Louisiana Waterthrush, Seiurus motacilla, offset printing after painting (watercolor or acrylic?). Altered from original in plate. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t have time to think and write this morning. We have company coming and the warning sirens of Dresden before the bombers blare shrilly from the roof tops. And yet…

I stepped out the back door to shake out the dog’s bedding, and stopped to listen:

The robin-like warble of the several scarlet tanagers who defend territories with benign melodies of possession; the Louisiana Waterthrush, who come early and stay late along the waterways and road, singing Sweet! Sweet! Chalybeate!; and for the first time this morning (though if I’d been listening, they’ve been around) the Indigo Buntings sing their couplets from the tallest trees–the dead snags of Hemlocks stark and skeletal over behind the barn.

The lull was brief, and there will not be much time for reverie because we are under siege. Some of us are. Others still try to make their peace with the order of things, and bird song, an offering accepted towards that end.

Right away, sir.

The same. But different.

A new filter. A new renewed sense to replace dulled vision, muffled hearing, insipid taste and anesthetized touch. A “separate reality” as Castaneda called this out of the ordinary way of walking in the familiar world. That is what I need right now.

Why? I suppose there are a dozen reasons. I am aware of a few of the guests at my pity party:

The approach of summer lethargy and heat-related discontents.

The sucking vacuum and emptiness where the next writing project–blog, radio essay or newspaper bit–used to incubate.

The slack sails after Land’s Sake and feeling discontent about my part of it, though others appraised my delivery much higher than I did.

And there’s the surly dog (who has, thank God, finally turned the corner and is remembering her domesticated side.)

There is the sorry state of the world of men that make me ashamed to participate in humanity, with no real hope that we’ll ascend above the mud and slime and ever be who and what we might have been. And it really does not matter who wins in November, as they will only be the hood ornament on the CorporNation.

There are the crappy hands, seen in X-ray last week at the orthopedists, pointing to a second and this time dominant hand surgery probably in last September.

Point is, I’ve been inside this fish bowl before, seeing life through a glass, darkly, though never before at 64.

And always, eventually, something new and energizing has come along in years past to pull me back into the land of the enthusiastically living. A new challenge has provided a filter that made the ordinary interesting again.

I’m not waiting for it to find me. I know better than to think the world is going to fall all over itself to lay down a red carpet to success. But I also don’t know how to make such a thing, such a transformation, a rekindling happen.

It’s maybe a worse case of the blahs than most, since it has taken me two weeks to actually even write such garbage down in this journal. And how many times have I started blog posts or Facebook entries, and scrapped them half formed? I mean really, son, who gives a rat’s acetabulum?

So…taking the familiar view in this image, looking from the pasture back towards the barn and the barely visible house, and inverting the image–that was sort of fun.

Time flowed. I sat up a little straighter for a few minutes, while the dog snores on the love seat, the rain beats down on the tin roof, the room is somber in the gloom of thick clouds and showers.

I will relent in my quest for stimulation and do what comes naturally at a moment like this. Move over, pup, I’m coming on board.

MINAMISOMA, JAPAN - SEPTEMBER 13: Local residents who live around the 20km exclusion zone around the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant, undergo a screening test for possible radiation at screening center on September 13, 2011 in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. Japan is marking sixth months since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck Japan offshore on March 11 at 2:46pm local time, triggering a tsunami wave of up to ten metres which engulfed large parts of north-eastern Japan and also damaging the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing the worst nuclear crisis in decades. The current number of dead and missing is reportedly estimated to be 22,900. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

While there are those who think too much is made of the nuclear situation in Japan, I continue to have concerns.

That the soil levels of cesium 134 and 137 are more than 100 times the levels in the Mandatory Evacuation Zone around Chernobyl seems significant.

That wild monkeys rather than humans are being sent into a forested region near the failed and irreparable Fukushima nuclear facilities I think tells us something.

The fact that both the Japanese and the US nuke folks have “solved” the health issues by raising the “safe levels” drastically seems a desperate measure to fool most of the people most of the time. It seems to be working.

Cypress or Graveyard Spurge volunteers along sunny roadsides in Floyd County

Immediately upon walking out of church Sunday, I was struck by a distinct sweet smell that was not familiar, and yet in the back of my mind (or my nose’s mind) I had smelled it before long ago.

Across Huffville Road from the church, along a fence at the edge of a steep pasture that drains rain to the Atlantic (the other side carries it to the Gulf, but that’s another story) was a stretch of untended, unplanted wildflowers of a most distinct yellow. I recognized it as Graveyard Spurge.

The spurge family, Euphorbiacaeae, has common representatives as crack in the sidewalk plants, and in the seasonal Poinsettias we see at Christmas. In some settings, you’d easily mistake them for cacti, since they have the similar abilities and adaptations to withstand very dry conditions.

What I did not know about this invasive alien plant is that it’s seeds have a unique means of dispersal: link

“Fruits are explosive. Capsules that split open when mature and throw seed to over 16 feet. The plant reproduces vegetatively through lateral root buds, forming extensive clonal populations. The taproot may reach lengths of approximately 10 feet and give rise to lateral roots, which produce adventitious buds.”

No wonder, then, that it is often found in dense stands along the side of the road, and especially visible this time of year when in flower.

Other facts to know are that some folks are reactive to it’s milky sap:

‘Toxicity:  It is potentially toxic to horses and cattle. All parts of cypress spurge contain toxic latex that irritates the eyes, mouth, and gastrointestinal tract and causes dermatitis upon contact in some people.”

TRIVIAL PURSUITS: From whence and when, the subtitle of this post? Codgers and Codgerettes?

A very young Corn Snake--a kind of rat snake

Fortunately, only one chop short of disaster, I spotted this new-born corn snake in time, and it remained unscathed by the hoe as I cleaned up garden weeds the other day.

I had seen a much larger adult behind the shed a week earlier–probably the same one I photographed hanging deceptively rope-like among the loops of cord and wire in the same shed last summer.

I brought the young corn snake inside to show a friend, here working on some computer projects, and he held the docile snake in his hands for this photograph.

Corn snakes (a species in the genus Elaphe, a rat snake) make good pets. They are docile as a rule, and quite attractive. Take a look at the variety of color patterns corn snakes exhibit.

At first glance, they might appear to the snakeophobe as a copperhead. Please look twice before chopping one of these snakes in two with a shovel or bashing it in with a rock to protect your children or animals.

These are beneficial around house or garden or barn, as they eat rodents (but also some birds and other small reptiles or amphibians) and kill by constriction. If they strike and bite, they are non-poisonous, and will cause less harm than a house cat scratching you or getting stuck by a blackberry or Smilax vine.

Note on the google images page the general elongated head, typical of rat snakes, versus the broader head and thicker body of a copperhead. If you can get the snake to roll over (you’ll likely have to be holding it) you’ll see the speckled belly pattern that might give these snakes their common name (looks like variegated corn) and their species name, guttata, which means speckled.

Related articles

• A Simple Guide to Looking After a Corn Snake (therealowner.com)

We all live in ONE common house. Economy equals Ecology

In another age, I would have, by now, begun to serialize to the blog the presentation I offered to an unpacked high school auditorium on Saturday.

But I think I’ve finally gotten it through my head that not very many readers or local citizenry want to hear or know or think about this stuff that speaks to our current and future obligations to the planet.

So I’ll just pass along this one illustration from the talk. I told the audience that if they remembered nothing else, to remember the centrality of this one mutualistic relationship that must describe the balance of life and living on the planet that their descendants will inherit.  We have lived for two hundred years in two separate houses–the “oikos” of our monetary resources [ECOnomy] and the household of our natural capital [ECOlogy] as if they were non-overlapping circles. This relationship is not sustainable.

The coming decade (singular, not plural) must bring those two circles to become one and the same. Human well-being (and the systems that generate it) must perpetuate for the long term the integrity of the natural systems that are impacted by that withdrawal towards providing our nutrients, energy and material existence–our basic needs, and only as much of our desires as the resilience of the planet can withstand, with a safe margin away from tipping points. We live today at or beyond tipping points.

In the future, it goes without saying, we CANNOT take more than ONE EARTH’s worth of natural capital a year to live off of. We should find a balance in some distant future world, where population and footprint combined inflict far less than everything the planet can provide and tolerate. This kind of relationship is going to take not new technologies but new hearts and minds. We can change.  Frankly, in my heart of hearts, I know we will not.

We will continue with business as usual. In that old-school economy, we use up forever. There is barely any overlap at all between the great circles of Economy and Ecology, and the former is pre-eminent over the latter in most disgraceful and unsustainable ways. It is not mutually beneficial to humans and planet. It is only good for some humans who do not want this system to end, ever.

YOU cannot be uninvolved. As Marshall McCluhan said, “On Spaceship Earth, there are no passengers. We are ALL crew.”

Below is a link to the reading and thinking resources I used for the presentation. I made little business-cards with the link for folks to pick up. But nobody did.

Possibilities of the Anthropocene  http://checkthis.com/k2v9#/

Related articles

• Must-Read: The Powerful Final Words of Ecotopia Author Ernest Callenbach(thinkprogress.org)

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IN SPACE - JANUARY 23: In this handout from the NOAA/National Weather Service's Space Weather Prediction Center, shows a solar flare erupting from the sun late January 23, 2012. The flare is reportedly the largest since 2005 and is expected to affect GPS systems and other communications when it reaches the Earth's magnetic field in the morning of January 24. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Civilization has become vastly complex, data-and-energy hungry and precariously balanced. We’ve put very many eggs in this basket. But we walk the tightrope of the future with that basket, blindfolded in a howling wind, hoping somehow to maintain our footing and make it to tomorrow. Do NOT look down.

Fukushima’s fate remains clouded in uncertainty, none of the possible outcomes quick or easy to get by without health risks to humans and living things in the sea. That’s just one of many nuclear facilities under failure for lack of adequate planning for a worst case scenario. The worst case happened.

I read a few weeks ago about an even more far-reaching disaster that could happen for lack of worse-case planning. And it turns out, the worst case has already happened, and not all that long ago. It was not such a big deal, because we had not built our house of cards nearly so high. That potential catastrophe was called the Carrington Event. Some authorities predict there is a one in eight chance of a repeat performance by 2020.

The Solar Super Storm 1859, the Carrington Event, set telegraph wires on fire. It would do oh so much worse things if it happened today. Perhaps the worst would be to take nuclear reactor coolant service pumps offline. The good news is that nuclear power plants have backup energy sources on hand. The bad news is that those backups are not designed for the possibility of months or years of the electrical grid being rebuilt after a super solar storm. And more.

“During a geomagnetic storm in 1989, for instance, Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid collapsed within 90 seconds, leaving millions without power for up to nine hours.

The potential collateral damage in the U.S. of a Carrington-type solar storm might be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in the first year alone, with full recovery taking an estimated four to 10 years, according to a 2008 report from the National Research Council.

“A longer-term outage would likely include, for example, disruption of the transportation, communication, banking, and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure; and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of lack of refrigeration,” the NRC report said.” WiredScience

Estimates are that it would take only a billion dollars to build into existing nuclear power plants the adequate backup in the event of a super solar storm. A mere billion–the cost of a single B-2 bomber.

We may get lucky, and only have earth-source issues to deal with without fearing what might befall us from space. But it sure seems like the odds of calamity are too high from this possible cause to not take out an insurance policy and build in failsafe measures that the folks at Fukushima are wishing they had about now.

400 Chernobyls: Solar Flares, Electromagnetic Pulses and Nuclear Armageddon | TruthOut

Space weather expert discusses solar flares  | LA Times

Carrington Event | Wired Science

Try taking an iPhone picture of a wiggly 6 mo old puppy belly w one hand!

There’s never a good time. Late Friday afternoon before a demanding weekend is one of the worst.

First thing this morning, I noticed the hair on Gandy’s side was sticking out the way it does when there is the lump of a tick under her fur.

In checking it out, there was no tick, no real lesion, but only a mass under the skin the size of  a small pea. I suspected some kind of subcutaneous fatty tumor. But a few hours later, it had completely disappeared. Maybe a sting?

Then this afternoon, after having seen her tummy often during the day’s play, she rolls over and has these round red flat lesions. They do not seem to itch or bother her in any way. But man, I sure don’t want ringworm or that disease where your nose and fingers rot off. That would really spoil my day.

So if anybody has an educated guess what this might be–and better–what to do about it on a weekend, please let me know ASAP!

The "Fertile Frond" interrupts the Sterile Frond

Yesterday’s puzzler: Interrupted Fern. The one from yesterday was just beginning to uncoil.

I have a few more fern images from this spring that I will post, even though we were out of town when the neighbor’s fern meadow was at its peak.

The order of the day, however, is not fertile fronds but fecund fescue: the grass is growing like there’s no tomorrow, as it always does until the hot-dry of June comes along and tames it.

We have given up the notion that our 1981 Honda mower can give us anything more, and replaced it with another (heavier, more complicated, more safety-burdened, and far more expensive.) This should be our last mower, the final installment in a 40-year run of small-engine love-hate relationships.

This one has a grass bag, and already, we’ve gathered close to 100 pounds of great clippings that will mulch the edges of the garden and offer abundant “greens” to the compost pile. It should be steaming nicely on these cool mornings. Having something to show for it other than an obsessively-manicured and otherwise unproductive lawn, heck, I might even see the point to mowing the grass!

Last reminder about Land’s Sake this Saturday starting at 10 at Floyd County High School and running into the afternoon.

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• Honda Mower Versamow Technology Helps Gardeners Mulch As They Mow (prweb.com)

A fern cobbled together from spare parts?

Nope. I’m still kicking. Not been very blog-active due to various distractions. One of them has been SPRING. The other has been 2-cycle psychosis: every small engine I have touched has been impacted by Mr. Murphy’s cussed laws.

Soon, I’ll have to mow the meadow with our new ultra-pricey Honda Mower we had to buy when the 1981 vintage Honda gave up the ghost a few days ago. And when I do, this plant will hopefully be spared, if I slow down enough to note it as I hurry through my accumulated and past-due tasks.

It is among my spring favorites, and always impresses me as a bit Paleozoic–like a plant dinosaur. It’s a fern, I’ll tell you that much. But can anybody carry it to the correct common name? It’s really quite obvious as no other fern has this particular sterile versus fertile frond arrangement.

Anyone? Anyone?

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