Creek Jots: January Leaves Like a Lamb

by fred on January 27, 2012

☐  Unheard of: A january morning and we don’t need a fire in the stove. Last I heard, we will pay in February for our month-long January thaw. And we will pay wide and deep for warmer winters, hot summer nights, and turbulent and chaotic climate in the decades to come. We have made our bed.

☐  Buck, the movie about the “real” horse whisperer, is coming to Floyd February 11.  Read more at SustainFloyd.org

☐  I got an “alert” from my mapophilic blogging buddy Gary, pointing out the revised imagery of our area in Google Earth. Dang. You can see the logging from last spring, the garden shed, lots of stuff not shown in overflights from a couple of years ago. These images are from Nov 2011, and zoom down to a much finer level of detail, even in our very rural part of the world.

☐  Speaking of views, I have two for you. One is of size, the other, of landscape. Both are highly worth your time. Or at least they were worth mine.

▶ Scale of Universe – Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool

▶ Remind Yourself How Beautiful Nature Is By Watching This Stunning Yosemite Timelapse 

☐  Why do blog visits fall off so precipitously on Fridays? Last week I had the lowest visitor count I’ve had maybe since the first year of the blog. And so I feel a bit foolish even bothering to post anything on Fridays. Most folks read from work. Is Friday the day they finally hunker down and get stuff done they deem even MORE important that blog reading?

☐  The “task manager and general informational-organization” realm is one that for me is in constant flux. I don’t seem to be able to find any one online or desktop application that does it all. It MUST be out there. And so I have come back (probably temporarily) to SpringPad, which admittedly has come a very long way since I was a beta user several years ago. It is, like most, the kind of app that is hard to “get” until you invest enough time to pour enough stuff into it that make useful. I’ve also installed the Mac version of Producteev, and flirt with Asana, WorkFlowy, Checkvist, and Things. And I still long for the long-abandoned EccoPro that did it all. Imagine, the Mac version. Sigh.

☐  Gandy is being incredibly good today, in SHARP contrast to the past few days–as if she finally GETS it. Frankly, I wondered if we were going to be able to come to terms. For the first time today, I caught her doing something she knew was wrong, and rather than be defiant she was repentant. Rather than biting, today she’s licking. Oh let it last!

☐  I love it when the depth of language leaps out at you unexpectedly. Of all places, I learned a very OLD meaning to a familiar word from an episode of the TV series (LOST on NetFlix.) Some of the characters were building a medieval-looking seige-engine giant slingshot of a thing which one them called a trebuchet. Say what? I thought that was a font type. It is, and here’s the story of how it got that name in 1996.

Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Vincent Connare for the Microsoft Corporation in 1996. It is named after the trebuchet, a medieval catapult. The name was inspired by a puzzle question that Connare heard at Microsoft headquarters: “Can you make a trebuchet that could launch a person from main campus to the new consumer campus about a mile away? Mathematically, is it possible and how?” Connare “thought that would be a great name for a font that launches words across the Internet”.

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Wild Kingdom Come: For Our Chickens

by fred on January 26, 2012

I told you a few weeks back that the coyotes got our hens. There were feathers all over the pen, and Ann found two carcasses of the black hens, Beta and Myrtle, out in the pasture.

What I didn’t tell you is that the next morning, Gandy (during her first week with us) and Ann discovered the red hen, Pearl, alive, down in the creek bed, nearly frozen. The thermometer had dipped almost into the single digits that night, and it seems a miracle that she survived.

For the next week, she would barely come out of her house even for food or water. In the past week or so, however, and particularly when the weather is less harsh, we open the pen gate around noon. She comes across the creek and has taken up regular residence just off the back porch. She was fearful and aloof and avoided us before, but now we are her only flock, and she seeks out our company.

A couple of days ago, just about the time I was thinking I should herd her back over to her pen, I heard her squawking out front. I jumped up and ran to the door to find a massive, mostly-black coon chasing her down the road. He didn’t even bother to look up when I hollered from the porch. I ran down in my socks, found a large rock, and hurled it soccer-fashion into the creek near the coon. He scampered up the nearest walnut tree, while I ran inside for the gun.

By the time I got back out, he was lumbering his way across the creek. The chicken was nowhere to be found. I assumed she would hide until dark, at which time the raccoon, the coyotes, wild dogs or some other predator would scatter her red feathers for us to discover on a future walk. But just before dark, I heard her calling far behind the house and coaxed her back home.

Yesterday, a fox explored the pasture in broad daylight, hunting for rodents. It’s uncommon to get more than a glimpse of a fox during the daylight hours; we’ve seen them pass through, during mating season, but I got to watch this one hunt. Her technique was not much different from Tsuga’s–nose-driven, but also attending to faint sounds of digging and scurrying under the matted pasture grass.

At one point, she paused, lifted one paw, cocked her head, then leaped far higher than the 80# Tsuga, tucked her legs under her, and spiked her head, nose first in the grass. She came up with the fattest rodent I’ve ever seen–too big to be a mole or a mouse as I watched through binoculars. And then she coursed back and forth on down the pasture, paying no attention to the chicken pen–whose gate was thankfully still closed at the time.

If the bold fox comes back during the day again, chances are she’ll be far quicker at grabbing the chicken than the coon was. And chances are, I won’t be able to do a darned thing about it.

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How To Make Your Dog Throw Up

by fred on January 25, 2012

Jesse loves a good WET better than any dog I ever saw

Hydrogen peroxide.

I’d never heard of this “remedy” until my wife came home from a church meeting last week telling me the terrible tale (outcome then unknown) about Tsuga’s best and only playmate, 120# golden retriever, Jesse.

It seems his owner, our neighbor and friend, was on the phone when he heard a commotion in the other room. By the time he went to investigate, Jesse had eaten a lot of thyroid pills (and the bottle too, it turns out.)

The emergency clinic in Christiansburg (Town and Country, the same one where we rushed Tsuga to no avail, almost two months ago) instructed Jesse’s human to induce vomiting–by giving the dog a 3% dilution of hydrogen peroxide, just as the recent article at the link above describes. (You might want to bookmark this, pet owners, and local folks, and the ER vet phone is 540.382.5042.)

We heard nothing more about this potentially tragic “stupid dog trick” for more than a day. (Jesse is highly intelligent, but to butcher and old country song, “the Mouth Has a Mind of Its Own.”)

The H202 worked and the dog is fine. His owner, however, may need sedation and counseling. And a stainless steel medicine locker out in his shop.

My only puzzlement is this: how the heck do you “make” a dog drink hydrogen peroxide? Should one keep a turkey baster handy for just such a use? You can hide a pill in some peanut butter, but a liquid that MUST go down NOW?

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Lineage: Labrador Retrievers Need Not Apply

by fred on January 24, 2012

Our dog was in a litter being handed out for free from the back of a truck at WalMart in Galax. A kind young girl suspected that, given away indiscriminately like this, some of the young “Shepherd-Lab mix” pups might end up back in Humane Society custody after being neglected or abused, in households unprepared for the considerable effort and time it takes to contain a puppy while it grows to resemble an intelligent being.

So mom and pups were taken off the hands of the Walmart Give-away person, and effort made through the Human Society to find intentional homes for the 8-week old pups. The mother dog, the girl told us, was definitely “mostly German Shepherd” and one of the three pups she brought for us to see was shaped and had the longer, denser hair of a Shepherd. But not Gandy.

And though they were advertised as being probably fathered by a Lab, we’ve decided that misses the mark. We know labs, by temperament and form, and this dog sleeping under my desk just now knows nothing of the wanting-to-please, quiet disposition of a lab. There is something else under the hood here.

There are practical reasons to want to know. We need to order a crate that will fit this dog as an adult. How big will she get? (I’ve seen the rule of thumb to double the weight at 14 weeks. She’ll be about 25# by then, so 50#. But how tall?) And we’re puzzled by her temperament, energy level, curiosity, intelligence and persistence. Who is this dog going to be?

We’ve thought maybe boxer, given the build and the coat, but the face is not right. We’ve wondered about pit bull, but she is so long of neck and leg.

Last night I happened to pick up the latest National Geographic, whose cover story is “What Dogs Teach Us.” The centerfold is a display of breeds. I did a double-take.

“THAT is our dog” I said out loud to no one. Almost all features fit, even though Gandy is definitely not pure to the breed. The long neck, the dark muzzle, long legs, copper coat and wrinkled brow. She even, when alarmed, shows the distinctive “ridge” that was so startling when Ann and I first noted it. “It’s like a mohawk!” we both said. And it is characteristic of the Rhodesian Ridgeback, or African Lion Dog. The image above is of pure-bred ridgeback puppies. Look familiar?

Even the description of the dog’s personality is a dead ringer:

“They are strong-willed, exceptionally clever, and many seem to have a penchant for mischief. Owners report them teaching themselves (and each other) how to escape crates and kennels, open even ‘child-locked’ cabinets and doors, and especially behind-your-back stealing of food.

…Despite his athletic, sometimes imposing exterior, the Ridgeback has a sensitive side. Excessively harsh training methods that might be tolerated by a sporting or working dog will likely backfire on a Ridgeback. Intelligent to a fault, the Ridgeback accepts correction as long as it is fair and justified, and as long as it comes from someone he knows and trusts.”

Man, does this hit the mark. Gandy returns blow for blow. She is not penitent when she does wrong, and will only escalate her resistance if confronted with force or punishment. But then, she can be a dear. We have yet to learn exactly where the switch is, or how to remove batteries.

Take a look at the Google Image gallery and compare to Gandy’s pix at Picasa. What do you think? Anybody been around this breed and have advice, suggestions or condolences?

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Getting the Joke: The Bond of Humor

by fred on January 23, 2012

I was thinking back this morning over past late-Januarys since starting this blog in the summer of 2002. I felt certain that, if I went back through the archives, I would find myself at the zero point, where life seems to be at a standstill, and molecular motion ceases.

Then I got curious, found myself in the January 2004 archive, and made myself laugh. That felt good.

So instead of trying to reach conclusions by way of a smarmy nostalgic slog across a tundra of Januarys, here’s what I wrote about humor eight years ago, prompted by the fact that I had just finished watching three seasons of MASH on VCR tapes. I always felt like Hawkeye Pierce and I had a bond–a brotherhood. Who shares your sense of humor?

Cover of "M*A*S*H (Widescreen Edition)"

Cover of M*A*S*H (Widescreen Edition)

Next to sex, the bond of shared laughter must be one of the most intimate of human experiences.

If I had life to do over again, there would be more music and there would be more laughter in my life. The music I could make alone. The laughter–that is a more elusive fish.

One can laugh alone, but the most satisfying humor is shared, and just as one finds only one or a few with whom he or she could spend a lifetime, it seems that finding another who shares the same way of coping with humor–of crisis management with laughter, of word play and wit– is just as rare.

Two people who laugh at the same thing are more likely, perhaps, to stay married than two who balance their checking account the same way. Humor involves the intellect (wit), the emotions (mirth) and the physiology (laughter) and so when two people laugh at the same thing, there is a deep connection that is beyond words and a bonding occurs, or the bond that was always there is uncovered.

I am decidedly not funny as in joke-telling. If pressed, I couldn’t come up with a half dozen jokes (half of them knock-knock) and I’d flub them sure as the world. But I do see (and too often voice) the ridiculous with some clarity in the news and my own bumbling life, and absurdity abounds on every hand. I see myself as a mirthful person; my family may not agree because I’ve learned to keep many of my witty quips to myself over the years.

Language is packed with humor, and puns are not off limits, no sir. While I am definitely not into cruel humor at another’s expense (which seems so popular on TV comedy these days) sarcasm and irony are fair and oft-used tactics, but I have to be very careful where I use them and have been misunderstood by my more concrete and somber colleagues in the past. There’s nothing more lonely than to be the only one to get the joke.

The most laughter-filled time in my life was, paradoxically, while working in a multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Program as a physical therapist.

I would come home on Mondays, after our medical rounds, with permanent laugh lines etched in the corners of my mouth. While I’ll confess, some of our pitiful patients were easy targets, the more usual victims were the clinical psychologist, the nurse, my good friend the sociologist-director (who gave presentations on humor in medicine), the exercise physiologist, the PT or the DO medical director. We were all such exaggerated characters in our own right, working in a stressful situation where terrible things had happened to the people in our charge–not unlike Hawkeye and Hotlips and Radar in the heat of battle and bloody operating rooms. Lordy, it felt good to laugh.

If you and I spent time together, would we share a sense of humor?

For some whom I’ve come to know via Fragments, I think “most definitely over a pitcher of some bubbly beverage, he and I or she and I would quickly find common ground and resonate in each other’s humor-frequency… they are the BJ’s and Trappers of this little blogging world”. And there are others for whom I think “we’d get along intellectually, but he or she is too (serious, concrete, up-tight, academic…) for me to be wide-open with my authentic quirky way of seeing and expressing things… these are the Frank Burns and Hotlips of the blogosphere; we’d smile, but we wouldn’t laugh often.”

Sorry. I’ve gone and gotten ruminative about humor. I’m a mess. But then I’ve been alone with the dog for two days since Ann’s snowed in at work. I’m starting to get a little cabin crazy and everything seems absurdly tragic or funny to me. Better laugh than cry. Eh?

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Country Living: January on Goose Creek 2012

by fred on January 21, 2012

Winter Clouds, Timeless Barn: Floyd County VA

It has been such a mercifully mild winter thus far–so much more benign than years in the recent past when, after the first week of December, there’s been little that could be done working on the next year’s wood for the ice and snow, and just getting to the paved roads was a daily challenge. (On the other hand, we are expected a terrible year of TICKS, and I hate to put that poison on the puppy to keep them off. There were 25 cases of Lyme Disease at our vet’s, four of them fatal last year.)

I have a project I might actually complete. I’m replacing the supports under the stacked wood–some of which have been in place since we first moved in. After we burned up a half-cord stacked up against the bank, I pulled a rotten “landscaping timber” out of the wet ground. It came from the rudimentary bridge across the branch, the way we found it in March of 1999, the year we bought the place.

I’m replacing the old rails with locust or oak, and even poplar will do since I’m elevating them on cinderblocks to keep the bottom row of wood drier than I’m finding it stacked just off the wet ground.

The other day, I found myself working hard enough to shed all but a sweatshirt. I realized that, one year ago, I could not work long enough to work up a sweat because of my hand pain. The April surgery was an agony, not because I had any appreciable post-op pain or complications, but because it took me out of the woods, so to speak, and the garden, for about six weeks.

Now, with the exception of the occasional sharp pain in the un-operated thumb, I can work until I get ready to stop–which, admittedly, is too near the very beginning of a task I would once have completed in one pass. Now, it takes several. We roll with the punches.

We have March mud on our road, with temps 15-20 degrees warmer than normal for this typically frigid time of year. The ground (including the gravel road) is frozen down deep, but the top couple of inches is a semi-solid more treacherous to drive in than snow. Thank goodness, once again, for Subaru.

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The Goose Creek Weekend LinkOrama

by fred on January 20, 2012

Scientific studies on climate helped establish...

Image via Wikipedia

I’m not making much headway on it, but for those rare moments when it is possible to actually think, I’m thinking about what to include in an unusual speaking opportunity coming up in April.

I’ve been invited to offer an Earth Day “sermon with slides” (waiting to hear if the visual component will work in the facility during daylight hours) between a 9:00 and 11:00 church services in another county. (I’ve had far more opportunities in Wythe and Franklin than in my home county. Don’t know what that says, exactly.)

So I may refer to thoughts towards that event as time goes on. There certainly is plenty to offer, especially as the first Earth Day came along the same year I started grad school towards a masters in Vertebrate Zoology. Those were hopeful times. We expected the “greening of America.” We knew what we needed to do as a nation. Then we forgot.

Then too, I am approaching the ten year anniversary of the blog, which coincides with the ten year anniversary of the end of my full-time employment in health care and the beginning of so much else. That calendar landmark bears some retrospective words and images here.

Meanwhile, the “read-later” links are piling up. Prior to the December 18 regime, I would have offered commentary and opinions about at least some of these. That was then, this is now. For those who might be interested, here are some keepers:

When Profits Can Take a Back Seat to Doing Good – WSJ.com 

The Climate BS Awards for 2011 | Planet3.0

Insurance rates driven up by global warming, NPR reports – latimes.com

Economic Growth and Human Well-Being | Planet3.0

Snow Depth Anomaly | Planet3.0 

Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson on Engineered Inequality | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com 

The Top 1 Percent: What Jobs Do They Have? – NYTimes.com

Why SOPA Is Dangerous

The Inquisition: Alive And Well After 800 Years : NPR

Arguments from Global Warming Skeptics and what the science really says 

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Under The Same Roof: Gandy’s First Month on Goose Creek

by fred on January 19, 2012

Surveying her domain: so much to explore!

Gandy’s puppyhood under our roof had a certain beginning exactly one month ago. But when that life stage will have an end is anybody’s guess. It won’t be soon enough, if you know what I mean.

Yesterday, the walls of an old farm house, the pitched hillsides of Goose Creek Gorge echoed the desperate cry of a man at his wit’s end: “I. Want. My. Life. Back!” Then, he conceded servitude and got back to whatever it was that Gandy wanted to do.

Tsuga died December 5. Gandy joined us December 18. And we remain emotionally ambivalent, thankful for a new companionship that exists merely as an uncertain anticipation, while grieving for the low-maintenance, high-fidelity friendship we still remember so well. We try not to compare. Someday, she will measure up. We walk by faith.

Ambivalence. To be sure. I question both the sanity and the practical consequences of devoting one’s life time and energy to the bringing up of a more-or-less domesticated wild animal one chooses to bring under their roof, onto their carpets, under their legs, into their otherwise peaceful sleep, and front and center into a daily schedule that was complicated enough without another mouth to feed (and entertain and train and avoid.)

What imperative drives certain people to suffer this torment? No doubt, we are among those souls whose lives are incomplete without this particular kind of caregiving-and-receiving. And we have done it again, with a whole month behind us now, more dividends towards the credit side of the ledger of canine relations. Things are going well. And things are not going so well.

The history of channeling of Gandy’s diminishing inner wolf is written  in the epidermis of my hands. I am pleased to notice that most of these (mostly) little (mostly) inadvertent wounds are almost healed, and she is far less prone to mouth without thinking. Even so, from time to time, I have to exercise gentle “alpha litter mate” tactics, and hold her firmly to the floor with her head and jaws restrained, release her gradually and tenderly, and reinforce “no bite!” She responds visibly by constraining her bite or diverting that energy to an offered, acceptable alternative to flesh, shoes, bathrobe or boots. There is hope for sure.

That not-unanticipated negative out of the way, she makes us laugh with her antics and the games she creates. She seems to have some herding instincts, which we see especially when she has found 2 of the 3 tennis balls our neighbor-friend gave us. She corals them both under the small green desk chair and attempts to get under there with them, inevitably kicking one ball outside the “fence” and has to stalk it, then carry or push it back where it belongs.

Outside, she is in heaven. And there is so much OUTSIDE to be enjoyed here. This place just begs for a dog.

She loves chasing leaves blowing in the wind, climbing (or attempting to climb) impossibly steep banks along the “New Road” and slaloming down the leaves towards the pasture on the downhill side. Give her the occasional bug emerged from winter sleep into the warmth of an afternoon and she is entranced. Put her inside the garden fence, and watch her discover and destroy a small turnip!

And she can certainly be disarmingly sweet and charming. Thankfully, we see this angelic side more often, the demonic, less. “Be sweet!” I tell her if she forgets, and she goes from soft mouthing to gentle, affectionate licking. Then back to biting. Alas. She is not Tsuga. She is her own self. And we do not yet know who that will be. I think I’m going to survive her puppyhood and grow to cherish her presence in our lives. I really do, he said.

At 12 weeks, she has outgrown her borrowed crate, and we’ve temporarily borrowed a larger one (from Gandy’s generous Fairy Dog Mother) that the pup doesn’t have to duck to enter, and hope to heaven this will be sufficient to meet her dimensions for the long haul. Oh please. She weighs close to 20 pounds (the vet visit today should get us an exact weight.) She is getting hard to lift, hold and carry.

She is no sissy, and suffers the occasional bump, fall or other trauma in stride. She will be worthy opponent for a groundhog someday, and my guess is she’ll be as fond of mining for moles as her Uncle Tsuga always was.

So, there’s more than you wanted to know. I continue to consider weaving these stories with those of the three labs into at least a short photographically-illustrated digital book. The question is, can one write a book while being nibbled to death by mice.

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Poisoning our Pollinators

January 17, 2012

I continue to have a gut-level sense that, when conclusions are finally drawn to explain honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder, that, yes, it will be attributed to many different stressors. But I predict that the lion’s share of blame will ultimately be fixed on pesticides. Hers’s one more nail in that particular coffin. Honeybee deaths linked [...]

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Things Above Us and Below

January 16, 2012

Once again, I have topics brewing (as if I had press deadlines looming).  One, in particular, I think if I can pull it off, I’ll submit to the op-ed page of the Roanoke Times. But that, along with most of the rest of our previously-“normal” life, will have to be postponed indefinitely until head-room presents [...]

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