Today, after my “morning constitutional,” I happened to glance down into the bowl and for a moment was worried–by all appearances, I was suffering some major internal bleeding, and was surely in serious trouble. Then I remembered I have been eating a lot of beets lately. That explains it.
Hell, USA.
This is a Google Earth image of where I’ll be going for work next week:
Isn’t it lovely? The weather forecast calls for temperatures well over 100 F every day for the next 10 days. I can’t say I’m too excited about this trip.
In other news, my hubby gets back from Colorado today!
Hyperbole.
I am not a coffee drinker and never have been. On the rare occasion that I crave a cup of tea or a scone, I tend to head for the local, fair-trade coffee shop. Today, though, a coworker showed up in my office waving coupons for free smoothies at Starbucks, so I wandered down there with him to try out the selection. I got the chocolate banana smoothie, and he got the orange-mango-banana smoothie. (That’s the one I should have gotten—the chocolate one isn’t very tasty, but at least it was free.)
He also bought us both pastries. The pastries come in little paper bags (made from 100% unbleached paper! oh boy!). On these bags are the words, “flavors my senses, sweetens my disposition, nourishes my dreams,” which just about made me gag on my dry, flavorless scone. I think Starbucks may have a bit of an ego problem. Certainly nothing that they sell stirs my imagination or nourishes my dreams. If they could come up with such a product, they’d be rich! Oh, wait. I think they’ve got that one under control.
Dancing.
I don’t post videos often because, probably, most people aren’t interested in them. But I stumbled across this one thanks to this New York Times article, and it made me incredibly happy. Please, please watch it. It’s best if you can watch it with the sound on, so wait until you get home from work if you must.
Turtle phobia.
I went backpacking this past weekend with four friends of mine. We hiked a 47-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail along the Tennessee/North Carolina border through the Roan Highlands. It was a beautiful (although difficult) hike and we had amazing weather most of the weekend. But I know nobody’s really interested in hearing about my latest backpacking trip, so instead I will regale you with a tale of how adorable and ridiculous my dog is.
About halfway through yesterday’s hike, I encountered a smallish box turtle in the middle of the trail. As soon as it saw me coming, it did what turtles do and tucked its legs and head into its shell. I walked on past it, with Winston (the dog) on his extendable leash behind me. When he saw the turtle, though, he leaped back in terror and tucked his tail all the way between his hind legs. I have rarely seen him so frightened. I pulled the leash and called him to come, but he dug his claws into the ground, and tried chewing on the leash in his frantic effort to get free. Finally he dove off the side of the trail–which was somewhat steep at that point–in order to make the largest possible circle around the turtle, and then ran as far and as fast as the leash would permit him once safely on the other side. I, of course, could not stop laughing. For the next 15 minutes or so, every time he brushed up against a plant or encountered a roundish rock on the trail, he jumped in fright.
I guess I don’t mind him being afraid of reptiles. At least I don’t have to worry about him bothering and being bitten by snakes.
Parenthood practice.
For the last two weeks, two of my nieces were out visiting. They are 10-year-old twin girls, the eldest of 6 children, and they are saints. If I had any reason to think that any potential child of mine would turn out like them, I’d be off birth control pills in an instant (that reminds me, actually…I forgot my pill this morning…crap). I am convinced that twins, at least identical twins, are the way to go if the number of children you want is two. However, my sample size is rather small, and I’m not sure it’s really an indication of much of anything.
At any rate, it was wonderful having them out here. Their newest sibling was just born a little over a month ago, and I wanted to give them a vacation from childcare and other chores. They did chores at my house, too–they insisted–but I paid them a small allowance for it, something they don’t get at home. We went hiking several times, we took them out canoeing on the river, we went to Appamattox because they are both interested in Civil War history (which is pretty hard to come by in the Dakotas), and on Saturday before their return flight we explored DC and spent a good many hours in the Natural History Museum. I hope that they will remember this trip for a while. Their brothers, 7 and 5, are both clamoring for their turn to come and visit. They’re much more of a handful, though, so we’ll have to wait a while for that trip!
Update: Six-Legged Ticks
I am apparently not as smart as I think I am. From Larisa Vredevoe, Ph.D, Deparment of Entomology, University of California, Davis:
Hard ticks have three distinct life stages. Larvae which emerge from the egg have six legs. After obtaining a blood meal from a vertebrate host, they molt to the nymphal stage and acquire eight legs. Nymphs feed and molt to the next and final stage - the adult, which also has eight legs. After feeding once more, the adult female hard ticks lay one batch of thousands of eggs and then die. Only one blood meal is taken during each of the three life stages. The time to completion of the entire life cycle may vary from less than a year in tropical regions to over three years in cold climates, where certain stages may enter diapause until hosts are again available. Many hard ticks can go for several months without feeding if not unduly duressed by environmental conditions.
So, some ticks do have six legs. That doesn’t mean, however, that eight-legged ticks aren’t going to bite you. They will. Nonetheless, I guess we both need a lesson in tick biology, and I’m not one to laugh. Oops. My sincere apologies to the hiker couple from Texas.
An awful, terrifying, and deeply embarrassing thing happened to me this morning.
I had to go out of town this morning for work, so last night I ran to the office and picked up the company truck, a little old manual transmission. Back at the house, I parked the truck in the driveway. There was no room on the street in front of the house because C and I can’t park our own cars in the driveway. It is very, very steep and both of our cars would bottom out if we were to attempt it. At any rate, it was nice to be able to use the driveway for once, so I pulled the truck in, engaged the parking brake, and went inside.
In the morning, I slept in, having gone to bed fairly late. I was to pick up a coworker in the next town over on our way to the work site, and I was running late. I ran outside, climbed into the truck…and released the emergency brake. I thought I’d, y’know, roll down the driveway, in a controlled manner of course, and start the engine once I was on the street facing the right direction. Bad, bad, bad move. Because, as I’m sure you all know, the brakes don’t actually work when the engine’s not on.
So. I rolled backwards, but not exactly in the controlled manner I had hoped for. I flew, more like it, pumping the brake frantically and ineffectually, lacking both the time and the presence of mind to step back on the parking brake. It was over in a few seconds, as with a loud thunk the truck came to rest against the neighbor’s deck. He came running out, shirtless, the impact apparently having shaken the entire house, as I spilled out of the truck. “What happened, what happened?” he demanded repeatedly, but I couldn’t respond for several minutes, I was so shaky. He stood patiently as I tried to collect myself somewhat. Finally I explained my incredibly idiocy, and he was as friendly and understanding as one could hope for.
Really, I should be thanking my lucky stars, because it could have been so, so much worse. For one thing, their car was in their own driveway, and I rolled between it and a tree with a hairsbreadth to spare, without touching either one. How I made it past that car, which was really almost exactly opposite from our driveway, I have no idea. Second, they had, for some reason (perhaps for this very reason!), two hay bales on the ground right in front of their deck. These bales took the majority of the impact. The back of the truck knocked one panel of the deck out of place, but didn’t damage any posts and didn’t seem to break any of the wood. The neighbor’s son had a min-soccer coal between the hay bales and the deck, and I destroyed that, but that seemed to be the only damage to their property. As for the truck, the trip over the hay bale ripped off a mud guard. Other than that, there was no damage whatsoever.
If I had managed to steer the truck at all, going even a little bit to the right would have caused me to run straight into their car. If I’d gone a little bit to the left, I’d have missed the car and the deck and either run into a tree or flipped the truck as it went off the side of the hill in their back yard. Somehow, miraculously, I was fine and very little damage was done. This is the first accident I’ve ever been in, so all things considered it wasn’t too bad.
The neighbor said it wouldn’t be worth contacting our insurance companies because the damage was so minimal. I was extremely grateful for that, since the truck was covered under company insurance, not my own, and I absolutely did not want to explain this to my bosses. He’ll let us know how much the deck repair and a replacement soccer goal will be, and we’ll give him the money for it.
Whether or not I will ever be able to show my face on our street again is another question entirely.
Six-Legged Ticks
C and I went on a backpacking trip a few weeks ago on the Appalachian Trail. We had arranged an afternoon shuttle on our last day from the end point of our hike back to our vehicle. We made much better time than we had anticipated and got to our endpoint early, so we spent quite a few hours lounging around at the hiker hostel from whence the shuttle would take us later in the day. While there, we had the opportunity to chat with a number of hikers. This hostel lies between 300 and 400 miles from the beginning of the trail, so most of the thru-hikers had been out for about a month. A woman we spoke with was very excited about having seen her first tick that day (she was from Texas–do they really not have ticks in Texas??). She had picked it off her husbands back while they were taking a break that morning. She said, “It was really gross, even though we didn’t have to worry about it biting us because it already had eight legs. They only have six legs until they bite you, right?” C and I looked at each other in astonishment, and shared a good laugh about it once they had gone on. They showed back up half an hour later, having headed the wrong direction on the Appalachian Trail without noticing it until they ran into another hiker. At least they were laughing about it.
My New Favorite Website.
garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.
