2020 Venture Vermont: Go to Trailfinder.info and find a hike you’ve never done before. Go hike it!

all right, i am triple dipping on this activity, because i needed to go to a wetland and look at sedges and i also wanted to look up trails in the area of East Montpelier as an example for a kid who was working on the cadette eco-trekker badge.

so.

chickering bog.

it turns out that chickering bog is not a bog at all, but a rich fen, and the main difference between a bog and a fen is that a bog gets all of its water from precipitation, but a fen is fed by groundwater.

this isn't a great picture of this plant, because it's been dry out, and they'e past flowering, but these are purple pitcher plants. they're fun because they are carnivorous.

first fruits

i know i mentioned the tomatoes.

i love fresh tomatoes and i have never grown any of my own, because most years i just can't be relied on to stay home and tend a garden.

but i'm not camping these days, because camping exposes me to more risk.

and did i mention that i love fresh tomatoes?

anyway, back when we were just starting to reopen the first tentative businesses after the first shutdown, i thought now would be a good time to raise some food. i'm under no illusion of raising a lot of it, but it felt like a good thing to do.

so i bought two tomato plants.

this lovely did not even make it as far as a plate. i meant to serve it all fancy with my dinner, but it got eaten before that happened.

2020 Venture Vermont: Collect rainwater and use it to water your garden

the item reads "collect rainwater" but i have construed it to include water from my dehumidifier. also, i don't really have a garden. i traditionally have some free range grasses and flowers and some feral berry bushes, but this year i jumped in and bought TWO WHOLE TOMATO PLANTS because i felt like growing some food.

plus i like tomatoes.

anyway, i have to run a dehumidifier in my basement, so that's a free gallon of water every day.

so. tomatoes.

2020 Venture Vermont: Photograph two kinds of mammals in the wild. Identify the full species name and describe its behavior

mammals are hard to get pictures of. they move quickly, and aren't into posing while you adjust your camera.



these white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are aware of my presence, and their ears are pointed toward me, but they're not worried enough to stop grazing. this group will probably feed for a while before retiring to a bedding area to chew their cud.

my beaver video here was taken at an undisclosed beaverpond in jericho. i was minding my own business taking sedge samples when all of a sudden and VERY NEAR i heard the beaver tail slap. i was a little afraid she might rush me even though as a rule beavers won't get out of the water to challenge you.

a large beaver (Castor canadensis) is a powerful animal capable of severing you arm if it has a mind to.

a mature female will live on her territory with her mate, her yearling offspring, and her new kits. the yearling offspring will help raise the kits until they have to leave and find territories of their own. any beaver in the family group may patrol the territory and communicate with the others, but the large territorial display is likely to be the boss lady.

2020 Venture Vermont: Learn to tie 3 new knots

it can be argued that i already knew how to tie a square knot and a clove hitch and a bowline.

what's new to me is the tying methods and variants.

rotifers

these days since i find myself in a lot of sedge habitats, i am also finding myself on the shores of marshes and beaver ponds and it's always fun to take a sample of water to look at later.

here's a bit of video of some rotifers. apparently they are all hanging onto each other by their feet (they each have one foot) and the rotation of their cilia paddles them around in a circle.

nature is freaky.

sedges: problem 2

I started at my house (which as of YESTERDAY is mine. not mine and the bank’s. MINE. paid that sucker off YESTERDAY. Still wearing my party hat.)

Uh, anyway. I started at my house and walked toward a little pond at the end of the driveway and then back away from the road and collected some samples, one of which, according to my notes, was a sedge.

I’m going with C. gynandra.

Then the next day i went for a walk up in the Preston Pond Conservation area, on the west side near the beaver pond. Of course i forgot my camera so there are no pictures of the samples in situ.

I wrestled with this one a long time and still don’t know what it is. Something maybe in phacocystis?

Both of these specimens are from the margin of the beaver pond. The left page i THINK is a group one, and if i got that correct, it’s probably from sect. Ovales and i tentatively settled on C. scoparia.

The right side sketch has an error that had to be crossed out. It is not a weird spikelet or fancy bract. This is a small, slender plant and it’s drawn more or less actual size. The little star-shaped spikelets separated along the stem make it, i think,  group 1, sect. Stellulate?  So i’m going to guess C. interior.

These two specimens are also from the area next to the beaverpond. On the left is a graceful plant that i put into group 3 on account of unisexual cylindrical spikelets. I’m tentatively calling it a C.baileyi.

I got all excited at the one on the right because OH LOOK! It’s really different and has all these fuzzy little spikelets on the one stem at the top and surely that will be easy! (insert hollow, bitter laugh here) after staring it in the face for the better part of a week, i am uncertain at best what to call it. I think it’s maybe an eriophorum, and possible E. virginicum?

This week i am coming out from under the anvil of overwhelmedness and starting to see some system here. I don’t have much to say to your posts because outside of “yep, that’s a C. lurida”, i don’t have much useful to say yet. I do read everything you post, and i look at your photos and diagrams, and you are helping me learn to think about both the sedges and how to make good observations.

One thing  i have learned is that i will need to pay more attention to the root systems and habitats.

sedges: first problem

ok, i am struggling a little with some of this, but part of my struggle is my failure to know how to organize my work for all the parts of the problem. i'm also new to sedges.

so maybe i'll just jump in with what i have so far.

i've done reading on sedges vs. grasses, and some are super obvious, and others... not so much. my first day out i encountered this thing that i THINK may be a sedge, but i also can't pin down what sedge it is, and i can't conclusively say it's not a grass. it turns out i have no photo of it, but is spent some hours trying to draw it it's mayyyybe a scirpus?

i had better luck with what is almost certainly a C. lurida:

one male, two female spikelets, plus the achenes are fat and the veining is right.

and then i ran into this thing, which i think is a sedge but i am also not entirely sure it's not a rush.

it's long and thin with round stems, but it's got these teeny little side-mounted spikelets and that fantastic long bract and i went back and forth between Juncus and Schoenoplectus. i still don't know.

and then there was this thing, which i can say with some confidence is C. intumescens

i still haven't analyzed a grass or diagrammed one, but i'm reading some articles about the parts of grasses that i hope will help me tell the difference where it's not glaringly obvious.

that's it for me for now.

flask

--

it doesn't matter if you get to camp at one or at six. dinner is still at six.

sedges

ok, so i've always known the rhyme

sedges have edges, rushes are round;

grasses have joints when the cops aren't around

-or the child-friendly equivalent

grasses have joints all the way to the ground

which works just as good, i guess.

anyway, these days in addition to my usual stuff, i am taking a class in sedges.

because apparently i don't have enough to do.

i'm going to try to post my assignments here, because this is the sort of thing both of you are interested in sometimes.

pets

here are my pets:

left to right: gladys, monster

gladys is a vinegar mother. monster is a sourdough starter. i care fro them, i feed them, and they're living things. they don't make a lot of demands, they don't chew the furniture, and they'll never jump up on company.

HA. like i have company.

memorial day in west bolton

there's an organization called taps for veterans, and their thing is to get live buglers to play taps for the funerals of veterans, because apparently that's a thing the government decided to cut back on.

all the money in the world for tanks or planes we don't particularly need but not an awful lot of money for the benefits of the actual service people.

and that is not OK, because regardless of how one feels about the wars,  we as a society made promises to those service people. we OWE them what we promised them, and better.

the military honors they are entitled to are perhaps a small thing, but every last one of them who wants those honors should get them.

anyway, this year they had an initiative in which people from all over stood to play taps at 3PM local time on memorial day. so i went up to the west bolton cemetery and played there. i met a gentleman there who was paying respects to his dead, including he great grandfather, who enlisted twice in the civil war.

here's the story from CBS news:




and here's me:

i write a lot. just not here.

ok, so i write every day. it is a wild sign of the times that a number of people who are interested in history saw this pandemic get going and thought: i should be keeping track. people are going to want PRIMARY SOURCES"

and i started keeping a covid journal, in which i chronicle my daily goings on and the numbers. it will also serve as a contact journal in case i get sick.

and yanno, i was some weeks into that puppy when the vermont historical society sent out a request for people to do exactly that. keep an journal.

also i'm working on material for my girl scout channel, because the girl scouts are having to figure out how to do alternate program and by the time i get done that and my inat indentifications and my field studies, i'm just TIRED.

charon share alike

count them up.

i keep saying that the choices we make now will decide whether we all know someone who knows someone who dies, or whether we will all know someone who dies.

here's my covid timeline:

a friend had it. she is mostly better but still feels tired and achy.
a friend of a friend died.
a friend of a friend died.
a friend of a friend had it and had to be put in a coma, but is recovering.
a friend did not get married this week.
a relative of a friend has it and may recover.
a relative of a friend died.
a friend has it and will probably die this week.

the choices you make now will determine the death count.

and not just death; survivors may have lifelong health consequences.

make good choices please. help your friends make good choices.

the president

people notice sometimes how i doggedly refer to donald trump as "the president" and never "the cheeto" or "the orange dumpster fire" or any of the other derisive names you hear out there.

it was initially because i wanted to maintain respect for the office, as i might expect from other people if there was a president they didn't like but i did.

and then i began to think there was value in using politically neutral language to describe what is happening, because a certain number of people will automatically agree with or dismiss what you say based on whether you like the president or not.

but above all, i have realized, there is power in that phrasing.

please compare:

the cheeto said we should look into injecting bleach.

orange dumpster fire is bragging about his television ratings while people die.

the president and his advisers are confiscating critical medical supplies that hospitals have already paid for and they are giving it to for-profit resellers at the cost of american lives.

which of these three sentences sound like the horrific, criminal betrayal it is?

the president is telling stupid lies.

the president is causing people to die and only cares about his television ratings.

the president is stealing medical supplies from hospitals for profit and revenge.

milestones

today i am a full-fledged citizen of the confinement.

i have a sourdough starter. i have been to zoom meetings.

and today I CUT MY OWN HAIR.

scissors only, because there are no clippers for sale anywhere i can get to them.

for whom the bell tolls

in the state of vermont today we had four new known cases of covid-19. our calculated rate of transmission is .55.

we're doing very well here. our governor made hard choices early and closed stuff down.

there will be no opening of things back up until may 15 at least, and it was a very smart thing to place the extension of the stay at home order so far out in the future because many lives will be saved.

we have choices, all of us. we can decide now and every day whether we will all know someone who knows someone who dies of covid-19 or whether we all know someone who dies of covid-19.

just now, as i was writing this, i heard from a friend that a father of one of her friends has died. he was one of three cases IN THAT FAMILY.

i have a friend who works on the unit where they treat the covid patients here. i have a friend who works at a nursing home where there are cases. i have a friend who is a respiratory therapist at this hospital.

i can't protect them from this. i can't protect the delivery drivers or the grocery clerks. but i can stay home and lower the transmission rate. i can decide not to order delivery stuff i don't need right now. i can reduce the general rate of exposure.

you can too.

costs

i want to talk to you about the costs of opening everything up for business.

there are people right now who act like it's no big deal if 1 to 2 percent of us die, because that doesn't seem like a lot.

if a plane crashed and a few hundred people died, the news cycle would be all about that and we would feel like it was a national tragedy.

if there was a salmonella outbreak and a few dozen people were hospitalized, we would panic.


but somehow our government is trying to cast covid-19 as not that big a deal, and the resulting deaths as a price we ought to be considering to save the economy.

let's put this amount of death into perspective. the worst aviation disaster in history killed 538 people.

more people are dying than that every day in new york.

the fukushima tsunami in 2017 killed 2,129 people.

the number of KNOWN covid-19 deaths in the US yesterday alone was 2,174.

every time you heard about some disaster and heard the stories of the survivors or we read out the names of the dead, do you remember how shaken you felt?

do you remember how much we mourned after 9/11? how we dropped everything and went to war about it? a war that is still not over?

more new yorkers have died from covid than were killed in 9/11.

over 34,000 people are dead in the US alone, and we're not done dying. we're a month into what is likely going to be two years' struggle.

i'm not staying home because i'm afraid to die.

i'm staying home because i am afraid of being the disease vector that kills people.

taking care of yourself and your neighbors is maybe the bravest thing you're ever going to have to do.

do NOT allow anyone to tell you it's no big deal. do NOT allow anyone to suggest in your presence that the lives of your neighbors are worth less than the profits of walmart.

do you remember, after 9/11, the solemn reading of the names of the dead? we should start doing that. it should be compulsory listening for people who are angry because they can't get their hair done.

flask's guidelines for living in the pandemic

things got real, didn't they?

maybe you're working from home. maybe your kids are suddenly at home. maybe you're out of work.

look. this is hard on all of us. we are all of us facing increased challenges in our physical and emotional lives. some of those stresses will be obvious, like when you don't know where your next meal is coming from, and some will be subtle, like when you just can't get it together to do things and it takes you two hours to brush your teeth because you can't muster up the energy. some days you're going to be a competent human and some days you're not.

in order to help you organize your thoughts, i'm providing you with a handy list of things to try to do each day.

1) grooming- try every day to brush your teeth. if you are able, also get dressed and maybe have a shower. give yourself extra points if you trim your nails or make yourself look especially nice.

2) nourishment- try to eat enough food on some kind of schedule so that you're taking in an appropriate amount of fuel to keep you going. if you are able, prepare or order in nutritious meals, at least one every day. if you make bad choices because you are sad or sick or can't afford better, be gentle and remind yourself you're doing the best you can. if you go off the rails and stress-eat an entire box of girl scout cookies, congratulate yourself on having supported the girl scouts.

3) exercise- try to do some of this every day, either inside or out. if the weather is nice and you can go for a walk outside without violating your local distancing guidelines, do it. even if it feels like a hassle to put on your outside clothes and a mask. if you can only exercise indoors, try to make some time to do some kind of indoor workout. you will fell better if you can pull this off, i promise.

4) maintenance- try to clean, repair, or put away ONE thing every day. if you have the energy to do a whole bathroom or mop the floors, awesome. but if you can just do one thing, you will have DONE A THING. this is important.

5) learning- try to learn something every day. learn something new, practice a skill you already have. if you have the energy for it, set yourself a goal, like ten minutes of guitar practice, or one educational video on epidemiology or one page of a nonfiction book.

6) creating- have something that is not your job that you can be working on. create, make, do. try to fit in some time every day for it, but if you don't get to it today remember to call it a day off and relax. it's to give you something to do, not to drive you crazy, ok?

7) amusement- read something, watch something, listen to something that makes you happy. play a game if you have the luxury of having someone to play with. have the best fun that you can. do not make yourself earn this. consider it fundamental.

8) help- do something, no matter how small, that will make someone else's life easier today. if you are able to do this, it is a moral imperative. if you are not able to help someone today, maybe you can offer someone the opportunity to help you. maybe this is on THEIR list, and they haven't checked it off yet.

9) sleep- you're probably not sleeping as well as you used to, plus your body is trying to recover from some heavy stuff. living through a pandemic takes energy out of you whether you realize it or not, and your body catches up and heals best when you're asleep. so yeah, sleep extra and if you don't have to be anywhere at any specific time, try sleeping until you wake up.

so those are my guidelines.

and remember, just like in your pre-pandemic life you will always plan more things than you can reasonably get to. leave yourself emotional space for that. you might come out of this thing with a sparkly clean house, a lean physique and a mastery of four new languages, but just count yourself successful if you get through a day without falling all the heck apart.

one day.

one day.

one day.

tone deaf

maybe i didn't really understand the concept of lent, but in my churchgoing days i thought it was meant to be forty days of solemn introspection and fasting with sorrow for our sins, the sins of the world, and the suffering of jesus on our behalf.

i don't know whose brilliant idea it was to print up stickers for the sushi counter at the grocery store, but either i lack a full understanding of the observance of lent or somebody in marketing doesn't really get the whole idea of the thing.

granted, it's been a while since i left the church, but i sort of think that if there'd been THIS much of a tonal shift, i would have at least seen an article about it or something.

CELEBRATE LENT

done her dirty

my neighbor's dog done her dirty today.

i watched this dram unfold from my desk:

it was 35 degrees and sleeting, good weather for staying inside, even if you're sick of staying inside but have to. my neighbor walked her dog down past my house, but her dog did not go.

she walked the dog around in the parking area, but the dog did not go.

she walked the dog all the way hoe, where the dog decided to go, which meant they all had to walk back down here where the dumpster is.

THAT DOG KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING.