Where Are My Teeth?

The shape of nature

Living near the woods makes me constantly aware of how human-centered our view of the "natural" landscape really is. "Under the spreading chestnut tree"? Trees in nature don't spread unless they fortuitously gowing alone, or on the edge of a precipice or an outcrop of bedrock or a river or a savanahh or something else -- like human beings -- that keeps comptetitors out of their light and off their roots.

Trees in a forest grow straight up as fast as they can, shedding lower branches as the uper ones shade them, like a climber ditching the surpassed rungs of a ladder. The woods around here are full of saplings four inches thick and forty feet high, fighting their way out of the understory, leaning into the prevailing sun as visibly as any daylily. Their crowns compete for the light; if they're lucky one of their bigger neighbors will die or be knocked over in a storm before they overbalance and make yet another catenary arch back down to the ground.

Of course, I should talk. Most of the forest around here is anything but natural -- fields abandoned sometime in the last century or near the end of the one before that, shallow-soiled ridges that weren't good for anything else. The biggest pines grew much faster than they had any right to -- 100-plus feet high and a yard wide in 60 years or so. And the younger ones all colonized the same former fiels at the same time in rows that might as well have been plantation-grown. Only in a few areas has the real natural succession taken hold.

Guess I'll just have to stick around for another century or two...

Bambi moves in

Yesterday late afternoon there was a deer in the back yard cropping ground cover. I went out and had a talk with the deer about staying away from the tomatoes, which ended in a small panic because the deer had apparently forgotten that there was a fence around the yard, and just trotting through the fence wasn't a good idea.

So today who is sitting under the nearest pine tree out back chewing her cud and staying out of the rain? You guessed it. (Note the identifying mark by the rear passenger-side hoof.) This time it was Julie who went out to remonstrate, when the deer started munching on the lilies. Same comedy of errors with the fence.

A few minutes later I went out to the (very nearly waspfree) shop and should not have been at all surprised to see yet again the same deer browsing on some new growth off the side of the driveway. As I whittled, she slowly grazed her way across the front lawn by the pond, up under the big pine and off toward one of the neighbor yards.

Whack-a-wasp

Unlike flies and mosquitos, wasps are big enough that you can hit them in midair and mean it. As the survivors of my gas attack on the workshop straggle out of their hiding places, I've been giving them what for with a spare piece of half-inch plywood.

When they come down to eye level it's easy, but you've got to remember not to swing wildly around the light fixtures (which seem to attract the wasps both for navigation and nesting. A good swipe head-on will produce a satisfying thick and knock the wasp across the shop.

It will not, however, do more than stun them, as I slowly came to understand after the buzzing pest kept returning from galley-west flying a little more erratically than before but otherwise little different (and erratic is not really what you want in the flight of a wasp that is now good and truly pissed off). So after knocking each wasp out of the air I had to hunt amid the sawdust, clamps and half-dozen dust-collection hoses littering the floor to track it down while it was still groggy. It occurred to me that you could make a really useless video game out of all this.

My family and wasps go way back, even ignoring the fact of having grown up with maybe half a dozen visible jews in all of my elementary school...

My father would cut yellowjackets in half when they lighted on his plate at lunch or dinner; I would rescue them from glasses of soda and try to help them dry off.

I'm probably not as scared of them as I should be, considering the time one of my classmates kicked over a nest during a nature walk in third grade, but I do find them kinda fascinating. One of the coolest things you can see is a paper wasp eating wood in preparation for making a nest -- the insect scrapes along the eadge of a board, and the material visibly dwindles.

My shop is full of wasps

I can only wish that were a line from a bad phrasebook.

This morning, when I went out to nip a few inches off either end of the board that will protect the bottom of the front door, there was a buzzing sound and a lone wasp zigzagging above me. As I looked for an extension cord to plug in the chopsaw there were two, then three, then four.

Probably the next thing I did was stupid: I got the bug spray and went out to the balcony outside my office, where I'd seen wasps gathering under the vinyl siding a few weeks back (maybe I should have sprayed then). I gave the area a few good shots, making sure to get up under the siding and trim. Then I went down to the shop, (quickly) dosed the wall and ceiling on the indoor side of the balcony, and left closing the door behind me.

Two or three hours later back out to the shop to cut that wood at last. Mistake. Wasps in the air, wasps on the electric heater hanging from the ceiling, wasps on the I-beam that holds up the office floor above. Wasps clinging to the light fixtures. All of them ill-disposed toward me.

More bug spray, more closed door. Maybe tomorrow morning it will be safe out there...

Why george bush is president

I just got back from an incredibly depressing half-week in las vegas (didn't step outside the meeting hotel once from the time festivities started until the sham was over) to read a discussion of what new TV a sporadically employed acquaintance should get. 32" was considered obviously most desirable, with 27 more likely and some people frankly laughing at the notion that 24 inches might be adequate for viewing in a small apartment.

I know that in these parlous times when we're laying down debts for our children's chldren to pay, high-quality video entertainment may be one of the few comforts some of us have to fall back on, but it dismayed me nonetheless. Good thing that tax cut's coming through....

Freaky white stuff

There's some kind of particularly weird fungus fruiting in the woods right now -- it's taken over selected stumps, but it also surfaces on random sheltered patches of ground or through beds of moss. It looks a little like snow, more like those scenes where someone has strewn gouts of powdered soap on the ground to imitate snow.

My guess is that the body of the fungus extends underground with filaments connecting all of these scattered surface bits, but that could be complete crap. I do know that I've been standing well clear of the stuff and avoiding accidental contact. It skeeves me right out, possibly because back in high school I read Kenneth Robeson's The Frosted Death.

In the meantime, the pictures also look a little strange because it's flash time in the forest. Leaf cover is still full, but the light is fading.

Reflections on being Top Predator

As I was walking back down the driveway with today's mail, I noticed one of the neighborhood cats, a large fluffy brindle, sitting in the yard, plumped down between the birch and the wild grapes, so I headed over to talk to it. As the cat backed up and moved away toward the neighbor's yard, I spooked a a tiny chipmunk that the cat may or may not have been stalking.

Maybe not, because the little creature ran pretty much right up to the cat before freezing again, and the cat just looked for a second, sniffed and continued heading away. Maybe, because what use to pounce when someone further up the food chain will just take your prey away?

I walked very slowly ove rto the chipmunk, which was picking its way slowly toward the patch of woods that separate us from the neighbors to the front. Cutest thing you ever saw, with stripes on the back and side, ears folding forward and back as it looked at me, spine of the tail clearly visible through the fur. We communed for a while, maybe five feet away, and then as I bent down for a closer look it clambered over the moss and pine needles to the nearest big tree. And chittered loudly from a safe perch.

Update: Same cat, different chipmunk. This time the cat was between the pond and the pine, and when it got up to leave, so did a little furry friend, bounding away from us both and into the trees. My guess now is that the cat likes to bat its catches around on the lawn for a while, and I was inerfering with its play.

Deer in the headlights

I was coming back from the Bernie Sanders birthday cruise (how cool is it that our congressman has his birthday party on a ferry in the middle of Lake Champlain), most of the way through the Roches on the CD player, brights blazing, and there they were. One doe was standing plumb athwart the yellow lines, and as I braked, she took a few steps into the opposite lane and then stopped, looking away from me. Her companion watched from the incline just past the shoulder.

It wasn't until I was passing the two that they finally moved away from the road, one ambling, the other bounding, in opposite directions. They really are stupid. And I continued using my brights liberally, because that's a heck of an expensive way to come by some venision.

Six frogs and a dragonfly

And a double handful of tadpoles still muddling around, including only one that's embard on The Change. I have no idea how they get from the size of your little fingernail to bigger than your thumb, but there the new crop was, perched in niches around the edge of the pond.

The dragonfly, iridescent blue-and-green on a brown background, hovered over the water looking for haples insects. Its downwash stirred visible ripples, which might of might not be part of it hunting technique.

Death of an Anti-Salesman

Did you ever wonder what would happen to those programmer guys with the hair and the attitude and the complete lack of hygene or social skills once computers stopped being way cool?

A couple of threads on a newsgroup I frequent are chronicling the ongoing (self-)destruction of an obviously brilliant programmer. He started out by complaining that there have been no jobs in his specialty for that past 12 (!) years, and everything he writes makes it clear why anyone with a brain would run away as fast as possible from hiring him for anything. How should people expect him to network, he demands, when he has no friends, doesn't kow any of his neighbors, and can't stand crowds? Oh, and he can't come to programmer-group meetings because they're generally held in restaurants and he's too poor to buy a meal so the management would no doubt throw him out and call the police...

It's really painful watching all this go by in lengthy screeds for and against, because this guy really ought to be programming somewhere. He's clearly not suited for any other job. But the same traits that marked him as a master geek in decades past -- arrogance, contempt for the suggestions of others, social phobia, complete ignorance of how human beings interact -- make it impossible for him to get back on his feet once he's lost the community of co-workers that more or less sustained him. Instead, he batters people he's never met with carefully-thought-out (and obviously specious) refutations of advice like "Don't add a paragraph to your resume saying that you really need this job because otherwise you'll be homeless in a couple months."

So why exactly is this guy Willy Loman? His skills and his expertise are still useful, but his incarnation of them isn't. He won't or can't take any of the help that's available to him, whether from individuals, organizations or government. And the more he tells about his situation and fruitless hunt for a job (or even for a friend meeting him for lunch) the more it seems that he's already clear on what his path is going to be.

But at least it's morning in america again...