Fragments From Floyd

Butterflies. Tsuga is convinced they are here for his sport and entertainment. And, as you may know, it is their shadows that he is almost always more interested in, since learning that the actual creature does not, after all, taste like butter, as advertised.

But the swallowtails on the coreopsis were just flaunting it yesterday, daring him to try to catch them. He dared. He dove. He missed, but not by much. (See intended victim in evasive maneuver just above the Jaberwock's cruel jaws.)

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I know it is said that your enemies will tell you what your friends won't. And so even though I think of you as my friends, I hope you'll tell me to my face. I so rankle when I hear it in the speech of others, so if I am guilty please, risk injuring my hidebound ego. Rescue me by pointing it out at once. I'll do the same for you. We'll be doing each other a favor, truly.

The offense to which I refer and from which I try to steer clear is ORPs: the use of Obnoxious and Repetitive Phrases in one's day to day speech. This comes to mind because all day long (I hate to admit it) I've been yelling at someone on a teaching DVD as if she could hear my hollering every time (and oh there have been so many times) she says "go ahead and..." as in "go ahead and open a new layer." In twenty minutes of narrative, she'll use it 40 times, and she consistently has done so now across twenty hours of her otherwise pleasant and knowledgeable voice. I keep shouting to her "No, just tell us to OPEN a new layer. It won't make you sound pushy if you do. We won't think you rude or controlling. Just tell us what to do. Not to go ahead and do. That's just saying the same thing twice. Can't you hear yourself!" But she doesn't listen. Or doesn't care, I can't say which.

I suppose some people can just tune out that sort of thing and get to the meat of what the speaker is saying. I cannot. In college (somewhere I still have the notebook) I couldn't attend to the vertebrate zoology professor for all of his "uh's" and "um's". Every one of them was a little road bump that made my mental needle skip, and I ended up off track. I counted the skips with little hash marks--all around the edge of the page, until they spilled into the center where my notes should have been. We're talking duhs by the hundreds! And that was the same prof, who, like my CD maven, didn't want to seem too forceful or cock-sure, so he used the terms "pretty much" and "and that sort of a thing."

Which reminds me: we had a neighbor, a man who perhaps had sworn the secret pledge of Devout Indecisiveness. He ended almost every sentence with "and so on and so forth and what-have-you-there." I kid you not. This was an intelligent man capable of normal human vocabulary! But he was mired in this bog of habit and without help, he could not escape. I imagine he is there to this day, and **stuff and such and whathaveyouthere. (**An occasional variant.)

Some people mush their adjectives into a puree to make them easy to swallow: the woods are not dark, they are KINDA dark. The dog that bit them was KINDA mean. They KINDA make my flesh crawl! Ya know? Or "don't ya know?" Crimminy! Don't ask me if I know, turning declarative into interrogative. You might as well turn down that dark road to uptalk if you're going to Ya Know me over and over again before you make your point. Assuming you don't think that would be too threatening to actually just say it out move on.

Sorry. I got on my high horse there for a minute. Didn't mean to throw stones. I don't doubt that I am blind to my own ORPs that make people cringe. Should you and I meet someday for a nice afternoon of conversation, you may find yourself making mental hashmarks, keeping score of my own obnoxious verbal habits. But 'til then, tell us about ORPers you have known--a neighbor, classmate, family member or coworker. What meaningless space-filling sentence fluff and egregious wishwashies have you been exposed to? Wink Wink. Nudge Nudge. Know what I mean? Eh?

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Twice yesterday, I suffered the terrible occupational hazard of photographer's/birdwatcher's neck. First it was a pileated woodpecker I stalked until I could see his silhouette against the drizzly sky. His rattatatting set the standing stump of a white pine swaying with each hammer. Shards of old bark and frass fell noisily through the understory. I watched him selectively and deftly pick away the leaves of a Virginia Creeper that were obstructing his work on the old stump. But after standing stark still for ten minutes with my neck flexed as if I were looking at the ceiling overhead, I never got the picture.

Then, just before sunset, as I usually do, I puttered around in the garden. And as they usually do, the cedar waxwings congregated in the old walnut by the barn, using its dying branchtips to launch their frenzied looping forays out for insects, and oft times, I'm convinced, merely to show their siblings a new aerial acrobatic stunt they've mastered. Since they were not more than 20 feet overhead at times as I stood there in the bean rows with my hoe, and since there was nice orangy indirect lighting, I decided I'd see if I could capture a cedar waxwing in motion. I couldn't. And trying to keep the lens centered on these speedy aerialists as they zoom directly overhead is a great way to end up arse-over-teakettle in the creek. So, if I decide I must try this again, I will spread an old sleeping bag under the tree (but out of the birdpoop zone) and see if this supine orientation for birds-in-flight photography is any easier on the bones.

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Your hippocampus knows if nine (and possibly soon up to 15) years in the future you will develop Alzheimer's dementia. My first gasp on reading this was to think "how horrible to be able to look ahead and know you would some day forget everything and everyone you ever knew, and yet live."

But maybe this kind of foreknowledge can allow us to better understand the elements in our genetics, diet, environment and lifestyles that effect the onset of this mind-robbing condition. Already there seem to be clues: genetics (in twin studies) plays an important role. At this point, the genes we have are the cards we play. But as is the case in many of diseases for which there is a genetic predisposition, having the genes for a condition does not mean we are doomed to suffer their expression.

Recent research suggests two pertinent alterable factors that all of us can exercise to significantly reduce our risk of dementias (including Alzheimer's are: 1) simply drinking fruit or vegetable juice 3 times a week may make you four times less likely to develop ALZH. And 2) early gum disease and the inflammation it causes (say NO to the cola!) can increase your risk by four. Exercise and moderate alcohol use also figure among the controllable risk factors for dementia (as well as for numerous other lifestyle-related disorders, of course.)

So when you need a mid-morning pick-me-up, chose the juice.

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First, I get all twitchy with paranoia, imagining Google has managed to hide surveillance bots in my sock drawer. Fie! Fie! Run for your lives.

Then, later on the same morning, I'm lured back into the Googleverse by the free download of Google Earth--the ten-year dream of my internet-using fantacy life: a free world map program that will transport me to every town, neighborhood and backpacking or canoeing location I have ever in this life spent time.

Approach. Avoidance. Seduction and revulsion. What's a paranoid, net-dependent, infojunky mapfreak to do?

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Field Note, June 25, 2005: From a walk on a cool morning in June, the sun, finally, tops the ridge. Instantly I can feel its benign warmth on my face. I squint into amber shafts of light moving through the trees high on the mountain. Sunrays move like search lights through the opalescent fog, sinking visibly down into the valley, to find wet magnolia leaves along the path.

The physics of a nearby star lifts graceful rising pirouettes of cloud. And the hydrologic cycle, earth's water ballet, begins once more on the banks of Nameless Creek.

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1) Trust for America's Health has made available a very complete summary of the nation's (un)preparedness for an avian flu pandemic (state by state: anticipated deaths, courses of Tamiflu, etc.) It also emphasizes what can be done, still, to reduce economic and health impacts from this crisis. I'd suggest this: print out this document and be sure someone in your local health department reads it. Today.

2) FuturePundit's evaluation of the TFAH document. Among his conclusions, the following:

"If a half million or more Americans were at risk from some type of terrorist attack billions of dollars would be thrown at the problem. We should do the same with the avian flu threat. Avian flu is far more likely to kill you in the next 5 years than anything terrorists might accomplish. Our preparations for it should be commensurate with the scale of the threat it poses."

An ounce of prevention...

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"The Worst Jobs in History" is the name of a six-part PBS series. It allows the viewer (I am told) to watch the show's host reenact mankinds' most unkind use of human labor, from the Dark Ages to modern times. And there have indeed been some stinkers throughout our species' erratic history. By comparison, my own personal worst jobs are roses. And now as I look back over the most memorable of them, it seems most of my most horrid jobs were of the summer variety.

I was lifeguard and canoe manager at a summer camp. I also helped with the horses. Low point: while rounding up a dozen horses that had freaked and broken through the coral fence in a thunderstorm, my horse leaped over the bottom of a forked fallen tree. He went between the forks. I didn't. Emergency room: sternal contusion.

Summer of my senior year in high school I installed fiberglass installation overhead (my neck starts itching just thinking about it) while standing on a tall scaffold at a new hospital under construction near home. This is Alabama, mind you. It is summer. The windows are locked closed. There is no air conditioning. No lemonade. For a buck 75 an hour.

I spent the summer after my freshman year at Auburn on a barge (about the size of our living room here) on the Tennessee River. On the river (tanning and fishing) by day, housed in the neon-blinking Liberty Motel weeknights. Location: Scottsboro, Alabama. I witnessed a tornado pass over my head through the windows of my red VW beetle. Job description

I had been on the summer job less than a week, pawning myself off as a hopeful engineering student (because that is, after all, what this business was about.) While learning the process of structural material testing (in this case, cured concrete cylinders to find their resistance to compression) my arms are plastered in molten brimstone (literally: carbon and sulfur at several hundred degrees) and I came to work on day three with both arms bandaged to the shoulder. (Same job where by week two, they decided for liability purposes, maybe I'd be safer out of town and off shore.)

First job I had after getting married June 1970 and concurrently beginning graduate school was digging ditches in south 'bama in July. Duration: one day. Heat stroke. Get that degree, boy.

Grad Student: thesis research on radiozinc metabolism requires two hundred toads that we collected on a rainy summer night on the new Auburn bypass. One hundred ninety nine gave their lives to science. One stowed away in my raincoat pocket. Found sometime that fall. A frog mummy. Job description

Grad Student: Same semester as the frog collection: Obtained five foot rat snake for herpetology class points. It escaped in our apartment. New wife jumping up and down on the bed screaming, questions wisdom of recent marriage to biology major. Job Description

Fatherhood looms in the near future. First job after Masters degree (Zoology) and move to Birmingham: I sold fire alarms on commission using the fearmongering script: "Mr and Mrs Jones, (pointing to glossy color 8 x 10 in three ring binder kit) this horrid lump of burned flesh could be your little Sally." Duration: two days, and stop payment on the sales kit. Job description

Pregnant wife, no job, new masters degree, a week after barbequeing poor little Sally: I finally find work at the Univ of Ala Medical Center in dental-nutritional research. Work responsibilities included 1) decapitate 40 day old white mice; 2) bake heads in pressure cooker (autoclave); and 3) pick out their teeth for assay. Probably my most "dark ages" work to date. Job description

I think you get the picture. Now, it's your turn. Bet you've had a stinker or two. Get it off your chest. Come on, tell us about it.

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Browsed yesterday in Delmarva's News Leader: The dangers of over-reliance on spellchecker.

"MILLSBORO - U.S. Senator Tom Carper says more research for the poultry industry is needed.

He spoke to WBOC on Saturday from the site of the Delmarva Chicken Festival. He said government funding allows poultry experts to learn more about avian influenza, a deadly bird disease. One infected bird can spread the disease like wildflower to other birds."

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Effect Measure announces today the opening of the Flu Wiki self-described as "an experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health."

"The purpose of the Flu Wiki is to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic. This is a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies. Communications technology has now become sufficiently available to allow a new form of collaborative problem solving that harvests the rich fund of knowledge and experience that exists among those connected via the internet, allowing more talent to participate."

Having just opened for business, and, as is the way of the wiki, depending participant additions, there is mostly just a framework yet for what should become a useful central communications hub for Avian Flu news, advice and information. I think we can count on some highly qualified and well-informed contributors here, and they will be free in this forum to speak openly unfiltered by corporate, party or bureaucratic strictures.

I've bookmarked it, because I'm feeling I'll need to come back often this summer.

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I'm dabbling in Photoshop. No, I'll be honest: I'm immersed in PS at the moment, because I've sent myself back to school. With abundant thanks to my benefactor, in a kind of barter, J has recently sent me a three DVD set of Photoshop tutorials, and I've almost completed twenty-something hours of the BASIC disk--the first time through. I figure after I've watched and taken notes three times, something useful will stick.

Until then, I'll be making stupid mistakes, like the one above. But hey--sometimes accidents cause novel creations that persist because they show unexpected desirable features.

I had clicked off "constrain proportions" as I worked on getting this Parkway Panorama ready to print and sell (he said hopefully.) And so to my horror, my 180 degree wide expanse of mountains got smooshed up into 30 degrees of view, piling up the little knobs and rises into a scene resembling the Shire. And I sort of like the potential here. I think of this place in Tolkienesque terms at times, and think of myself as a very tall Hobbit. May the hair on my toes never fall out.

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We see our son not so often these past few years, and each time, after he's lived in yet one more far-off place, he brings home a new way of talking. In college, he lived in Tennessee, so there really wasn't a lot of difference in their southernisms and ours in southwest Virginia. Then during his junior year, after 9 months in Ireland and Europe, the jigs and reels and lilting tones of voice persisted for months after he returned home. With graduation, he moved to Vermont for a year and brought south new words and ways of saying them. Recently, we visited him in Vancouver, BC.

At our first time alone after spending the evening with our son, I asked Ann "Is it my imagination or does the boy end all his sentences with question marks? Have you noticed the rising inflection, and if so, does it bug you the way it bugs me?"

We discussed this with him, just wondering if he was aware of it. "It makes you sound indecisive, and wears me out to listen, because it's like you're asking me (or any listener) to approve of every declarative sentence offered as a question. I thought you should know."

He wasn't aware, and agreed it probably makes him sound a lot less sure of himself and his opinions than he in fact is.

Since then, I've learned this isn't just one of my little idiosyncratic language peeves. Uptalk Makes Me Upchuck says one writer; and another speaks of the linguistic affliction of the helium-filled inflection.

So if the speech patterns of someone you love? end with those little upturned apologies?, do them a favor? Make them stop?

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Okay, Carl. Here's another in the Fragments Goth series. See the ominous larger image--not a double exposure, but also not one that lent itself to very symmetrical composition. Hence, getting rid of some busy detail by losing it to shadow. Webs of mystery, what lurks in the netherworld of spiders?

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The use of eminent domain or "takings" is supposedly only to be used for the greater good. But whose interests are behind the recent takings in Connecticutt last week, supported by our "supreme" court? If this doesn't concern you, you're living under a rock somewhere. And even your rock might someday be bulldozed to make room for town houses or a cronie's corporate office park.

The common good is an expanding concept, and economic development has gradually -- and controversially -- come to be included in that sphere. Thursday's court decision solidifies its constitutionality for eminent-domain purposes, but -- as Justice John Paul Stevens' majority opinion stressed -- states remain free to set tougher standards.

They should do so, without delay. Lax eminent-domain policies favor moneyed interests over average citizens. States must counter this effect with laws that set high standards for "public benefit" and clearly define what that phrase means. Furthermore, if there is voter consensus against takings of non-blighted property, state laws should reflect it.

...It's time for legislatures to straighten out the loose and wobbly language of eminent-domain laws. If politicians resist, voters can do some "just compensation" of their own -- at the ballot box. Link

How does your state define imminent domain? Are there elections coming up in your town, county or state? If so, what do your candidates say about this most timely subject? If we don't define our 'greater good', if we don't take a hand in defining the limits of this powerful law, someone else (a contractor, a corporation, a political party) will make that decision for us. Take an interest. Or be taken.

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First, at the edge of the creek you dig a deep hole in the silty sand with your front paws, throwing it so that it covers your underside with a layer of brown. Next, run zigzags through the wet morning pasture so that your coat is caked with a dozen kinds grass seeds and chaff. Then hurry to find your master (somewhere out in the field taking pictures of spider webs) and show him what a finely adorned country dog you've become. If possible, lick his ear while he's down on his knees, then run around in large circles in the tall grass. Next: find a sunny spot and take a nap. Back porches preferred.

(Secretly, Tsuga wishes we had sidewalks.) via

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The Crooked Road is bringing Floyd to regional travelers' summer vacations and the front page of the Christian Science Monitor. Thanks for the tip yesterday from Nantoka ; and I see Floyd's music scene has even been noticed on the Left Coast by Fragments friend Rebecca Blood. Say, wouldn't it be fun to have a grand blogger meetup that includes the Floyd Friday Night Jamboree! Floyd's first Blogging Man (and Woman) gathering!

BTW, Doug Thompson has the Friday Night Jamboree documented in a video available for viewing at his site.

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My dental hygienist had never heard of it. After all, those who use this stuff aren't necessarily the kind that makes their regular six month prophy visits. I saw this first on a NYTimes piece, with a really sad photo (which I snagged, but somehow, it doesn't mesh well with the play of light in dew covered grasses) and the article is now archived. Just as well. Some snippets:

"The drug itself, a synthetic stimulant that can be manufactured just about anywhere, causes dry mouth, Dr. Shaner said, and that in turn allows decay to start, since saliva is unavailable to help control bacteria in the mouth. The drug also tends to leave users thirsty and craving a constant supply of soda pop and other sugary drinks, which spur the decay; Mountain Dew, he said, has become the preferred drink of methamphetamine users. At the same time, the drug's highly addictive nature causes many users simply to stop doing what is needed to take care of themselves, including the brushing of teeth."

"There are also dentists who point to methamphetamine users' tendency to grind and clench their teeth nervously, aggravating the frighteningly twisted and tangled look of meth mouth."

Just say NO. 'Kay? More here.

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SLANT OF LIGHT ~ Not to tread on the photographic toes of Mr. Fog himself, here's a rare shot from our valley. By the time the sun rises over our ridge, several hundred feet above the valley floor, the morning fog is usually long dissipated by the heat of the day. Compare Doug's slanting rays coming directly at the viewer from a sunset over the actual horizon versus the near-vertical rays of our 9:45 sunrise over the ridge. I had told myself that yesterday was going to be a sticking-with-business day. I'd just walk the dog down the "new road" over by the barn and come back and accomplish something. I ended up wading the length of the pasture (boy did I get soaked!) looking for spider webs, then doodled with images til almost noon. I confess, at this stage in life, I don't tend to defer gratification like I did when there was more time ahead in life for deferral. Sometimes I eat desert first, and the result often comes in the form of these visual slices of life I so enjoy sharing.

TIMBER! ~ Later this morning, Ann and I will be going down the road for the felling of monstrous white pine that grows very near the corner of Polly's barn. Craig, the treeman, asked if I'd come take pictures of the feat-- a very tricky and precise operation where there is some risk of the tree clipping the corner of the barn. But it must come down. Its roots are heaving the foundation, and one larger limb through the roof in a storm would crush the building flat. So, maybe a little photo-documentary later today or tomorrow.

SHEDDING ~ My gosh, when will the dog be done with shedding hair! But then, tis the season, and I've lamented about it every year this time, first with Buster, now with Tsuga, as follows: 1) I lauded my approach to doghair collection: turn on the ceiling fan, wait for the great tumbleweeds of dog hair to be driven up against the side of the couch, and collect them when reaching for your beer. (Ann didn't like my method, but hey, she's from Venus.) 2) Let it fall as it may, sweaters can be made from the stuff! I suggested a home industry: LabPacca garments, originally in Buster Black, now in Tsuga Taupe! and finally, 3) "Coat your dog in DoggiEnamel--the miracle sealer that locks out fleas, ticks and burs and ends shedding forever! (Complete with picture of product.)

SUMMER READING ~ Help me out here. I'm thinking of doing a future piece in the little column at Floyd Press that springs out of the blogger's book meme (or variations of it) that are going around. One question that should have been part of this 'assignment' is "what books did you read as a child that left a lasting impression and why?" If you're willing, send me three book titles from your days as a reader, particularly if you think today's young readers would benefit from adding them to their list of summer reading. The assumption is that some kids still think of summertime as a time to check out books in the Library Club Summer Readers club like some of us older folk once did. Are there summer reading programs where you live?

WALDO LIVES! ~ "Fred, come quick!" Ann gasped as she pulled the dog up the driveway by his collar. "There's a snake over behind the barn, and the dog is VERY interested. It's huge and I want you to tell me it's not poisonous. "It's just Waldo" I said with confidence. And sure enough, he's a little bigger and badder than last year, all curled up inside the center of a cinderblock. I goosed him with my hiking stick, and of course he hissed and struck at it before slithering off under the barn. Soon, on sunny mornings, he'll be cryptically draped along the stone foundation of the barn again, and we'll play "where's Waldo."

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In July, 2003, I was secretly delighted to find out my weblog had even made the "ratings" at all. This, even back in the early days when there were, if I'm remembering correctly, only about 50K blogs listed in the Truth Laid Bear Blogging ecosystem. Somewhere near the very end, I qualified (by whatever arcane formulae are used to calculate this, and three years later, I'm still clueless) as an Insignificant Microbe. I pretended to take offense:

I feel compelled to voice my resentment at the reference by innuendo on behalf of my kindred corpuscles that our weblogs are 'mere microbes' at the bottom of the food chain. That this blogger and associated blogs are AT THE BOTTOM, there can be no debate. But microbes! Please!

Call it hubris, but I consider myself higher than the microbe level, much higher....more on the order of a rotifer, tardigrade, or gastrotrich....perhaps not sentient in the InstaPundit way, but multicellular, by gosh....way beyond the level of staphylococcus.

And I think I speak for other hierarchy-impaired bloggers who hope one day, after regurgitating the crumbs that trickle down from the Top Feeders above, to one day grow into truly macroscopic creatures....flatworm, flukes, leeches!

Yes, we are small and insignificant, and the higher feeders swallow hundreds of us with their corn flakes every morning, but we ARE NOT MICROBES, and its time we took a stand:

We are M.A.D! Multicellular And Defiant! MADBLOGGERS! All for one and all about nothing in particular!!

There, I feel better. Think I'll go take a bath in a drop of pond water.

After three years of early morning writing in indifference to the drifting of continents, impact of meteors or rise of the terrible lizards, Fragments lives into the present era. Survival of the fittest? I think not. I attribute the evolutionary staying power of this blog far more to chance than to design, to blissful ignorance rather than to intelligence. I now have a backbone and walk upright, a TLB Large Mammal. Why is it that I feel at times more like an insignificant microbe than ever, one among the millions of blogs whose numbers grow by 30,000 a day? Why blog against nature red in tooth and claw?

I think the motivation to write and read blogs comes from the knowledge that each of those 30K new blogs are not as alike as peas in a pod or staphylococcus in a petrie dish. Each is as unique as the DNA of its author, a phenotypic expression of personality, experience and purpose. But subject to the selection pressures of real life, 999 out of 1000 of these newly evolving blogs will be born to die, to go extinct in two months, lacking the fitness--whatever odd ingredient that is, after all--to thrive, grow, compete. But some will live, propagate ideas and grow synaptic networks with like minds in a living net of words.

Meanwhile, some of us old-timers persist, in spite of the odds and without a clue where this adventure in emerging diversity will carry us. But it feels more and more as if the future is not merely a matter of my individual survival as a blogger. It feels as if there are forces at work, beyond our private purposes or personalities, that are shaping blogs-as-organism. Perhaps we are on our way in some strange lineage toward becoming a collective multinucleate creature possessing powers and properties for change we could not imagine as mere microbes. Could it be that the Grand Scheme calls for something like this potentially-cooperative syncytium of voices to draw us back from the brink of the abyss? Will blogs united become a force of natural selection in human history?

Who can say. I only know the this medium has been a force for good in my life, and trust in some small way it has brought at least some pleasant images into the thought-world of others. And if we each act locally for good, in the end, our impact can be global. Staphylococci of the world UNITE! We have more at stake than our egos or blog rankings!

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As photographic composition goes, I can't get too excited about this image. But as catalyst to memory from the middle of a snowy January day, this will carry me back to the colors, textures and smells of June pasture after a cold front has passed through. Clearness, coolness and color--a snapshot of the times of our lives.

I've been back over in the dew again morning already, even though it's barely light. A dense fog has settled into the valley. And again, there is no focal point than the valley itself, landscape for its own sake. But I'll return one more time later, as the sun rises. I can't watch it happen from the windows. Hopefully, the fog will not burn off completely before the light becomes a reason of its own to be there in the wet grass of June. Life on the planet is good, if we keep our vision sufficiently circumscribed.

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Yummy Peanut Butter! Delicious! Come! Eat! Enjoy!

The tops are eaten out of most of the green pepper plants. The sunflowers are eaten to the ground. One deer, according to the tracks, stepped between the strands of electric wire and helped himself to the product of hours of work (read: bending, kneeling, swatting gnats, sweating, miles of walking, carrying water, repairing worthless fence...you get the idea.)

What we need is a little operant conditioning. So I'm hoping the yummy lure (not well shown in the little picture here) will bring about a strong and lasting negative reinforcement for any deer who thinks I am in the business of growing deer salad.

Our neighbors we visited Monday evening have built crude 10 foot fences around their well-established garden plots. We can't do that. A 12 foot locust pole would have to be sunk 2 feet in the ground. Our garden, from necessity being the only flat sunny place that isn't a pure layer of river jack, is partly over the septic field. Tilling depth is fine. Deeper, we're messing with corrugated pipe. What are we going to do?

I can't tell you the sickening sense of being violated when you see those deep cloven prints across your deep-dug beds. (Oh my back!) "Ah, the tomatoes are looking good. Lettuce needs thinning already. Hmm. Better transplant the chard. AAAKKKKKKKK! My peppers!" If we had neighbors, they would have shared my moment of angst.

"Animal caught in a trap" they would have thought, looking up from their morning paper.

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Yesterday in the morning coffee browsing session, I ran across this wonderful Charles Atlas era Stong Man Stunts post via Metafilter. (Do take a look at some of these, but don't try them without adult supervision!)

And while reading about bending steel rods and tearing telephone books in half with your bare hands, I remembered a month or so back, Ann had tossed some long-lost snapshots on my desk (since then, buried under bills and CD cases) and asked sarcastically "ya got any idea who THIS is?" Yesterday I dug down to the lower strata and retrieved one of those pictures.

Duh. Sure I know who it is. It's Charlie Brown in his "I'm gonna whip Lucy's ___ period" in June, summer of 1985. Rumor has it that twenty years later, those six pack abs look more like a pony keg. That's what I hear.

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We've lived here now going into our seventh year (can it be?) and have known that, just up over that ridge on the east side of our valley, we have neighbors. But they, having lived on their land in Floyd for almost thirty years know the trails well, and will occasionally walk the mile and a half, through the woods, down to the old road along Nameless Creek and end up on Goose Creek Road by our barn.

"You need to walk up and see us" they tell us, but we never have. Last night, we did. Well, we didn't walk it, but we spent a few hours at their place at their big annual Summer Solstice gathering. We saw the headwaters of Nameless Creek. We got a different feel for our place in the larger scheme of things, being up on the ridge that we usually see on our pasture horizon. We put our little creek drainage into a larger perspective, got our bearings you might say. People become "real" neighbors after you visit them in their homes, share a meal. And last night we shared a potluck meal with maybe sixty of our more colorful Floyd County alter-native neighbors. It was indeed a cultural event. A multicultural event, actually.

We found a place to carry our paper plates full of organic vegetarian salads and such, and as we were sitting there, we became aware of a rhythmic commotion around the corner of the two-story farmhouse. I thought at first it was a boom box and the music was pure, raw percussion. It grew louder; more parts came in: cowbells, clanging pipes, sounds I could not name, several drum tones in vastly complex syncopated beats. And it was getting closer. And in a few minutes, from under the shade of a giant maple comes the procession of the Kasun Ensemble, by then in full tempo--and smiling ear to ear. We were obliged to set our paper plates down (marauding pups notwithstanding) because it is futile to resist moving to the beat of Ga.

Kasun (who live in Floyd) "is now considered one of Ghana's most innovative and powerful music and dance ensembles. By blending the authentic sounds of traditional instruments with the exuberance of hilife music and the complexity of African jazz, they are developing a unique Ga sound and bringing the tropical passion of West African music and dance to the world stage."

How cool is that: a mile from home as the crow flies, and in a different world entirely. And never more at home. There's no place like it.

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Be sure and see the "lowest hanging full moon in 18 years" during the next three nights. It will appear huge, and this NASA article tells you why.

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The third annual Spring into Summer street festival tried to make up in enthusiasm what it lacked in attendance. Somebody forgot to tell the public we were celebrating Fathers Day, the coming of summer and our downtown merchants. Even so, in the coolness and drizzle, it had its moments.

I posted one puny picture to the galleries. Doug Thompson got a nice little video with very good sound quality, I might add, Mr. T.

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For the three of you who are following the bird flu developments, Effect Measure is the weblog by "senior public health scientists and practitioners." You might find information here that hasn't been sterilized and diluted for the masses. You've read my concerns on this subject going back to last fall. One of my chief issues is the economic and societal impact, WHEN (a word rapidly replacing the IF of six months ago) a pandemic reaches the US. From a recent post...

"A pandemic of influenza could result in 350 million deaths globally/"said Michael Osterholm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "and would cripple the global economy with the suspension of international trade." [Dr. Michael] Osterholm, associate director for the National Center for Food Protection and Defense, [said] at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting June 16.

...Osterholm characterized a pandemic influenza as "the perfect storm" for the global economy because of its potential effect on countries that depend on overnight international trade for critical services.

"Collateral damage from the pandemic would also be significant because a suspension in trade would mean that countries will not have access to imported products used for manufacturing, life-saving medications and other consumer items," Osterholm said.

I have some very personal ruminations on this below. I share them with ambivalence. One the one hand I want to be honest and forthright, having done a good bit of reading on this for more than six months, seeing a looming matter of immense importance. On the other hand, I know that no one knows with certainty how this thing will turn out. So I'm sharing with you my concerns, open to the possibility that a lot of chickens will die, a few people will get sick, and H5N1 will mutate into an insipid bit of RNA that made the news for a few short months in 2005. So, with that caveat, read on if you want.

Note: Further reading in the blogs at FuturePundit and later this week, a collaborative wiki that looks like an idea whose time has come. I'll post when it's up and running.

How does one walk the fine line between prudence and panic? How can individuals be proactive to prepare for a time when we might become isolated into neighborhoods or communities that are compelled to be self-sufficient for a month? For six months? duing a period of restrictions in the movement of people and goods? I don't think this is alarmist delusion, but to bring it up is to suggest there's an elephant in the room we'd rather pretend isn't there. We've had no "duck and cover" drills for this one, and it seems we ought to have a proactive plan in place at all levels of society. Great, if we never need to use it. A real source of panic if we need it, and there is nothing but disinformation until the edge of the precipice.

Ann and I haven't really internalized this very real potential future yet by doing anything tangible in response. But this week, we'll be bringing home enough canning jars for the garden produce (if the deer leave us any); we'll do what we do when a winter storm is expected, only thinking it might last a month or two instead of three of four days. We'll be talking with neighbors who will be butchering a beef in the fall, and barter for the small amount of meat we're thinking about canning. I'll be wondering how our local community of neighbors and the larger one of FLoyd County would best form barter and sharing networks to use our experience and skills. And I'll ask about what, if anything, is in place for our local health department's role in this potential problem.

Possible fiction: Despite all measures at local containment, our area could become rapidly involved. The Roanoke and New River Valley lie along a main east-west corridor of exmigration from large eastern seaboard urban centers where the flu would likely be seen first in large numbers. Imagine that the hospital in Blacksburg where Ann works would soon have a dozen cases. She works there in the pharmacy. Will she be allowed to come home, risking the spread of the virus to Floyd County and Goose Creek? How will essential services go on while severe restrictions on travel are maintained? Will people comply?

I hesitate to voice these questions because they are still about events that have not happened. At this point, a bird flu pandemic remains a hypothetical problem, but the hypothesis may be verging on becoming a fact supported by grim numbers. How should one face such a possibility? Denial doesn't seem like a good alternative, nor does indifference. This is a historically-unique spot we're in, friends. There is the possibility of cataclysmic changes in the way we live our day-to-day lives. But maybe the exercise of thinking how we can work more closely together will have good consequences, even if (as we all pray) this pathogen fizzles off into the annals of diseases that never were.

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I think we're drawing to a close in the pasture grasses series. I have just a few more images to post. I'm hoping, first, that the field will be mowed very soon and second, that the orb weavers will have a chance to spin their magic in the tall grass before it is cut.

We're approaching the time of year when it pays a spider to lay out its silver snares. The shafts of sun in the late afternoon are dizzy with the blur of midges, gnats, beetles, and newly-hatched mayflies--a bounty of spider food.

As the sun sinks below the western ridge, a squadron of cedar waxwings perch in the bare branches of an old walnut by the barn. They take turns launching out to snare a meal, do a few acrobatics, and quickly return to the perch so the next young of the year can show off her recently-learned hover, dive or loop above our garden. What insects the birds force down into the lower realms, the spiders eye hungrily. And they simply sit. And wait. The liklihood of having guests for dinner goes up with every degree of summer heat.

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I haven't given up on the grasses, and still think there are images out there waiting to be discovered. But the tall stems are going from green to taupe and the weight of the ripening seed bends the tall stems in random angles now. There won't be many more chances to take these photographic field notes of how our pasture grows.

I started out with my camera yesterday morning, and made it as far as the bottom of the steps when this web flashed in and out of vision. Just the slightest angle away from the view above and the silver web disappeared. If I bent my knees to get a lower angle, the light shifted in wedge-shaped sectors around the web, absorbing and transmitting the light as if I were looking at the grooves on an old vinyl LP record.

As I look at the larger image (click the one above), and especially if I let my focus wander just a bit, it seems remarkably like an eye staring back at me out of a black pupil with the reflection of a spider in the center.

From the spider encounter, I went down another thirty feet to the road and surveyed the possibilities of more pasture grass pictures. It didn't take long to decide it had been too breezy overnight, so there was not much dew (that gives these lacy grasses their crystalline glow;) and it was still breezy, which would cause problems especially with closer shots. About that time, out of the shoulder high grass at the far edge of the pasture bounds this deer--a doe, I'm guessing (a good five feet off the ground here) and possibly with a fawn lying in cover somewhere in the sea of green, going to brown, nodding and swaying in the morning breeze.

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Well, this runs about six times the length of my usual longest posts. I'll hide most of it in the "read more" panel. It was kinda fun, but it is a project easier done for one who hasn't lived through as many book/reading personaes as I have.

Books I own? You're kidding!

This is a question whose answer is not terribly meaningful, do you think? Owned, as in, ever? Hardback, paperback, academic and desk copies and manuals? I doubt you're going to find anybody who bothers to respond to this exercise who will say "in my lifetime, I've owned six books. No, seven." Most are going to say like me, hundreds, thousands maybe. Perhaps the more relevant question would be 'how many and which kinds of books have you kept to the present and why? Or perhaps, what kind of books have you tended to buy, to read, to give away or to keep? So there: I've skillfully laid out a number of sidestepping alternatives and now I have to decide if I want to answer any of them like a compliant book meme mousketeer.

For some years now, I have not read very often for amusement or to fill time. Back when I did, science fiction was front and center for a while. And Tom Clancyesque adventures. But the pattern in my book-buying over the years has more focused on "tell me how this works" or "help me think about _______" than it has "show me a good story" or "take my mind off the real world." I've largely been drawn to non-fiction because I think the world out there is vastly interesting and rich and time is short. Why not be entertained and absorbed in something that will bring loose ends together? Someday I might have to know about ________ when the kids ask, when it comes up in cocktail party conversation or when my philosophical maps have gaps that could be bridged by that particular piece of understanding. I have to confess, I'd be hard pressed to tell you many of these distant-past purchases from recall, but I sure recognize them when I see their names. In the past couple of years, my ratio of buying books to actually starting them to actually finishing them is something on the order of 5 to 2 to 1, respectively. I'm fixed for a whole slew of rainy days.

Okay, now that you've got the floodgates lowered with this memory-prod, it just occurred to me that one day recently I discovered a list I'd written of books read during, oh, probably 1973 to 77--from the year before we moved to Virginia to the year before our son was born. I'll append that to the end of this thing, for my retrieval and recall more than to shed light on any of these particular questions about my reading habits or focus.

First, I would have to say that my book buying and reading life has experienced ebbs and flows and the wind blows in different directions in different periods of my life. Has it not been like this for you? Some generalizations will have to do, because I'm lazy.

Let's see: sticking with the broad brushes… Over the years the epochs of book reading and buying have reflected the eras in an evolving body, mind and spirit. Early Virginia as young homesteaders saw "back to the land" to "how to"; from there to "all about biology, nature, and natural history. Soon, photography and the philosophy and history of science were hot. There was the Ram Dass/Carlos Castaneda/Taoist period. And when our son was born, in a midlife 'opportunity', the classics of Christian belief: Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Merton, CS Lewis, Francis Schaeffer. Somewhere in here, cosmology and astronomy combined with late nights in the back yard with the binoculars, and the library expanded accordingly. I often read authors with whom I knew I would strongly disagree (the behavioral and biological determinists, for instance, like Richard Dawkins, BF Skinner, etc.) and I'd read a while and rant a while. I never much wrote down anything in response though. I wish I had on paper some of my more eloquent tirades against the intellectual superstars of the times. Or maybe it's best I don't, come to think of it.

We still have quite a few books. Many of them are still boxed in the Very Back Room. It is ostensibly at least partly for the books that some of us think a new room addition to the house is necessary.

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The Last Book I Bought/Read:

What Are Old People For? By William Thomas, MD

Excerpts on Ronni Bennett's blog made me think this youngish man had some good insights on the role that our elders should play in American society. I worked for years with the elderly as a physical therapist and was inspired by the wisdom and vitality I saw in people who had found themselves anew in their 70s and 80s. Now, I look into the not-too-distant future at how I must adapt to the changes of those ages of life, and I'd like to be more of a spokesman for my age cohort.

I will tell you too the books that are waiting in line on a nearby shelf after the one mentioned above:

God's Politics -- Jim Wallis
The Writing Life -- Annie Dillard
Pattern of a Man and Other Stories -- James Still
Crossing Open Ground -- Barry Lopez
The Dollmaker -- Hariette Arnow
Gap Creek -- Robert Morgan
A Dab of Dickens & a Touch of Twain -- Elliot Engel
Long Life -- Mary Oliver
The Blue Valleys -- Robert Morgan
One Foot in Eden -- Ron Rash
And if I want to be conversant with Silas House who will be on staff at Hindman, I should read maybe his first book, A Parchment of Leaves.

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Five books that meant a lot to me -

Somewhat in order, all of them ancient, the five that pop out just now, given what I had for breakfast this morning and the vagaries of whimsy, plus just a pinch of deep thought:

1) Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill I read this through a couple of times, late high school, early college. Hills summary from the lives of many prominent, powerful and successful men of the early 20th century (Ford, Edison and others) provided examples of how people rise above the mediocre masses, and why. There were patterns to success. I was a bit turned off by the idea of using people and influence and ambition to 'get rich', but I think some lasting principles came from this book that have carried me to more than a few victories against the odds. It reinforced the importance of self-belief with humility, of an understanding of the role of persistence in the face of failure, and showed the power in knowing how to find the answers and overcoming obstacles to reach deeply held goals. I first considered having a personal 'missions statement' and holding that before my eyes of hope each day. I became convinced, and remain so today, that if a person in a free society wants something bad enough for long enough and is willing to do whatever it takes to make that dream a reality, there are few forces that can stand against them.

2) Entropy -- Jeremy Rifkin I cannot rehearse all the reasons this book was significant for me at the time (early 80s?) There is always an alchemy between the ideas in any one book one is reading and others recently or concurrently being read; with conversations had over a pitcher of beer, from dreams and delusion, with an occasional 'original thought' tossed in. This book opened up for exploration many large issues of the past and future. How did we come to think of the world and have the relationship with it that we do as western scientific mankind? And what does the future hold if we continue to treat matter and energy as if they were in practical terms, without limit? Rifkin's analysis and solutions weren't all correct. He went on to pen other books and find detractors the likes of Stephen Gould and others. But he thought large and saw solutions more from changes in human attitudes to nature and each other than in the creation of another new machine that would save us from ourselves.

3) Guide to the Perplexed - EF Schumacher Sent to me by an influential friend with whom I had many deep discussions of our doubts, Schumacher's opening page describes his experience as a young man, standing on a corner in Leningrad. He could plainly see a large church opposite him, and yet it was not indicated on the map he held in front of him. He stopped a policemen to ask for help. "In Russia, we do not put churches on our maps." And this precipitated a flash of realization that, in years of education in the worlds' finest universities, the things most important to mankind for the preceding millenia had been left off of Schumacher's maps of understanding about the world. He proceeds to put the spiritual dimension back into the framework of reality. While I did not go with him along the path he chose for this important renaissance, his story nevertheless catalyzed the same kind of crisis in my own thinking as he had experienced, and I began at that moment to doubt my own doubt.

4) Miracles -- CS Lewis Again, so much of what scratches us depends on where we itch. I tried re-reading this book again a few years after its first large impact it had on first reading and it did not speak with the same clear voice. But first time through, that alchemy of which I spoke brought a number of ingredients to bear. Lewis, of course, was at his peak in wartime England in the early 40s. His language is dated, but his analogies and metaphors are timeless and his love of language apparent. He was a Christian apologist I occasionally did not understand or disagreed with, but I respected his carefully worded pictures that described the world he came to know after he was delivered "kicking and fighting" from his agnostic background into the Presence of the being he described in the character of Aslan, the Lion, in the Chronicles of Narnia.

5) Psychocybernetics -- Maxwell Maltz Funny. Amazon.com says "people who bought this book also bought: and one it lists is Think and Grow Rich. I honestly don't remember a great deal about this book other than 1) the author is a plastic surgeon who drew some conclusions about self-image and self-expectations by seeing how his patients dealt with new faces. 2) He spoke of the processes involved in accepting change and offered good advice there; and 3) it dealt with creative imagination, relaxation and visualization. It was a realistically pragmatic book with sound advice, and I've incorporated some of the influences of that book into my own life for good.

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Who's Next?

I really balk at laying the heavy hand on five more bloggers. This gets to feel coercive and forced at this point. I tell you what: I'll mention some folks, and if they happen to wander this way and see their names, and want to participate, we'd love to see what they would tell us. But that's about as assertive toward these busy people as I'm comfortable being.

Colleen, of LooseLeafNotes, has already been memed severely of late. Does she need one more?

Tom Montag, the Middlewesterner, is busy gathering material to write yet another book. And he's touring the midwest to do it. Just what he needs: another "assignment."

I'd like to know far more about where Trey of Only Connect is in his thinking, and how through his reading, he got there.

And Dave Bonta, of Via Negativa, I'm thinking, would have a hard time narrowing down his favorite five. And his reading tastes I'm guessing are about as eclectic as one can possibly get. I'd love to spend a day in his library!

And finally, TravelerTrish has just done a complete remake of her books, so should have a good idea at least of where to go to look for those books she might want to spotlight, were she to undertake this completely discretionary little writing exercise.

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Appendix

Partial list from my journal, dates uncertain, '73 to 76', mostly.

Sidhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek -- Annie Dillard
Selfish Gene -- Richard Dawkins
Only Dance there is -- Ram Dass
Lives of the Cell; Medusa and the Snail -- Lewis Thomas
Appalachians -- Maurice Brooks
God and the Astronomers -- Jastrow
Six Great Ideas -- Mortimer Adler
On Human Nature -- EO Wilson
Seven Tomorrows
Psychocybernetics
I'm OK, You're Okay
Entropy; Algeny; Who Should Play God -- Jeremy Rifkin
Evidence that Demands a Verdict -- McDowell
Sometimes a Great Notion -- Ken kesey
Eden Express - Mark Vonnegut
Overskill -- Schultz
Mind in the Waters
Since Silent Spring
The Complete Walker - Colin Fletcher
Little Big Man
Backyard Livestock; Small Grain Raising; Seed Starters Handbook
Human Aggression
The Naked Ape - Desmond Morris
Escape from Freedom --Erich Fromm
Shadow of Man -- Jane Goodall
Stalking the Wild Asparagus --Euell Gibbons
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Atlas Shrugged -- Rand
Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle --Garrett Hardin
Territorial Imperative -- Ardrey
Act of Creation, Janus, Ghost in the Machine - A Koestler
Physical Control of the Mind -- Delegado
States of Consciousness-- Charles Tart
Tropic of Capricorn -- Henry Miller
Relaxation Response --Herbert Benson
Towards a Psychology of Being -- Maslow
Meaning of Happiness -- Alan Watts
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance --Persig
Tales of Power (and others) -- Casteneda
Mere Christianity, Miracles, Space Triology, Problem of Pain- CSLewis
Newthink --Denovo
Guide to the Perplexed -- EF Schumacher
Philosophy of Religion -- David Elton Trueblood
The Self And its Brain -- Eccles and Popper
A sense of the Future -- Bronowski
The Firmament of Time -- Loren Eisley

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Animals at Play Marmaduke? Tigger? Batman? Mr. Fantastic? Gumby? Porky Pig? ScoobyDoo? Nope. First guess was "right" .... Hobbes of Calvin And Hobbes. I swear, there's a picture of that goofy tiger in exactly Tsuga's twisted play posture, but in three C&H books from the kids' books upstairs, I couldn't find it. I think what brings Hobbes to mind is his boneless trunk that arced in every conceivable direction and his totally self-possessed but unselfconscious attitude in his bearing. Somehow, Tsuga, especially in this play sequence with the plastic bucket, just makes me think of Hobbes. Thanks for playing!

I've Got Email Good advice from the Peanut Gallery re G-mail. Caveats considered, I think I'll use it for student communication and possibly reference Gmail to my ISP mail account as backup, filtered into a folder. Yes, I suppose my email content will be scanned for commercial purposes. Isn't our Guvment doing the same thing for dangerous words? I'd rather have an advertizement than the thought police, and there's no way to be invisible to the latter.

Assignment: Finished I carried my big, black three-ring binder of scored reading comprehension essays back to the Department of Academic Research (or somesuch) at Radford yesterday (and picked up my check for this little project.) When somehow, through the chatter, the department secretary learned I was (am) a physical therapist, we got into a long discussion about fibromyalgia. It was odd to hear myself giving all those facts and recommendations as if I were a clinician again. Maybe it's like riding a bicycle. But I don't see myself doing PT in any regular or sustained way again, for a number of reasons. There were parts of health care I liked, and miss. Mostly, it's the feeling that you've been able to take a little bit of pain from the world.

Command Central Did I tell you I'm getting a new desk? Not that it hasn't been just peachy all these years sitting behind my $10 yard sale, laminate-covered (taped in places) particle board desk. Yep, we bartered half the cost of the desk for the walnuts we cut. In addition to the desk, there will be a sidepiece for the computer, printer and scanner (same height-width as the desk, so extra surface area to spread my JUNK); and on the left side, another little piece on casters for CD caddies, office supplies and such. Construction (from white oak) starts next week. Completion expected in about two months! This will be one of two pieces of furniture we own that won't go to the dumpsters when we're gone.

Bits and Pieces Old News: There was a tsunami warning for the Pacific Northwest this week. Bizarre creatures: ever see one of these? Neat Gizmo: Plugs into your car's cigarette lighter (why do they still call it that when really for most, it serves so many better purposes?) Expert on Avian Flu says "We're Screwed." Bermuda Triangle solved: the bacteria did it. And I'm still trying to understand why, after 35 years, she doesn't get my jokes.

MEME Warning! Later this morning, I'll post my "Book Meme". It's long and boring, but readers (if any), the scars will heal. Then, over the weekend, I'll work on the "five things I miss about childhood" thing. Mercifully, it will be brief. With all these words, I wanted to post another grass picture today (I have maybe three waiting, and might get another couple this morning. Good suggesting, Andy, re a photoessay on grasses. I'm thinking of contacting somebody in the agronomy department at Tech to help me identify the grasses in my pictures.) Coming next week: some pictures of plain, ordinary life on Goose Creek--the garden, the barn construction (that's another story), some other not-terribly-photogenic but perhaps interesting slices of life from home. And at this juncture, I'll head back to the coffee pot, from thence to the front porch followed by an amble along the creek, a visit to the garden (where not a single corn plant has survived the mystery predator) and back to the computer to see if anybody is up yet. TGIF, y'all.

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Not once but twice this week, the dog (perhaps) has been negatively reinforced in his impulse to chase cars that come down our road. There aren't many of them. Most are going slow. But MO is on their side. It would be a terrible irony to live on a one-lane gravel road with a half dozen cars a day and have your dog injured by one of them.

First, there was the car this week--going very slowly--that he actually ran into, hitting it not too hard from the side, overshooting his mark. It didn't seem to hurt him, but it definitely got his attention.

Then yesterday, what I hope was a lasting fright: There are a couple of loggers who come by almost every day. One of them has a massively large bloodhound that rides sometimes in the cab (his head barely fits) and sometimes in the bed of the truck. Well, T-dog went tearing down as the truck came past. He was just even with the truck bed when the HOUND stuck his large floppy-eared head over the side at an unsuspecting Tsuga and quite certainly scared the begeebers out of him. Our much smaller pup tucked tail and ran back up to the safety of the back porch.

Maybe he'll think twice about the next passing vehicle, wondering if it is going to "spank" him or have GIANT BEAST that will snap him up in its terrible jaws. Maybe, in time, he'll learn life is easier (and he spends less time in Puppy Jail) if he just watches and waves.

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I'll have at least one more in this series of pasture shots (for tomorrow)--which I was tempted to call "Love the One You're With" as grasses dominate our viewspace. As I look out the window at 7:45, the light is slanting over the ridge, a glancing brilliance that leaves the barn in shadow yet. Looks to have been a dewy evening, very much cooler than it has been, and the grasses will be wet and glowing when the sun strikes them; we could have a very nice rising steam as well. So, one more cup of coffee and be off. I'll come back soaked to the skin, but I'll go back at least this one more time to see what I can bring back from a stone's throw from my desk. Life, at this moment, is good.

I like the simplicity of this shot. It is almost too spare. But the form of grasses often has a calligraphic quality, like fine strokes of a light ink against dark paper.

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Quickly. Your first response. What comics character does this bring to mind?

Maybe it's just me. I do pay attention to body mechanics and posture more than the average person, after a good while as a physical therapist. Tsuga here, in his plastic bucket exuberance, has his pelvic girdle planted while his upper torso is strongly sidebent to the right (almost 90 degrees) and also rotated right (maybe 20 degrees.) (Don't try this at home!)

Upon first seeing this photograph last week, I realized, without having ever done the same intuitive analysis of cartoons (I'm not that obsessive) that there is one comic character that often shows just this same jump-twist-wiggle, making me think the artist is a very good observer of large vertebrates at play.

I'll be amazed if ANYBODY gets this one. Come on. Amaze me.

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Not once, but twice, and even though I've avoided making eye contact with any bloggers or looking at all like I was interested, I've been tagged to participate in this book meme that seems to be circulating through the b'sphere of late.

One tappist was Andy at Older and Growing who doesn't do memes, as I don't, but did, as I will. He recently has been experimenting with what we agreed were "Doug Thomposian sky effects" with his images.

The other was the Ode-hunter pair (ODE is entomological slang for Odonates, or dragonflies) over at Urban Dragon Hunters, from whence, flitting odonately as one does, I hopped over to a site hosted by "two Brooklynized Tennessee Hillbillies" to read about a wonderful new kind of iPod that comes with an optional firewire port. (More invertebrate humor here, folks, and of course, just up my alley. I recently learned that in parts of England, these creatures we call pillbugs are called "Chunky Pigs."

So, I be the tappee. And maybe on Slow Friday, I'll post my yawner of a response to the book meme, where mostly I'll have to talk about what I hope to read, once read, or would read if 1) I could stay awake reading in bed; or 2) could read more than a paragraph in the past three years without jumping up because it made me think of something I just MUST write about!

Then, although there's nobody holding a gun to my head, it seems to be the expected last step of this little exercise, I have to tap five more bloggers to have their turn at the book meme. Of course, it would make my life a whole lot simpler if you'd just step up to the plate and let me know you'd LIKE to do this. Don't make me get pushy...I'll wait to hear.

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It is the Season of Grasses. We are surrounded by a sea of tall grass and in it, we wade chest deep across the pasture. And as it lengthens, matures, and flowers; as blades and stems give rise to the glumes, paleas and lemmas that make up their unpetaled flowers, the grasses become collectively a lovely creature. Their dissected tops and fine wirey branchings seem especially well fashioned to catch and hold an overnight dew. When the sun rises over the eastern ridge, they glisten white with diffracted light and share the look of frost and snow that water gives their dried remnants in other seasons.

It is not likely you'll find coffee table books of grasses, since they lack the color and form of their petaled, insect-pollinated competitors. It is true: individually, they are not much to look at. And taken together, their lanky growth, mixed always with an assortment of rangy forbs, does not make for a tight image with a clear message. And yet, to remember a summer like this, I want to look back and recall the little artificial prairie we look out on every morning. I'll make a few more attempts to capture some essense of this vast assemblage of plants (the botanical family Poaceae, from which all our grains come) that shows them off in their summer dress.

The image above illustrates one of the hardest matters in this attempt at portraiture of pasture grasses: they stand out best when backlit against the dark hillside the very moment that the sun strikes the valley floor. This means shooting straight into the intense light source, and with this, there will be (usually) undesirable lens flares in the image. Most times, I wear a baseball cap, and hold it at arms length off-image while blocking the glare. Yesterday, I forgot my cap. When I put my hand out for the same purpose, it created this otherwordly triangle of light hovering over the pasture like a brooding spirit.

This image enlarged is here; and another from the same vantage point is here. Which do you like best? (I'm doing some actual framing, so pardon the digital frames. I'm just in that state of mind.)

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I walked into Cafe del Sol yesterday, just as B was getting out of his car by the front door. We hadn't seen much of each other for months, and hadn't had lunch in maybe a year, so he offered to buy, and we pulled up our chairs for some caffeine and a bit of catching up.

To make a long story short (a rare and cherished phenom here at Fragments--almost always goes just the opposite direction!) he told me that he has just had one land purchase fall through. "That's too bad" I consoled, knowing how long and hard he and his family have been looking for a place to persue their dreams of having a community centered on equestrian activities.

"No", he said, "it's actually good the first deal fell through. Because now, we're going to be YOUR neighbors."

He bought the place I blogged about on Monday. It was on the market maybe ten days. As I said, the best thing would have been for someone already living in Floyd County to get the place. They did.

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Okay. I need to hear your thoughts, you folk who not only HAVE a GMAIL account (as I do), but actually use it--daily, intensely and fully (as I have not yet done.)

Email needs have shifted here with the laptop AND desktop, keeping my email and Ann's new account separate. I'll also have 120-something students in the fall to communicate with, and will need to store a lot of messages and be able to organize them, sort quickly through them, and make sense of it all, separate from family email that will continue to come in on the desktop where Ann can read stuff when she needs to. I was disappointed to find that I can't use Gmail to receive blog comment notification; apparently it needs to be an ISP-based account. Darn.

What I'm wondering is if the Google Mail servers are reliable. Much down time? On a few of the times I've accessed it, I've gotten 'out to lunch' messages or some such. Can you set up email filters that work cleanly? Are there things I should do up front to come up to speed with it and get full use from it? It's hard to tell with only two messages to play with in my GMail Inbox.

I have a few weeks to decide for certain. I see AOL has just come out with a free 2GB email, but it seems heavy with advertisements, as is Yahoo mail. Google mail's intrusions seem a bit less conspicuous. I'd really like to hear your thoughts and experiences.

And re the title of this post: yes, I'm aware the familiar phrase is "You've Got Mail!" but every time I hear this, I get antsy because I know somewhere in heaven, my highschool english teacher is wagging her finger, saying "That's a vulgar way of saying 'you have mail.' You don't need both 'got' and 'have' together. Why not just use proper English!"

Yes, m'am.

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It may not be very much of a photographic subject; there isn't a clear focus to draw the eye. But I had a great time basking in the first light that filled the valley; and it was refreshing too, on a humid June morning, to be wet to the skin from wading the chest-high grass. It may soon be bundled in six foot shredded wheat rolls. I thought I'd get out and enjoy it while I could this morning.

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Once upon a time, during the Bell Bottom era long ago (before most of you kiddies were even born) I shamed my Establishment coworkers because they went out and bought those new-fangled string trimmers. Shame on you that you'd use fossil fuels to do what you can do perfectly well (without engine noise or gas fumes) using an old-fashioned muscle powered swingblade or scythe! I was mortified at their gadget-dependence! They had caved in to the illusion of TV marketing. Fie! Fie!

And what will I be doing today? Weed whacking with a noisy, awkward, but effective Stihl String Trimmer. You see, the warranty has expired on all the human joints that are required for the preferred manual methods of yesteryear. And so I'll stand there on the creek bank, gently gyrating side to side, while the juice of Cretaceous swamps powers the whirling plastic blades and splatters my glasses with green flecks of pulverized plant parts. This always seems perverse and absurd to me, and I feel terribly guilty. I can only hope nobody drives by while I'm out there. Maybe I should wear a disguise to protect my reputation as a low-tech Earth Friendly sort of person.

I console my guilt somewhat by the fact that at least my weed whacking won't be the fancy, get-every-last-blade tidiness for which some urban folk use these whirling banshees. But I'll be cutting the waist-high grass that is falling over into the road or creek; I'll trim back the henbit and bedstraw that wants to come up and short out the bottom wire of the electric garden fence. I won't be edging along the English Garden or spiffying up around the bird bath or topiary. Trust me: this will not be a manicure. It will be more like an emergency amputation.

We maintain something of a yard, meaning some kind of vegetative order immediately around the house; but we really never have wanted what most people think of as a lawn. And if it weren't for the garden perimeter, minimal road frontage and necessary snakefree low-grass zone around the barn, we'd only be mowing a few hundred square feet of grass around the house. Period. We have some foundation plantings in the front, mulched, with a border of split chestnut rails Ann drug down from the top of the ridge long ago. And from time to time we keep the grass from looking totally ignored. But we have never been the kind of folks who fretted over getting all the dandelions out of our yard, for instance. Nor have I ever made the perverse effort to encourage our yard grass to grow by using fertilizer! How conflicted is that?

So when it is the middle of June, hi temps in the 80s and humidity the same, it just doesn't seem a rational thing to do to cut the tips off of what will inevitably and very quickly just grow back, over and over, time after time, all summer long. But that's just what you'll find me doing today. I'll be the guy in the trench coat, dark glasses, wig and rubber nose, standing sheepishly by the side of Goose Creek, holding a whirring, gas-guzzling green-speckeld string trimmer.

Posted by fred1st at 6:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

...might be a highly invasive plague!

What does it mean to be "native" any more? Will the term "native plant" or "endemic salamander" soon be equated with "threatened and endangered?" I pondered this as I drove from Goose Creek to town a few days ago, listing off roadside plants in flower, and gazing farther back to the edges of forest and field. It was staggering the number of non-native plants that are not only present but dominant, to the exclusion of those plants that have grown here by history and adaptation over the ages. Without a doubt, our native plants are being sup-plant-ed by aggressive species for which there are no "native" predators or control measures in place.

The air was heavy with the intense floral smell of Multiflora Rose, a beautiful plant, but a climbing shrub that once started, will quickly take over a fencerow (as in the picture) or a field. The best time to spot it is now, while it is in flower. But eradicating even a single plant by hand is almost impossible. The tough canes arch out from the base like tentacles so that approaching the roots of the plant is to do battle with the sharp pricles that protect this alien rose bush from being controlled by horses, cattle or sheep. Or a well-meaning land owner with a brush axe.

We have a few Multiflora rose monsters to deal with on our place, and will do it soon before the plants drop seeds. But on a county-wide basis, it seems obvious there is no effort at control; many formerly working farms have become, like ours, more of a hobby farm. Lacking the appropriate farming mowers and other tools or the attention it takes, the scourge of multiflora rose promises to become a dominant blight in Floyd County, as it is so many other places. But it is not alone. More aliens coming in future posts.

Larger image here.

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While I don't intend to be an accomplice to a population explosion in Floyd County, somebody is going to be buying properties here that have come on the market near us, whether I do or don't blog about it. First choice would be for someone who already lives here to be able to move to the home of their dreams without leaving the county. Barring that, I figure if someone reads Fragments, they have a pretty good idea of both the things Floyd County has, and the things we don't have as a rural and relatively inaccessible place. So if readers find a home here via one of the very infrequent pointers to properties I hear about and mention, those kind of informed folks might have a better-than-average chance of being certain that Floyd is the right place for them, will come here, and become a good fit for the community. That said, my realtor friend Sue is excited about a place about a mile from us (as the proverbial crow flies) and you can read about it and get in touch with her if you're interested.

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If you're a turkey vulture riding the thermals over southwest Virginia pastures this week, it's got to smell like dinner is served. The first cutting of hay is underway, and there is no way around it: creatures that find refuge in the tall grass often don't know what hit'em. Snakes, groundhogs, rabbits, smaller rodents--and somehow worse because they are so helpless at this time of year--fawns. They are hardwired to lay low when danger approaches. And so this week, the buzzards are feasting.

We set out for our morning walk on Saturday and were stopped in our tracks by a strange mewling cry that sounded at first like the scream of a bird. We looked at each other. That's the alarm cry of a baby deer, we both realized at the same instant. The dog heard it too. Ann held Tsuga by the collar while I ran back to the truck for a piece of rope (we'd neglected to bring the dog's leash.) The bleating continued, but moved down the hillside in the cover of the canopy, closer to the pasture. An adult deer snorted over and over; the baby was in danger.

We heard no barking, so it wasn't dogs; but something (coyote? bobcat?) most certainly was after the fawn and the doe could only stand nearby and protest. The next day, along the logging road, there was the smell of something dead. We figured we knew what it was. We'll be looking for the circling buzzards to come do their cleanup.

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We decided to return to a special place for our 35th anniversary dinner. It was more special for me than for Ann, since I'd spent two summers up there at the Biological Station in the late 70s. Located in Giles County about an hour north of us, Mt. Lake Hotel and grounds provided the setting for most of the filming for the film, Dirty Dancing. And yesterday, it was swarming with visitors and guests. We had to drive around the parking area a couple of times to find a parking place. As is common for this time of year, there was a wedding party there, lots of kids (we learned there's a girls camp nearby as well) and so at dinner, we were sandwiched between tables of girls giggling and singing, and girls giggling and playing hand games. That's what we get for dining at 6:30 instead of later.

I was happy to see the lake full. One of only two natural lakes in the state, "Salt Pond" (as it was originally called) lies over a fault that alternately closes (and the lake fills) or opens (and the lake drains.) We talked to a young man in the dockhouse who said a couple of years ago, the lake was almost gone and there was serious talk of closing down the hotel. But yesterday, the paddle boats were out, kids fishing, and the smell of bedding bream on the breeze.

I just had to stop on the way home at this one overlook seen above, knowing the image wouldn't do justice to the memory. I have a 35mm slide from the same spot from almost thirty years ago, taken on a rare clear day in June after a cold front had passed through. But the summer haze has settled into the valley for good this year, so you can just make out the New River watergap. The image doesn't show what the eye could see--the first set of hills that mark the West Virginia border. Click the small image above for a bit more detail in the fading light.

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* Frames and Prints__ I'm finally working to get some images printed, matted and framed. There are several places around town where I could hang a couple dozen photos, and a summer project is to do just that. Only last week did I print for the first time on the recommended paper for this Canon Pixma i5000, and I must say, that does make all the difference in color and deep, rich blacks. I'm also trying to come up with pricing, and have had two folks tell me my initial asking price for a custom 8 x 10 was too low. Bigger than 8 x 10 will have to be shopped out to others, so I won't be able to do 11 x 14s without an additional markup for the middleman (or woman, as the case may be.) I've sent some prints off to customers and have a short list yet to work on. I have an assortment of simple frames from Michaels, and will soon have a variety of mat samples to work with color combos with various images at home. This is just a lot of fun, I'll tell ya.

* Garden Grows__ I'll have to post a weekly garden picture. Later today, maybe. So far, some gains, some losses. I'll be replanting the corn this morning, and it WON'T be 'knee high by the 4th of July' because what seeds germinated were plucked off at the soil line. Cutworms? Crows? I'll overplant and hope for some surviving kernels. Yellow squash also hasn't come up, but dummy here bought 'bargain seeds' (as this was all that was available when we got back from Vancouver) and obviously, the viability went to zero. So far, we've had ample rain and the electric fence and my bladder-driven deer-be-gone measures have keep the stilt-rats out. It might just be a fair gardening year.

* Summer Writing__ I got the letter last week saying I'd be accepted at Hindman. But there were too many wanting in the memoir class. Rather than take a chance I wouldn't make the cut there, I switched my choice to nonfiction and will be just as happy there, I think. The staff person for that group will be David Dick, whose writing history spans almost 40 years-- much of that with CBS as a journalist--but in recent years, he's worked in other writing realms as well. I'm sure he'll broaden my horizons, largely consisting of the ridges I see from my desk here.

* The Wood Fairy__ Puttering in the garden one day last week, I glanced over toward pines where I have wood split and stacked to dry. I'm sure I did the theatrical wide-eyed, jowl-rattling double-take because there in front of my orderly stack was a piled heap of maple--a thousand pounds at least--that I knew I hadn't put there. Then it dawned on me: this was the wood our treeman, Craig, had offered if I would go to Shawsville to load it the Tuesday morning when our California visitors were here. I couldn't go then, so he'd loaded it on his truck, gone out of his way to come by a couple of days later. Finding nobody home, he unloaded it at the edge of the yard, for free. I was genuinely touched by his neighborliness and will be furture warmed by his gift, come January. Thanks, buddy.

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Tomorrow is our 35th wedding anniversary--and they've been two of the happiest years of my life. (Sorry, dear--little joke.) One of the most notable among these yearly remembrances was three years ago, when I forgot. My daughter triggered the last-minute emergency measures, and my son helped me cover my tracks. Turns out, I shouldn't have panicked. Here's the story.

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...and lots of rocks make a big splash. We've been talking about summer memories. This might end up being one for these young visitors playing in Goose Creek in borrowed boots.

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* Laptop Lives!__ The ThinkPad is still working after a week and a half! However, getting file and printer sharing set up was far more involved that I imagined. Even with expert help last Saturday (Thanks, BJ!) the desktop and laptop were not talking. Thanks to reader Steve for suggesting Network Magic. Unfortunately, it had recently gone from free beta to a paid-for software, but it was worth it. All it took was installing the downloadable software on both machines. It worked around all the dead ends and displayed the Network Map, Shared Folders and Shared Printers on its very attractive and uncluttered panel, clean as a whistle. I can't say I've fully figured out how best to use shared folders yet, but at least it will work when I need it.

* One Man's Trash__ As soon as you throw it away, you'll need it. If this isn't one of Murphy's laws, it ought to be. It hasn't been a month since I purged my computer disk caddies of old, out of date disks. Old McAfee install disks? My subscription expired and I changed software long time ago. So I tossed 'em. Dummie. I recently installed PC-Cillin Internet security--a great deal for $35 from NewEgg less a $25 mail-in rebate for competitive upgrade. All you need to do is send in the install disk, invoice or title page of the owners manual for "any Norton or McAfee product." Dang. I looked in vain in the old computer boxes. I'm just too tidy for my own good. Anybody got some old disks or owner's manuals you'd like to throw out (my way?)

* Freebie__ I have explored, used, then abandoned a lot of online services, email accounts and such over the years. But there is one I've been using for a few months now that I think will be on my links bar and hotkeyed on all the computers I use at home and work for a long time to come. Backpackit gives me five free pages to set up with links, notes, to-do lists and even email-notified reminders. It is sleek and fast, and I use it to move clips and links between the two home computers. It will serve the same purpose to shuttle text and links between home and the university when I go back to teaching. You might want to check it out for your own needs.

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We had some folks over for dinner last night. The evening included three adolescent boys, a wet too-friendly dog, a creek, rocks, matches and marshmallows. It don't get much better than that.

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Early Summer is a significant season in the life of Fragments from Floyd, which, like most blogs, is still in its toddler years. The first entries appeared (at goosecreek.blogspot.com) in a timid testing-the-waters sort of way in March and April of 2002. It was not until the entry of June 5, 2002 that the idea first occurred to me that the very act of writing could be a reason to blog. I'm referring to a post called Summer Lightning (appended below) that came to mind last night when the front porch scene was recreated. I had never thought of my words as being meant for anyone's reading but my own. I could not predict then that writing would become both a personal discipline and a necessity, much less did I understand its potential to bring so many other people (who I now think of as friends) from around the shrinking world into this little valley, this place, these lives of ours, including even the life and times of the family dog.

Those were difficult days in the early summer of 2002 when the blog seemed a pointless diversion from a profound shift in personal identity. I'd lost a clear vision of who I was, because I stopped doing and being what I had done and been for two decades. But it seemed certain after this abrupt divorce from health care in May that, since I was no longer bound by the routine of a professional work week, I would have the time--and that I must take the time--to learn more about where I was. And in the summer of 2002, as I began to think about my purpose, my belonging, about the blessings of being here in this place we'd been moving to all our lives, I began to find my way into this present that has become perhaps the most rewarding period of a lengthening life. Since Summer Lightning, I've grown not only three years older, but considerably richer. At 57, I am most thankful to be able to say that.

I go back this time of year--for the third anniversary now--and read the revelation of that June night. All of the fearful uncertainty and hopeful potential of that unique time floods back to me with a certain embarrassing tightness in the throat. This was the first post to which a reader expressed their deepest empathy and appreciation for what I was feeling and saying. I was stunned when they thanked me for sharing. After decades of cold, objective, Spokian technical writing, searching for words from the heart was cathartic release. To create with language was a brand new form of exploration, of making pictures of saying what was inside and deeply personal. But it seemed a risky business. I had felt so needy then, so vulnerable, and debated if I should be so honest and bare to strangers. But it turned out, the risk was, after all, worth the gamble.

And another fact that makes this June 2002 post a milestone in my mind: it represents the first time the idea of writing essays--period--but much less for radio broadcast, surfaced. I admit, this notion of writing to a larger, local audience was Ann's idea, and I laughed at the suggestion. But I emailed (a longer version of) Summer Lightning to the local NPR station in Roanoke. In mid-June while I was visiting my daughter in Wyoming, I learned it had been accepted. I've recorded 14 now, I think, and I owe this opportunity to the daily writing that was most definitely birthed through the weblog and midwifed into the world by Fragments readers from all over.

So. If I was no longer a physical therapist, no longer a chief player in wage slavery, who the heck did I want to become, given this later-mid-life opportunity? When I recorded that first essay, I had the hardest time writing the byline. In the end, with great reluctance and a feeling of massive pretension, my fingers typed at the bottom of the page "Fred First is a writer and photographer living in Floyd County, Virginia. He writes every day to his weblog, Fragments from Floyd.com." There: I'd said it. And now for three years, I've done just that. And I'm even comfortable with the self-ascribed labels. These passions define who I am and what I do far better than a name out of the dictionary of occupational titles, even as I have returned to my first profession of teaching.

Thanks once again this year for indulging this little retrospective. I'm sure I did something similar this time last year. As I have confessed before, the anniversaries of important dates are prominent on my identity maps that orient me to where I am, have been, and where I'm going. While I still have no idea of the final destination, it seems certain this strange way of living life in words that bubble daily to the top of the page, to celebrate the present, and preserve it, page by page, archive by archive, is a way of growing to know both myself, my times and place, and this wonderful community better and better. I trust you will stay with me, from time to time, for whatever comes next.

Since archives take a while to load, I've pasted the June 2002 piece below, and you can read it, if you'd like, by clicking "Read More"...

Summer Lightning
June 5, 2002

The animals have been tended, my wife and son have left for work, and I am alone watching the first rays of a humid, empty day through the windows. I am in my slippers, merely waiting, early into my second month "between jobs". Waiting: on epiphanies, promised calls, revelation, solace, inspiration.

There are few places I would rather be today than in our remote valley in Floyd County--this land that wraps itself around us, a country that is more like home than anywhere we have ever lived. I drink the last of the morning coffee in the midst of a sanctuary of harmony and light that my eyes and internal rhythms are just now adjusting to, and it feels to me as if a healing is happening here. Solitude, health, natural beauty, time empty waiting to be filled and a smattering of expectation-- blessings brought home to me in the dark, last night.

It is late, and I am last to bed, past the usual time. I step out onto the front porch into the cool, sweet air of early June, and sit on the top step quietly as if not to disturb the wildlife, whose nocturnal day I am entering.

The pasture grasses just beyond the maples are in full flower and their pollen smells like midnight bread baking, while Goose Creek sends up wafts of spearmint, wet mud and turbulence.

My eyes soon learn to see in darkness and I am aware of soundless flashes of summer lightning, and stars overhead. My night vision comes and goes with each flash and pause and flash. Rising from the dark field on the fragrance of grasses are tens of thousands of lightning bugs. Put them in a jar; shake and watch them illumined with the cold, translucence of memory. They pulse and rise above the field in counterpoint to the tempo of the clouds, signaling ancient syllables that we could understand, if we were more often still, less troubled, and if we stood more in the darkness of our own fields.

Gravity pulls me down and I lie on my back, on cool stone, horizontal, facing out not up, into a mock-infinity of space, wondering what is my place in this world of men and of words. Do I deserve to be so blessed among Earth's anthill of humanity? What must I do in the warmth of this gentle epiphany that is revealed to me tonight, and how should I then live? Maybe I will try to find the words in the morning, after the house is quiet again and the fireflies have gone to bed and the world smells of heat and ozone and toast.

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I've noticed over the gardening years that during the freshly-tilled stages early in the season, weed seeds (Portulaca and Galinsoga mostly) tend to come up in the footprints left by my size 12s in the fluffy soil. I've pondered why this might be. Maybe the footprints create a little pocket of higher humidity and shade; maybe too much soil air is not good for young weedy roots and they do better where soil is compressed. Ater all, I do tamp seeds lightly when I plant them, so they will have moist soil all around them. Come to think of it, the times we've used "raised beds" we've had fewer weeds. Maybe this is because we don't walk in the beds.

So this year, I'm going to minimize the footfall compression in the garden soil to those absolutely necessary to plant, weed and harvest. So far, I am finding that I can weed the untrodden places one-handed if necessary, reaching out and pulling back across the airy surface with the shuffle hoe. Once rooted in the compacted soil, weeding means bending over or a two-handed lift-chop with the regular hoe, time and time again. I'm all for reducing the risk for a return of elbow tendinitis, and have a history of recurrent back problems. So we'll try the paths method. If it gets dry enough to irrigate later this summer, most of my paths or walking lanes run across the slight gradient, and I can trickle water down all the rows from the west end of the garden that is nearest the creek.

Meanwhile, I keep finding historical leavings buried and waiting for the tiller to wrap its tines around. Today, it was a 19 inch metal bar of some kind, probably a "tooth" on a haying machine. And of course it was 19 inches vertical in the soil, not conveniently horizontal six inches down. I found it just next to where, last week, I dug up a 6 foot creosote post that had been there no telling how long. So, we combined garden archeology with the weeding this morning. Whew. Feels like a sauna out there already. Maybe this would be a good time to come in and blog in the shade.

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"Lighting is everything" I often say of photographic successes or failures. The right lighting can create the right depth, color, and mood that makes for a keeper, or it can leave an image flat, wan and featureless. But then, there's something to be said for timing.

The dog was coming my way, after having romped in the creek. The early morning light, soft and golden, had just broken over the top of the ridge. Standing in the dappled shadow of the maple tree, Tsuga stopped in his tracks and looked pensively out across Goose Creek and the field beyond. I dropped to one knee, braced the telephoto for the composition, and--waited a second too long to press the shutter.

Just what I needed: another shot of giggling puppy gums. Why can't he just use a towel like the rest of us?

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What the heck. I decided to go ahead and post this little nostalgia piece that will be this week's Floyd Press column. I'd love to see bloggers pick up this memory meme and tell what summers were like when and where you grew up. For you, what are the sensations of summers past? If you write on this topic, please let me know. It would be interesting to see how our childhood experiences of summer are different. And the same. -- FF

When you were young, what told you it was finally summer? There was something in the air today that made me think of long-ago summers through the rose-colored lens of memory, and from a distance, it didn't use to be such a bad time of year, growing up southern.

The long season of hot summer days and balmy nights left traces like marks in soft clay, sensations forever written on the clean page of a young memory. And here, five decades later, some odd unexpected moment--waking from the first catnap of the season on the front porch with a book face down beside me or the scent of pasture pollen breathed deeply in the soft air of a June day--will bring back the memories of summers, growing up in the Deep South.

To a small child, signals that summer has come appear well ahead of the almanac's markings. For me, summertime began the first day we could "go barefooted" and get out of bed in the morning and undress from pajamas into our swim trunks--the baggy kind with the mesh liner that was perpetually full of sand. But the officially sanctioned sign of spring was permission from our parents to play in the sprinkler. The first one I remember was nothing more than a brass circle with holes in it. Silver drops arched out in a crown of spray that soaked into the prickly zoysia grass in the warm shade.

My first full immersion outdoors was in a large, tin washtub. I have seen the old black and white pictures of a chubby me splashing in the kind of tub that was once used to wash clothes by hand. Later, I remember so many still, hot afternoons splashing with the neighbor children in the blow-up plastic swimming pool-the Michelin Man kind with three inflated rings, filled to the top with chlorine-smelling water. Its surface was quickly covered with plump-animal swimming rings and grass clippings from the yard. A gritty sediment grew on the bottom every time we stepped from the scorching heat of the sandbox back into the relative cool of the water. The tiny leaves and filamentous peach colored flower petals of backyard Mimosa trees fluttered down into the tepid broth all day long, so that by evening, the little pool looked like a forest pond badly in need of a bullfrog.

Summertime was the Season of Ice Cream. It began in late March when the Popsicle Man resumed his rounds in our neighborhood. The memory of the sound of his jingling bell still evokes a Pavlovian urge for something sweet, cold and sticky. It conjures up the taste of dripping orangy dreamsicles, watery grape double pops and crusty nutty bars. Summer's memory tastes like the flat wooden spoons that came with the ice cream cups. (Somehow, I remember the taste of the spoon more clearly than the ice cream.) In an Alabama summer, the correct posture for eating popsicles or ice cream cones was leaning over the grass, expecting the worst.

And summertime meant, and still means ice--and lots of it. Swirling in a sweating glass, full to the top, ice was the main ingredient of all summer drinks in the Deep South. I still think a glass should be filled with ice before it is filled with anything else. When visiting friends who serve me a glass with one or two lonely little cubes bobbing around, I know these folks weren't raised where I was.

Of all the seasons, southern summers brought more than their share of smell-memories--of freshly cut grass and gardenias; of the oily smell of Coppertone: the sharp smell of chlorine of public pools and the sweet, chlorophyllic aroma of a kitchen table covered with a bushel of green beans fresh from the corner market that my mother and I would snap while we talked.

Floyd's short spell of hot, humid days will soon be here, and I'll grumble and fuss with the rest of my neighbors. But you'll have to admit, we have a pretty good time of it in the mountains. And even if we suffer a little, summertime will leave us with its own special moments, a gift to our senses that we should savor and remember, no matter how old we are.

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To tarnish the poetic imagery with science, truth of the matter is, most of the droplets you see here result not from surface dew but from root pressure when nights are calm and humid. More forces push water into the plant than transpiration pulls out of the plant, and it weeps along the margins of the leaves. See how most of the droplets form along the margins, the largest where the main veins meet the edge of the leaf?

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I wonder if the local greenhouse will sell me just the two-gallon plastic buckets that shrubs come in? Of all the toys we could get for the dog, this is by far his favorite thing in all the world. He could hardly wait for the privet hedge to come out so he could commence his romp around the house and over into the pasture with his Darth Vader Puppy Helmet.

It is just the right kind of flexible, so that when he intentionally drops it on a run and gets his feet all tangled up in it, it springs and bounces like a prey animal trying to get away, and he captures and subdues it all over again. He runs at full throttle, often holding it in his jaws by the bottom edge so that bucket fits over his head, so he avoids running into things, I suppose, by peeping through the convenient Visual Portals (some would call them drainage holes) in the bottom.

So. I'm hoping to buy a half dozen of these, put red ribbons around them, and give them to Tsuga for Christmas--a surprise he can play with for hours in the snow. A home-schooled pup, a country dog--he has such simple pleasures.

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Very hot and still the air was, Very smooth the gliding river, Motionless the sleeping shadows. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

No longer can you see the seed rows set by the drill, thin lines of new growth winding their way to the vanishing point at the far end of the valley. Already, the flowers of orchard grass and timothy droop heavy with seeds and it is time for the first cutting. No longer can we walk the perimeter of the field and come home dry; a morning's dew is enough to soak us to the skin from the waist down, and then our pants are battered in a fine flour of pollen and chaff.

The grasses, of course, bear flowers drab and small, depending on indiscriminant wind to carry on the generations, seed to seed. But here and there, in the pasture understory, clovers, pinks, daisies and hawkweed show their colors to anyone who will take time to look deeper than the surface. To a casual passerby, it is only a monotonous gray-green field of grasses waving in the heat. From a bug's eye view, there is a pallete of color in the ankle to knee world, where petals are posted like signposts, advertizing pollen, nectar and a full stomach.

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Oops. Never got around to posting this yesterday. So fire me: they're Saturday Jots.

• ON THE ROAD AGAIN Got a call yesterday asking if I would do a program (can't remember what the series is called--Friends From Floyd or somesuch) at the local library in August. So I'll offer my App Studies Photomemoir, I suppose. And I'll need to find a digital projector; but I WON'T have to borrow a laptop!
• FLAILING FINGERS Finally, I can quit obsessing about Firefox working correctly on the laptop. I gave up on the extension called Tabbrowser Preferences after kicking the issue around on the Firefox Forums, and this morning successfully installed Tab Mix, and am a happy camper. So far, the new machine is purring along nicely. Last night I even attempted to use the laptop to revise a little story for the next Floyd Press column, but I'm still very clumsy, especially with selecting and moving text; and my left little finger hits the Fn key that's where CTRL is on a regular keyboard. But it's feeling more familiar with every keystroke.
• READING WRITING I've completed 45 of the 125-ish writing samples I've agreed to score. Bio students read a piece (from a webpage called World Health Center, I think) and assess the sources and author credential and bias, note main and subtopics and evidence supporting the claims of the article, describe any implicit assumptions or conjecture, and evaluate the author's conclusion. I score each paper according to 9 criteria according to a rubric provided. It takes anywhere from 5 to 12 minutes per paper. I figure I've got a good bit more sitting to do. But the pay is not bad; and I can do it in my gardening grubbies from the front porch (if it would ever get warm enough!) And I'll have to say, most students don't understand critical reading. It's sort of scary. Most take the piece at face value, not questioning that the webpage sidebar offers nutritional supplements, while at the same time, the author's conclusion is that nutritional supplements may protect us from the health consequences of ecoestrogens. Hmmm.(Essay from another source is here.)
• BLACKBIRD PIE I'm stopping what I'm doing about every ten minutes this morning, and carefully opening the front door, peeking around the corner of the house at the garden. There is mischief afoot. Or, I should say, abeak. During a break in the rain yesterday, I took a quick walk down to see if the moisture had encouraged any seeds to sprout. Already, even though most of the green bean seeds haven't risen above the surface, the crows have started pulling them out of the ground, just like they did last year. Not eating them. Just pulling them up for fun, and hautily dropping there little beany bodies there for me to see. The .22 with the scope is propped next to the door. And I won't be shooting in the air. That thing stuck up in our garden: SCAREcrow, it isn't. BEMUSEcrow is more like it. And I'm not doing that much work to entertain the blackbirds this year. Gardening can bring out the Terminator in the best of us.
• ECTOPARASITOPHOBIA We found the first whopper tick embedded beneath Tsuga's thick fur yesterday, so the alert level has gone to ORANGE. The local live-in pharmacist-lady anxiously dosed him with a largish bolus of Doxacylcin. We're hypervigilant, still suspicious that our last dog, Buster, died at age 4 from a tick-borne disease. Diagnosis was never conclusive, but it started with migrating arthritic changes and malaise, and I'm thinking the cursed ticks were to blame. We'd never forgive ourselves if we could prevent that from happening again, and didn't. And some of us are more prone than others to assume guilt and responsibility for Everything That Happens. Dear. He'll be fine.

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Well, I might as well share the joy: logic has lost the battle. On Monday, our builder-friend Karl is coming over to begin the process of adding a room onto the back of the house. Her idea. Not mine. And therein will hang a tale.

Logic: We already have enough space. We rarely have overnight visitors. We don't have the money.

Nesting Impulse: We need more room on the ground floor. We need a place for company to stay without climbing stairs. What are we saving for?

Of course, the plot goes deeper than that. But let's just say I've never encouraged the conversation over the past two years since SHE first had this revelation that we could add 400 sq feet of living space by running the house into the bank out back. But the Persistent Irresistable Force has met the Ultimately-Moveable Object, and I've been drawn into the gravity of this moneypit venture like a tiny, passive meteor into a black hole. Yesterday, in an act of defeat, I drew up a starting plans on 3D Home Architect. Monday we'll talk about rooflines and plumbing and begin looking at window and door catalogs. Argghhh.

Ground-breaking may be a year off, or it may be before mid-summer, depending on Karl's schedule. At any rate, you're likely to hear more about this reluctant addition that will be Her Domain. And of course, there will be pictures all along.

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We found it. I don't think there's any doubt, we have a bear about. T'weren't no dog big enough to deposit that kind of spoor. Not a ruminant, lacking the characteristic lumpiness; no hair or bone, so not a catamount or bobcat. And lots of it, suggesing something bigger than a breadbox.

Should we be afraid? No, except possibly for the goofy dog who at times thinks of himself as a mouse, at other times, a carnivorous mastodon. As long as we don't corner a mother with cubs. Or sneak up on one unawares, which, given our tendency for chatter on the trails, isn't likely.

Makes me feel some satisfaction we live in a sparcely settle placed where a bear would be comfortable, with enough territory to stick around a while. We'll just have to be sure and not put temptation in front of him that might run him afoul of his good neighbors. We bring the catfood in if CJ doesn't eat it; and we won't leave garbage in the back of the truck overnight anymore. And maybe, we'll whistle while we walk. Just in case.

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At the end of almost three months of researching, deliberating, ordering, anguishing, returning-to-sender and redeciding about a laptop, when it finally arrived on Wednesday, it seemed a bit of an anticlimax. But it works, and it fits. I like the feel of the keyboard and the touchpad on the ThinkPad (and the touchpad software options) much better than the dead-on-arrival Dell. The screen is quite bright, performance seems snappy enough, even though I've not put it to any kind of test yet. Nor have I run it on battery to know what kind of real life it will have. It is thinner and lighter than the Dell, and I don't notice a lot of heat from it.

Not to say there have not been some minor glitches. While the laptop gets a good connection with the D-link router so I can use the net from across the room or the front porch, I can't yet figure out how to share files with the desktop. I ran the wireless network wizard, copied files on a Flash drive from desktop to laptop, but am dead in the water still. And I'm going go have to figure out if Bluetooth (which came installed) is anything I need at present. Old dog, new tricks.

The most frustrating hindrance to full use of the laptop is getting Firefox configured the same as on the desktop. For some reason, extensions will install, but their OPTIONS button is grayed out. Especially vexxing is that I can't get Tabbrowser Preferences (a firefox extension) to work with the laptop (nor was I able to with the Dell for the day it was operational.) Firefox's default control of tabs is dismal by comparison. If anybody has any ideas of what needs to be tweaked, I'd be grateful for suggestions. I'm guessing it has something to do with permissions or security, allowing installation from webpages (though I've downloaded the extensions and manually installed them in Firefox, still doesn't work.) Ideas?

I am happy to find I am able to make my hands conform again to a standard QWERTY keyboard, after using "Natural" ergonomic keyboards exclusively for many years. Even so, if I have much typing to do, I'll connect an external keyboard (and mouse). I still feel like I'm plodding through a bog of oatmeal trying to get anything done with the touchpad.

So. I'm pleasantly distracted today, groping my way around the new machine, installing here, hunting registration keys there, half expecting to see smoke coming from under the hood by day two. But hey--maybe this 'brick' will go the distance with me. Here's hoping.

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The Thinkpad shipped last Friday (from HK...I guess that's Hong Kong?) and arrived to be quarantined in Louisville, Kentucky (why there, I wonder?) over the holiday. Finally, I got notice it would be delivered on Tuesday--most likely, this would happen while I was in Floyd with our blogger-guests and friends from town. But I'd scoot on back home after a quick lunch, and probably be here when it arrived, since it almost certainly was a signature-only delivery.

Well, as lunches in town do, it simmered along at a comfortable pace (and I would have had it no other way), so when I finally got by the Bank of Floyd to do some urgent end-of-month banking, the inside windows were closed. I pulled in behind another car in one of two teller windows at the drive-through; but just like I inevitably do in the grocery store, I chose to get behind the guy who can't find his pen, and when he does, it runs out of ink; and then he drops his checkbook out the window and gets a cellphone call while he's making his transaction. So when the other window became available, I thought I'd just move over there.

So I put the truck in reverse, looked out the rearview mirror: nobody had pulled in behind me in the half-minute I'd been there, so I backed up. Into a 1992 Subaru's right front headlight. It was pulled in so close behind me, I couldn't see it for the tailgate of the truck. This nice stranger-lady and I wandered around in the courthouse looking for someone to come record the evil deed--which will come out of my pocket, likely less than $100, but not exactly what I'd planned for rushing home to accept my package.

So when I pulled up to the house at 2:45, the first thing I hoped to see was a package sitting at the back door. Nope, but there was a yellow UPS notice of attempt to deliver, with a second attempt scheduled for middle of the next day. My luck, they'd send the thing back to Hong Kong. If nothing else with this laptop fiasco, I'm getting a lesson in patience. Now, if I could just learn to drive.

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Happily, the weather cooperated and gave us one cool, pleasant night for sleeping (sorry, the guest room was supposed to be furnished with nearby calling whippoorwills, but they clocked out early) and a fleecy-clouded shirt sleeves morning for birding, sketching and the twenty-five cent tour of downtown Floyd. Happily, too, we've closed the distance once more on electronic friendships, all the way from California, and now Pica and Numenius (their nom de blog) can read about Nameless Creek and Tsuga having experienced both!

One of the best things about conversations with interesting people is that they almost always resurrect in me some latent creative or intellectual desire, or challenge me to do more with the ones I already have. Our recent blogging house guests were both ardent birders and enthusiastic sketchers, and my antennae are up on both fronts.

I'm not letting the calls out my window this moment pass through consciousness as generic tweet tweet tweets. THAT is the Acadian Flycatcher we heard in the meadow yesterday morning; and from the porch, I can hear the Kentucky Warbler we heard along the middle road in the Rhododendrons. If I can ever hook on to some word-equivalent to a bird's musical (or non-musical) call, or find an appropriate metaphor (sounds like a squeeky hinge) then I'm much more likely to remember it when I hear it again, and Pica and Allan helped me with a few of our valley residents' calls yesterday that I will remember now every summer from here on. Meanwhile, here's a list of what the birds REALLY say, such as "Don't you dare!", "Quick three beers!" and of course, the Connecticut Warbler's call of "tip tupa teepo tupa teepo or whip it, whip it up, whip it good." (?)

Ann and I were delighted to see both P's and N's sketchbook/journals they have been keeping of their visits to Hatteras and elsewhere on this trip east. We talked about the similarities between sketching and photography. Both serve to make one pay focused attention to detail, but sketching allows you to draw out the tiniest of features apart from their context in a way that, short of massive photoshopping masks, I can't do through my lenses. Brushes, pens, papers and watercolor tints have come a long way in portability, and those framed 4 x 6 spiral-bound journals of watercolor paper were so inviting: there's that empty slate of the zen-garden tilled surface I spoke of yesterday. What creative potential! All that's missing is the talent to put discernible images on the page. But I think I have the eye for composition and used to draw caricatures of my teachers in high school (a couple discovered when my classmates began twittering at my english teacher in a giant bunny outfit--she had big front teeth and a twitchy nose. But that's another story, except to say that when she confiscated my drawing, she recognized herself and laughed. Whew!) Point is, I may yield to a lifelong temptation to find other brushes than in Photoshop and see what happens. Just what I need: another hobby!

Perhaps best of all, by visiting with P and N who have visited with other blogger-friends in California and Boston, it's like I've touched those folks, too, less vicariously that my reading their blog alone. Here was someone to say, yes, we found X or Y to be just the way they seem on their blog or as you imagined them to be. I joked that eventually, given enough time (and of course there isn't) every blogger would have met someone who had met someone who had met another blogger in the flesh....and we have less than six degrees of blogger separation. It already feels that way at times.

We had lunch yesterday at Oddfellas (where Pica said, "On the west coast, this would be a GOOD meal!") It fell short of a full Floyd blogger lunch, but Doug Thompson was there, Colleen Redman was invited, and there are three other Floyd County-affiliated bloggers who potentially can come the next time bloggers pass this way and share a meal. So. Traveling mercies to our friends from the far west. Thanks for the memories, but you've stirred up a hornet's nest. Now I need drawing tools. And a new pair of binoculars!

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