is becoming littered with dead, curling leaves, though not enough yet to rake.

The squirrels continue to be lively and noisy, and I do think next month may bring the start of bird-feeding here. I just have to figure out where; ideally it would be a place where I can sit and watch them, and where the seeds won't make too much of a mess, and where there might be a chance of discouraging the squirrels. Must think on this further...

Thanks, Chris

1. Of all the books that you have eventually finished after many starts & stops, which one took you the longest and how long did it eventually take?

Oh, good heavens. See, the problem with this kind of question is that it presumes the memer wanders around with such information readily on tap in their brain. With the exception of a few categories of data, my mind doesn't work that way. In order to answer it, I would have to wander through a library -- an actual physical library -- filled with every single book I have ever read in my entire life, and look at each and every one of them to see if a memory about it being difficult to read and get through surfaced. My mind is excellent at responding to memory triggers; it sucks at pulling up such data out of thin air. This is also why I loathe memes about favorite books, most disliked books, ten books a person must read, etc.

That said, I wandered my current library and came up with two:

Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment by I. G. Simmons, and John Bidwell and California: The Life and Writings of a Pioneer 1841-1900 by Michael J. Gillis and Michael F. Magliari. The first was impossibly dense, which was awful, because I'd assigned it to a class of inexperienced freshmen. I was having to write explanatory glosses of every damn paragraph; I hate to think what it did to my students. The second I read for a book review. It took me for-freakin'-ever, because it was filled with lots and lots of facts about a guy I wasn't that interested in, and the two authors kept overlapping, and I couldn't tell the point of the book beyond that Bidwell was nifty-spifty-keen, and it was really poorly organized, and it talked far more about Bidwell than his writings, and was crap about context. Then, after all of that, the reviewers decided to run with someone else's review of the book, and never told me (I learned this by seeing the other person's review when I went to see if mine had been published).

2. What great band (or album or song) have you heard so often, you wouldn?t mind never hearing again even though you still think the band (or album or song) is great?

See rant, above. Then add in that I am absolutely horrible at knowing or recognizing popular bands of any kind. The artists I know best are weird and small-scale and little known. I exist in a pop music bubble of sorts -- I recognize names of groups, but if a song plays on the radio, I have no idea who wrote it, nine times out of ten. I am the person who did not know who Pink Floyd was until I went to college. I am the person who, in high school, was well-liked because they could put anything on the radio (except most heavy metal and a lot of jazz) and I wouldn't care. Unless I'm singing or dancing with it, music is aural wallpaper for me most of the time. If there's something else to compel my attention, music awareness goes right out the window.

How about any of the Agical-May Evor-Tray ones? (And if any o' you mention this name, or even its abbreviation in the comments, without scrambling it first, you run a very very high risk of having your comment deleted. I am very sick of people coming here looking for the damn lyrics!)

Although perhaps not. I don't think it's really all that great. It's my answer more because it annoys me than because it's good. (Ducks to avoid the rotten tomatoes from hordes of fans.)

3. Which cliché or often cited quote needs to be placed in quarantine for a few decades?

Agh, agh, agh! See, rants 1 and 2, above.

"It's a free country" perhaps?

4. During the 1990s "Compassion Fatigue" received a lot of press, now the media is giddy with "Donation Fatigue". What will be the next trendy fatigue?

Fatigue fatigue. More seriously, how about Conservation Fatigue? (I'm thinking peak oil here.)

5. What percentage of respondents will answer "meme fatigue" to question #4?

Well, presumably anyone who chooses to respond likes doing memes, so I'm guessing the percentage will be low, perhaps even zero.

Inflicted by Chris Clarke

Vanity

I'm having "a moment" this week. Bear with me.

Basically, I'm feeling old. Not so much in the "gosh, I'm feeling creaky" sense as in the "my god, I look like shit" sense. Partly we're talking hair, largely we're talking skin. Both are depressing.

Lucky me seems to have inherited the "early grey" gene from my mother's side of the family, and it has by this time kicked in with a vengeance. Back in its heyday, my hair was a rich dark brown with coppery highlights. Now it's a flat brown with silver ones. Simply put, it clashes with itself. Once it is all grey, it will no doubt look spectacular, but at the moment it is having an argument as to whether warm tones or cool tones will prevail. The cool, obviously, is winning, but in an ugly, petty way.

It's also too long at the moment. Worn down, it looks okay, if not exciting. Basically we're talking mildly wavy, wispy hair that's parted in the middle. It's fine, so it tends to fluff up when it's clean, and to lie disgusting and lank when it's not. However, being fine and floaty, when it is down it gets in my eyes, into my mouth, tickles my nose and makes me sneeze, and is generally a pain. So mostly I'm wearing it up, which flattens it onto my skull, which means that I look like a pinhead. A pinhead with a receding chin and a too-pointy nose. Not attractive!

So I'm thinking haircut, and I'm toying with a dye job -- anything to stop this droopy, gawky, getting old without dignity thing. I'm almost at the point of wanting to shave my head just so I don't have to deal with it. The only things stopping me are (a) the aforementioned pinhead factor, (b) an awareness of strange lumps and bumps on my scalp that I'd rather keep hidden, and (c) it's getting cold! The only real question now is... bangs? Or not?

I'm not really fond of bangs -- largely because they are hugely annoying when they're growing out and because I have memories of the way they aggravated my acne as a teenager -- but they would have one really great advantage. They would hide my high, blotchy forehead!

Which brings me to my second act of griping: my skin. Specifically, the skin on my face. Elsewhere it's either fine or I don't really give a rat's about how it looks. But my face... I look at it every day. Lately, with rue or disappointment. I have that lovely trifecta of zits, wrinkles, and splotches going on. The splotches are particularly aggravating because they are both ugly and self-inflicted. They are a photoreaction to -- ironically -- a wrinkle cream I tried about four years ago. It had oil of bergamot in it, and that plus sun equals ugly brown blotches -- mostly on that lovely high forehead I was mentioning before, where they are impossible to ignore. Hence, bangs.

Yet I can live with the blotches, more or less, as I have lived with the zits for lo, these many years. No, what's frosting my shorts is the wrinkles. Crow's feet. Mouth lines. Little vertical jobbers above my nose that show up when I squint. And worst of all, full-cheek wrinkles. I didn't even know about them until I was looking at the pictures from our trip. And there they are, covering the entire lower half of my face. With splotches and zits on top of that. UGH!

So I'm feeling depressed. Blah and grey and wrinkly and blotchy and drab, drab, drab. Sigh.

I Drew A Pig!

You can too!

(Two caveats: (1) in order to save your pig, you need to enter a name. I wasn't able to type mine in, but if that happens to you, cut-and-paste works fine. (2) The code the site offers to display the pig is geared for forums, not html-based sites. I found that doing a screen capture and an upload worked better. Plus then I get to keep a copy of my pig. *smile* You can also convert it into html if you wish.)

c/o flea (whose pig is just adorable)