It took me back to my college and grad school years and I could feel my own motivation slipping right away. I almost didn’t make it back to the office. I had a shorter 3rd-term in college where some unusual classes were offered in the spring. A number of girls in the dorm took quilting one year while I was taking Qualitative Chemistry. There was always a biology trip to the Bahamas, but I could not afford that. I also needed to keep working. My job was helping to manage the Chem Lab storeroom and assist the chem professors. Detecting a theme? Might not sound like it, but I always had fun. And then I went off to summer internships doing more chemistry. I’m an interesting person. Really.
It was 70 yesterday and for 40 minutes I was 20 again. I ate lunch outside at Rutgers University and without my lunch buddies to dissect the dysfunctions at work (they were otherwise preoccupied) I passed the time watching students going by. Nobody does spring better than college kids, right? First warm day and a few were already sitting on the lawn. OK, I knew the ground was still wet. The frat house I walked by had speakers out on the roof and kids hanging out on porch sofas. I passed a Frisbee game in front of a dorm, and every third kid had shorts and/or flip flops on. And there was a lot of bared skin already too. Spring fever is on!
It took me back to my college and grad school years and I could feel my own motivation slipping right away. I almost didn’t make it back to the office. I had a shorter 3rd-term in college where some unusual classes were offered in the spring. A number of girls in the dorm took quilting one year while I was taking Qualitative Chemistry. There was always a biology trip to the Bahamas, but I could not afford that. I also needed to keep working. My job was helping to manage the Chem Lab storeroom and assist the chem professors. Detecting a theme? Might not sound like it, but I always had fun. And then I went off to summer internships doing more chemistry. I’m an interesting person. Really.
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I am feeling virtuous and sore, in equal measures. When I saw it was going to be 70 degrees on Wednesday, I cleared my work calendar and decided to take the day off. What a great decision. I had so much exercise and so much fresh air. I began with a 2-mile run at the Ken Lockwood Gorge. I debated skipping the run but it’s a beautiful Rails-to-Trails path with great views – one of my favorite places. I spent the following 7 hours in my yard doing spring cleanup with a one-hour “break” to move one ton of wood stove pellets from the garage to the basement. These are 40-pound bags. So hence both the virtuous and sore feelings. I want to do this every Wednesday instead of work. It’s like therapy for me and I guess I needed the mental health break from work. When you burn a million calories it also gives you a ravenous appetite. But I think I managed to eat less than I burned. Who doesn’t want to lose weight? Much gets written about weights and diets, and in the end, it’s still food in / calories burned. I was going through a box of old family stuff and found a 1958 “Table of Desirable Weights”. It was established by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. In researching the Good Housekeeping booklet containing the table, I found out that MetLife keeps that table updated. So I spent a little time studying how their recommendations have changed over the last 50 years. There are indeed some differences, but a lot less than I thought. Presuming that an insurance company is building this table based on actuarial experience of health outcomes based on weight, it demonstrates how social norms about what weight is attractive really has nothing to do with what weight is healthy. OK, now does anybody know how many calories are in two Motrin? I do. I've been mostly lucky with neighbors, whether in an apartment or after I traded up to a house. My first apartment was rented from a cool college professor; I'm still in touch with him. My second apartment was in Delaware and amazingly, I found myself living next to a girl I went to high school with in NJ and a drug dealer in law school. That was weird. Then I lived next to a gay couple; they were nice. My blip with abnormal people as neighbors came next. They were OK for a while...a married older couple. The husband was handy and retired; he'd help me out with stuff once in a while. The wife was best described as 'simple'...quiet and mousy. When the husband died, the drug-using daughter moved home. That's when things got strange. People would see her coming out of the nearby woods with a sleeping bag, all soaked and dirty. She got a dinosaur Cadillac somewhere and painted it with pale pink house paint. The cops showed up a few times, late at night. And my house got broken into while I was on a trip. Of course the cops went to the druggie's house first, but nothing ever came of it. She did a lot of damage to windows and finally the sliding glass door, but actually stole very little. I moved not long after that.
Now that I'm "in the country", it's a little harder to get to know neighbors because of the distance between us. You don't just see people in the yard and talk over the fence. They wave going by in their cars. But there is a cool couple living across the street that I know pretty well. The husband is very funny. He talks a blue streak and when his wife is gone he's climbing on the roof and doing other things she'd never let him do if she were home. And she's an ex-teacher so nothing gets by her! I often think it'd be nice to know more of the neighbors, but I've come to love my space too. ![]() I have long wanted a ‘good’ pair of binoculars. Thanks to 15 years of service to J&J and 1,400 “points” to spend in an online catalog, I now have a pair of Nikon 10x42 binoculars. Holy cow, they are really cool. I worked my way from window to window in the house, spying on unsuspecting trees. I couldn’t believe the clarity and detail of things now so close to me. I know there is nothing cool about a bird-watcher, but binoculars are cool. Invert them and they can be used as a crude microscope. Combined with my iphone, they can be a telephoto lens. And in a serious emergency, I can start a fire with one of the lenses. Back in 2008, a team of researchers from the University of Oxford made an intriguing discovery; binoculars can also be used to reduce pain. Let’s say you’re out in the wild and you hurt your hand. If you look at your hand through inverted binoculars the smaller size of your injury tricks the mind into thinking the pain is less. OK, I’m probably only ever going to use them to look at far away wildlife and that may not be cool to anyone but me. But I’m fine with that. Ahhahahaha....that advice was from a Dilbert cartoon. Cracks me up. There are a lot of unwritten rules that are pretty well known by all, even if not followed by all. Doesn't everyone know you're supposed to wait for people to get off the elevator before pushing on? Or that you don't double-dip your chips at a party? Here are some lesser-known rules:
I have a sandbox at work! Unfortunately, it’s not the kind I played in as a kid, nor nearly as fun. This sandbox is a virtual place to play with new computer applications. The world has changed, right? I spent hours playing in a sandbox as a kid. Like everything else, my Dad made ours and it was cool because it had attached picnic table type seats. And a cover. Everyone knows you have to keep the neighborhood cats away from your sandbox. The cool thing about a sandbox is that there is no right or wrong way to play with sand, but yet many ways – from pouring, digging and sifting to scooping and stacking. You use your imagination. I remember building cities with roads, buildings and trees. The trees were my happiest part. I would use those small 2-leaf maple tree sprouts that popped up from seeds dropped by the tree above the sandbox. They were, in my estimation, perfectly sized for my cities. My cities had cars too…wood block scraps from Dad’s workshop. My brother’s cars were from Matchbox, but he didn’t share them much. You learn to share in a sandbox too – the space, the digging tools, and sometimes the Matchbox cars.
![]() Their eyeballs don't move. The make NO sound at all when flying. And they don't make their own nests. I'm talking about owls. I have a thing for them, probably because they are so elusive and hard to spot in nature and I've actually been treated to seeing them twice. The first time was out in Idaho; baby owls in a tree where I was staying. The second time was when I was doing my bike ride from Pittsburgh to DC. I was near Fort Frederick, MD and it was unusual because it was the middle of the day. Never would have seen him at all if he'd not been doing his distinctive call. I found him in the trees and managed to get this picture. It is a barred owl, named for the bars of colors on his chest. Mostly though, you just hear owls and because they are nocturnal, you hear them at night. About two weeks ago I was thrilled to hear a barred owl in the woods while relaxing in my hot tub. Not the first time I've heard him around my yard. Last evening, I actually got my tired butt to go back out in the cold and dark to listen to the county parks naturalist talk about owls. I'm really glad I went. He was a great speaker and I learned a lot more about owls. I learned several different ways to find/spot owls. Three tips:
Which part of us results from nature versus nurture? Tonight I'm thinking about the personality traits my three brothers and I have in common. Since we have the same gene pool, it's hard know whether our chill nature was learned or programmed. We are definitely lovers more than warriors. We all got the Live-and-Let-Live gene and I think we all have a very long fuse before rising to anger. Someday I'll might ask them if they've ever fought for anything or if they can think of anything they'd fight for. I don't think any of us sees the point of an argument or fight -- rather surprising considering we were normal kids with the usual sibling spats growing up.
It was funny when we were given a box of my father's things to split up after he passed away. We all poked around the box, commenting on old war pins and some papers and then all looked at each other. Nobody aggressively was like, "I want this...." In fact, just the opposite. We all waited to see if another had a strong desire for something. Slowly it would come out as "well, if nobody else is interested in this pin, I wouldn't mind having that...." Lots of qualifiers and willingness to give deference to someone with a strong desire. Very civil. I know lots of families that can't do that. We are basically introverts. We can mingle and hold conversations when we need to, but you'll often find us hanging back and just observing the action around us because we are also Watchers. We don't miss a trick. Our humor is very dry and pretty acerbic. We're all conscientious and dependable (ho hum). And we are all great sleepers. That's actually what got me thinking of the ways we are alike. I came across this photo of my brother Jeremy sleeping. He is arguably the best sleeper of all. In fact, the family photo albums is full of pictures of him sleeping in some pretty unusual and uncomfortable places, always with his blanket. There are worse traits than being a great sleeper! A driverless Google car hit a bus on February 14th, and it was the Google car’s fault. This was a first, so it made the front page of USA Today. It was a very human accident. The car detected obstacles in its lane and anticipated that the bus on its left would slow down so the car could merge in. But the bus driver assumed the car would abandon its attempt to change lanes. The car made the wrong decision. Maybe that was California programming. In NJ, everyone knows the bus would speed up to keep the car from merging in.
When I’m driving, I’m not solely watching what is happening, I’m trying to predict what’s going to happen. There are the obvious bad drivers that swerve in and out of lanes without signaling, the super-speedsters and the tailgaters…but I’m thinking about the more subtle signs. I watch the front tires of cars moving in lanes next to me. Parallel to the lane lines is good; sudden drifting towards a line is bad. Or a car that’s moving in a lane at a speed where you know he’s going to have to hit the brakes because you can both see a car ahead of him. Or the Camry that thinks it’s a Camaro. I also notice cars already damaged or cars with lights not working. Driverless Google cars have been in 17 other accidents, the majority of which were rear-ended – “typically at intersections where [other drivers] anticipated the Google car would move ahead.” Ah-ha. The fix is simple. New Jersey rules need to apply. Everyone knows that you step on it when the light turns yellow, not stop! ![]() The practice of stone stacking, which has been gaining ground in wild spaces, is now under attack by environmentalists. The city of Boulder, CO actually briefly declared stone-stacking a jailable offense in an attempt to stop a local artist. And there are hikers who take glee in kicking over any stack they come across. I have built a few in the middle of a riverbed in VT. Since it was fall, my sister-in-law and I had no illusions that our cairns would last beyond the winter ice floes. The other was on my friend's lakefront. I expected if they didn't knock it down after my weekend visit, the spring rising of the water or a deer or dog would knock it down. It actually lasted a year or so, and then all the stacked rocks fell back down on the rock-filled waterfront. So what's the fuss about a stack of stones? Stacking stones is certainly not a new practice. People have always used them to mark trails and they were used to mark graves in the old days. People have stacked stones as a spiritual practice, finding zen in the balancing of rocks. But environmentalists are concerned that lifting rocks out of soil will create erosion and with the practice becoming more ubiquitous, especially out west, it's being seen as akin to graffiti in nature. We all go into the woods for the 'wilderness' experience and somehow think we're the only people who have "passed this way." We go to retreat from civilization and rock stacks are unnatural...they are so obviously man-made. I think that's the real reason people are starting to object to them...not erosion. It's a fair point. I'll probably still make the occasional stack, but in a place where I know it's only temporary because nature will knock it down at some point. I don't know if I'll thwack other people's misguided stacks... |
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July 2017
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