Mountain Time

A Sancho friend goes to the Pantanal -- Part three

2010-06-14T11:57:00.001-07:00

Pampas deer

This time we opted to travel by 4x4, and it took around five hours. We really enjoyed seeing the scenery from the ground -- although as there are many ranches, there were lots of gates to open! The second lodge is on an island and was bought by the owners to farm rice, but they changed their mind and turned the property into an eco lodge. I should say at this point that Carolina Vargas gave us some excellent advice about our trip, and thought our choice of two lodges was a good idea as we would get to see two different areas of the Pantanal.

Spectacled caiman

Capybara

Refugio was different, but excellent also. Our guide, Sergio, was an amazing character who had lived and worked all over the world and knew the flora and fauna of the Pantanal really well. We had another four excellent days and nights there with the added bonus of seeing the places in the programme where Carolina had been teaching Sancho to become an adult otter. We saw the large family group from the programme (with Italo), and most afternoons a solitary otter would come and fish outside the restaurant (not Sancho, I'm afraid). The water at this lodge was clear so we could see how amazing they are in the water. We were lucky enough to see two ocelots at Refugio, although the otters were my favourites. When I got a picture of one with a fish in its mouth it made my holiday.

When we left to go to Rio, I was gutted -- you know, when you were a kid and cried when a holiday was over? I felt just like that again. Rio was good, but on reflection, I think a week there was a bit long. I think it would have been better to spend more time at the lodges and maybe 4/5 days in Rio.

To those of you who, just like me after I watched Raising Sancho, are thinking I really want to go but it's a long way, etc. -- just do it!!!!!!!!!! I have never once regretted it and I look back on our time in Brazil with fond memories. It's the best trip I have ever done - period. Enjoy and Boa sorte (good luck).

[Trailhead's note]: There will be an additional post containing some practical travel information Jim included in his post, and also many more photographs and videos. I will be stepping out of civilization for the next three days, however. So the final posts will come after I return. Many thanks to Jim for sharing his experiences with us!]A S

A Sancho friend goes to the Pantanal -- Part Two

2010-06-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

The flight was amazing. It was just over an hour, and once the land dropped away into the Pantanal basin, he flew us low over the river so we could see the wildlife. We landed at the lodge at lunchtime and all went to have lunch together with the other guests and the owners.

The early start meant we were able to do an afternoon safari, which lasted into the evening. We stayed there for four nights and had the time of our lives. We did jeep safaris, horse riding, boat safaris and kayaking. We saw so many birds and animals that I couldn't list them all. The only absence was the cat family. That is not surprising, however, as to see a cat is highly unlikely. Some of the lodges that boast about lots of Jaguar sightings actually leave meat to attract them, and frankly I would rather not see one. We did hear one calling at night and found tracks:

Barranco Alto was a fabulous place and at the end of our four days and nights we were really sad to leave, the other guests and two scientists that were there were all lovely people but soon enough it was time to move on to Refugio Da Ihla and Sancho country.

A Sancho friend goes to the Pantanal -- Part One

2010-05-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

January 2008 was a very important month for me. I was at a rehabilitation centre in Penrith in Cumbria. I was there for the second time in five months to aid in my recovery from a back injury I had suffered earlier that year at work. (I am a firefighter in Hertfordshire, England.) It was a Saturday afternoon the day before I went home and I was one of the last people at the centre (most had left or gone home for the weekend) and I had decided to watch tv in my room. There was a BBC Natural World programme on and I had seen several before and really enjoyed them.

Little did I know that the following forty six minutes were going to change my life forever!

I won't go into detail about my reaction to the programme, as this can be found in earlier posts (I posted under the name jim-irie) but I did think at the time and many times in the following weeks and months -- wow, what amazing animals the giant otters are and how much I would love to see them and the pantanal for real.

When I googled Raising Sancho, I found my way to Trailhead's blog and in the following months my interest grew. Fortunately my wife was interested too, so we started looking into the trip of a lifetime.

We booked flights through a company I had used before and a hotel in Sao Paulo (for 1 night to break up the travelling) and in Rio for a week at the end of the trip. The thing to remember is that most internal flights go through Sau Paulo and there are two airports in the city. We stayed our first night in Sao Paulo then got an internal flight to Campo Grande (pronounced grange).

We met our pilot (Alex) at Campo Grande and he took us to the airstrip on the edge of town.

Next: Flying to the Pantanal.

A Sancho Fan is called to the Pantanal -- A Series

2010-05-28T05:44:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to post that one of our original Sancho commenters, Jim Irie, has traveled to the Pantanal and written a piece about it for Mountain Time. (His original comments can be found here.) The piece has a lot of wonderful photographs and videos with it, so I'm going to break it up into a series. The first will be posted later on today. Many thanks to Jim!

Hello, Sancho fans

2010-04-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

I see that Raising Sancho has aired again in the U.S. and, it appears, Spain. I can always tell when that happens, because the visits on the statcounter explode. This blog has been mostly idle for a year or so, since I began writing on another site. I do monitor the site, though, because almost every day brings at least a handful of visitors interested in Sancho.

Raising Sancho had a pretty big impact on my life, in sort of a mystical, serendipitous way. I saw the show several months before some very big changes happened in my life, and in an odd way, my experience with it prepared me and cushioned me for those. And, of course, traveling to London to meet and hang out with Carolina Vargas, who is one of the most nature-connected people I've ever known was 1) one of the more surprising things I've done in my life and 2) just generally awesome.

And beyond that, watching and writing about the show made me friends all over the world -- Chicago, Belgium, England, you name it.

So. Even though I went through two boxes of tissues in the week after I first saw the show two-and-a-half years ago, Sancho still reverberates in my life today. I feel so strongly that Carolina and Sancho's story offers not just a deeply admirable example of human interaction with wildlife, but powerful lessons about life, risk, loss, and letting go.

I've asked one of the many friends I made through Raising Sancho to write a guest post about the trip to the Pantanal that he took after seeing the show. He has agreed, and I'll put the post up as soon as it's finished.

Feel free to comment as much as you like. Carolina does check in from time to time, but it may not be soon.

Raising Sancho, 2010

2010-01-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

Hi there folks. I'm seeing a lot of you from Denmark AND the U.S. Did the show air here this weekend?

If you want all of my Sancho related posts, they're all here. Start at the bottom.

Also, be aware that there is a "Sancho the Otter Appreciation Society" on facebook.

There have been no major changes since my visit with Carolina last year. Sancho's whereabouts remain unclear.

No one should have poison ivy

2009-07-07T07:43:00.001-07:00

...where I have poison ivy. No one. Ever.

Not even Republicans.

I just got oral steroids prescribed. I'm not screwing around with this.

Eleven years of peeing in the woods and this has never happened.

Till now.

Owl omen

2009-07-06T04:05:00.000-07:00

In Mexico, it is believed that an owl's appearance can predict a death: owls are bad omens there and supernatural powers are attributed to them....More in line with the Native Americans of Southern California who believe that owls are sent to guide us through dark places as friends, I consider owls a good omens....[F]or me, every time I have been about to go through a major change in my life -- for the better -- a flesh-and-blood owl appears right at the time I'm making a decision. They do seem to appear to guide me.

Stacey O'Brien, Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl

Pizza was calling, and so we hiked out fifteen miles on Saturday, even though we'd planned to camp a couple miles from the trailhead and hike out Sunday morning. We emerged from the forest very close to dark, and lugged full packs and the dog into the car with a groan. By the time we drove the 11 miles to the main national forest road, it was completely dark and drizzling.

We drove around curve after curve, tailed for awhile by a large, impatient truck. At exactly the same moment the truck swerved into the left lane to leave us in the dust, our headlights shone on a statue sitting perfectly still on the yellow line in the middle of the road.

Except it wasn't a statue. It was an owl, sitting perfectly upright, illuminated by our headlights, staring straight at us. The truck passed on the left and we swerved to the right.

The owl never moved.

I don't know whether that owl was a harbinger of death, or of further change, or just an owl sitting on the yellow line. I just feel blessed to have seen her.

Trailhead to the trailhead

2009-07-02T12:18:00.001-07:00

I'm off for three days of backpacking West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest. This time I hope to have something bloggable to say about my trip.

Ahem.

Off, but this time just for two days

2009-06-19T09:53:00.001-07:00

I will be computerless until Sunday evening. Tonight I'm camping in thunderstorms and tomorrow I'm doing an overnight kayaking trip.

Back Sunday. Hopefully, with photographs.

Why the hell is this place called Mountain Time if you live in the midwest?

2009-06-18T21:44:00.000-07:00

Good question.

I used to live in the mountains. And this site was started when I lived there. I stopped posting here in May, 2008, when I abruptly moved back to the midwest from northern Idaho. I filed for divorce a few months later, because I didn't like my husband's girlfriend. I started two other sites under different pseudonyms -- I used those places to engage the hell of getting a blindside divorce from someone I'd spent my entire adult life with, and whom I trusted far more than I probably should have.

Once I emerged from that hell, I realized I wanted to be back here again. I am Trailhead, and Trailhead is me.

Clearing the cobwebs

2009-06-18T19:56:00.001-07:00

Wow, this place was dusty.

So I cleaned up a little, and I'm settling back in.

Pulled from the comments, another amazing otter story

2009-06-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

Commenter and Sancho fan Dave was kind enough to tell us the incredible story of the river otter he raised as a kid in Florida. Dave writes:

I was about 13 or 14 when my otter turned up behind my house. We lived on a small river down in Florida. The otter my mom named Samba was alittle older than Sancho. His mother had been killed by something, it looked like maybe a boat or a gator. He took to my dog (Golden Retriever) like it was his mother. The two where always together they would meet me at the bus stop in the afternoons and we would play and fish most days. I didn't have the knowledge of Carolina to help him get back to being on his own. So he would mostly just sit lay next to me while I fished for his food.

To me otters have the best outlook on things they are always playing and socializing with there family and friends. He could sence if I was stressed when I would get off the bus from school (everybody knows middle school can be a stressful place) and he would always do something funny or make weird noises and before I knew it whatever had happed that day was long forgottin. Alittle like Sancho's story mine does not have the best ending. One day Samba was in the garage under my fathers car and he was running late to work or something and he was trying to get Samba to come out (my father and Samba did spend alot of time together so Samba did not know him that well) so he reached under his car to pull Samba out and grabbed him by the tail and Samba bit him. It was not a bad bit I asked my dad and he said it didn't even draw blood but like any caring parent he was concerned and he called the local wildlife department.

Thats the sad part like Sancho's story. Here is the nice ending many years later with what would later become my wife, we where at Seaworld and I was telling my to be wife that a had raised in otter for about a year just like the one in show we where watching. I also told her that the local wildlife department didn't have the right habitat ect to keep my otter so they gave him to Seaworld. So she pressured me to go ask after the show if he was still around. So I did knowing that the likelyhood was very slim. But I did knowing my soon to be wife would not let me off the hook if I didn't.

I walked up to the trainer after the show and asked if they had an otter named Samba he said no, "I know it" is what I was thinking. The trainer asked why I told him my story and where I was from and how long ago it was. He told me that was really weird because they have an otter that came from the same area I lived same age as Samba would have been ect... But his name was Otis. He asked me if I would like to see him, Of corse I said yes so me and my wife went behind stage to the otter habitat.

I had no idea they had as many otters as they did there must have been 10-12 otters of all different types and before we even got up to the habitat the guy was going to show us I pointed out Samba and he saw me. He was standing up tall at the back of his little river area and he ran up to the front wall so I could see him. The trainer laughed and said so you do know Otis. I talked with the trainer for quite some time then and he told me that I answered alot of the question he and the other trainers had as to why Samba was the way he was. They told me he was by far the oldest otter they had but still the fastest out of the water he said that he runs more like a dog than the others and that it now make sences being that my dog and him where like a Mother - son relationship.

So I am holding out hope that one day Sancho and Carolina will be reunited like me and Samba where.

Thanks to Dave for sharing this great story! I love it.

Sancho in US?

2009-02-20T17:46:00.000-08:00

Is Raising Sancho showing this week in the U.S.? I'm seeing all sorts of U.S. traffic I haven't seen for a year! Someone drop a comment and let me know.

Meeting my friend

2009-02-01T18:56:00.000-08:00

I am walking along the River Thames in the South Bank area of London with Carolina Vargas. It’s the week after Christmas, and the place is packed. We’ve been strolling for awhile, listening to buskers play a jazz version of “Jingle Bells,” and then pausing to watch a pair of dancers.

A few minutes later, we’re caught in the middle of a noisy human throng waiting to get into the London Aquarium. Suddenly, Carolina looks up and says, “What is that?” She tilts her head slightly, pointing her ear to the sky. I look at her quizzically, because I can’t hear anything through the din. She smiles and points upward toward a slender tree, the kind you find growing doggedly in the middle of the urban concrete. There is a slight fluttering within its branches.

She’s found an astonishingly tiny bird -- then another, and another. They have a pretty song, and we stand there for a moment enjoying the nature she has plucked out of the human chaos surrounding us. I’m amazed at how incredibly strong her animal-spotting instincts are. I am a photographer, with a photographer’s eye – but this is something altogether different.

These instincts were, of course, honed in the wetland Pantanal region of southwest Brazil as she sought out endangered giant otters for study and observation. If you’re reading this, you probably also know it was there that she took in and raised the orphaned giant otter she named Sancho, after Sancho Panza, a character in Don Quixote. Panza (also spelled pança) means “belly.” Sancho was so named because the infant otter would drink so much milk his belly would swell into a fat little mound.

You all know how that story ends, but I get hits here every day from people wanting to know what happened after that – and what is happening now. I was lucky enough to spend the last week of 2008 with Carolina in London, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in conservation at the University College of London.

London is a long way from the Pantanal, and it is much, much colder. “I don’t think I could survive here for very long,” she laughed one day as we shivered on a train platform in the morning chill. Carolina is a paradox in one respect: she’s completely adept at navigating the bustle of London, but longs for the wilder, bigger spaces of the Pantanal. She is comfortable taking the Tube, but more comfortable rowing a boat on the Salobra River.

The essential adaptability of her character shows in her life here in England. She lives in a small, spare room in Central London decorated by pictures of her family and of Sancho, and shares a kitchen and bathroom with several other women. She manages the intense workload of a graduate program in a second language, yet still has to find the time to devote to a part-time job to meet her school expenses. She’ll spend the summer working on a final project, probably related to giant otters.

Everything she is doing in chilly London this year has a single purpose: to get her back to the Pantanal, and the otters. But money is a constant challenge in wildlife conservation, and probably more so for those who study giant otters. Despite the fact that Sancho has charmed the socks off hordes of people who visited this blog in the last eighteen months, giant otters are not the “charismatic megafauna” that draw money easily, such as polar bears, chimps, whales, or even that more elusive resident of the Pantanal, the jaguar. I am mildly ashamed to admit that Raising Sancho was the first time I’d heard of giant otters. To make matters worse, limited resources in a poor global economy are increasingly being shifted from wildlife conservation to climate change issues.*

One of the things I realized, as Carolina and I talked more and more during my trip to London, is that I’d like to be involved in giant otter conservation through my writing and photography. To that end, I’m hoping to join her in the Pantanal early this summer, to write and photograph a piece on the otters. I may try to get two articles out of it. One would be a more general article, and another would relate to how the interests of the giant otters intersect and diverge with the interests of the local population.

Carolina conducted interviews with local people during her time in the Pantanal to determine their attitudes toward the otters -- information vital to creating policies to manage the relationship between them. There had been some feeling that the otters competed with fishermen for available fish. (A more likely explanation, however, is commercial overfishing.) Fortunately, some of the local people are starting to become aware of the value of ecotourism, and they understand the otters have a place in that. Tourists come in increasing numbers to see the otters, and then spend money. This is good for everyone. But the relationship of the otters to the people living in the area is still a matter of concern. Having lived out west, it’s a dynamic I find interesting with respect to almost any conservation issue.

In June, 2008, Carolina returned to the eco-lodge where the events in Raising Sancho took place. Over the course of several days, she spent time on and in the waters where so much of her work with Sancho occurred, catching up with events that have occurred since her departure. She saw the family of ten that made an appearance in the show, and as so often happens, that family has taken over the territory of the otter couple that interacted with Sancho toward the end of his time with Carolina.

Although a number of the local guides think they have seen Sancho in the area, Carolina did not see him while she was there. And so his whereabouts stubbornly remain, like so many questions in life, a mystery.

What is clear, however, is her single-minded dedication to the otters. We spent the last day of 2008 huddled in her room, poring over research papers, drawings, and photographs of the Pantanal and its inhabitants. I learned about otter campsites, dens, and latrines. I had a thousand questions, most of which have no answers yet, because the study of these creatures is still in its infancy. As we watched video footage of the otters on her laptop, an enthusiastic smile spread across her face as the sound of the otters’ vocalizations filled the room.

I found myself hoping, for her own sake and for the beautiful ariranhas, that she gets back there soon.

*When I first started posting on Raising Sancho in 2007, I received several inquiries from people who had seen the show and wanted to know how they could contribute to Carolina’s work or research. I’ve been pestering her for months now to let me link to a PayPal account on this blog, so that those who want to can support her education, and when that concludes, her continuing work with the otters. I know she is uncomfortable with this. When you get to know Carolina, you realize she has a streak of modesty a mile wide that instinctively shrinks from self-promotion. But my argument is that if people want to support her work, they should be able to do so. She remains skeptical of that. So my solution is this. If you want to support her work, e-mail me (or her) and I’ll continue to bug her to create a PayPal account, and if she does, I’ll update the blog and link it.

Sancho, 2009

2009-01-29T12:20:00.000-08:00

I see a lot of visitors from France and Switzerland today. Was Raising Sancho broadcast recently?

This blog was closed in May of 2008, but I was about to make another post about the week I spent with Carolina Vargas in London in late December 2008. So come back soon!

Closing Time

2008-05-02T05:10:00.000-07:00

You know those moments in your life, the ones that blindside you but clearly foretell the end of an old era and the opening of a new?

I had one last night.

And I'm not on Mountain Time anymore, guys. E-mail me at the link in the upper right hand if you want my new URL when I create it. I can't stop blogging. But things have changed, utterly. I'm leaving the blog here for all the Sancho fans. But I'm moving on.

I hope to hear from you.

Sancho Video -- Updated Again

2008-04-28T12:27:00.001-07:00

Animal Planet has put a brief clip from Raising Sancho on its website called "Fishing Lessons."

I hope a full DVD is coming.

Update: Some of you have noted that you can't view the clip. Try this: when you click on the link, look to the right for the categories. Check for "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" and then click "view galleries." From there you should be able to select the clip.

Another update: Reader and Sancho fan TP from the United Kingdom sends this site along. Lots of stills from Raising Sancho.

Though Carolina mentioned that the show was aired in Central and South America recently, I did not get as many visitors from that airing as I did from the European and U.S. showings. This does not surprise me. I received very few visitors from the Asian showings as well (with the exception of visitor chittraporn from Thailand). It must be a language issue. Later on, when I have more time, I'm going to search the Spanish and Portuguese Googles and see if anyone is writing on Sancho in those languages. Also, if any of you find anything, please let me know.

Strange bedfellows

2008-04-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

Love it.

Sometimes I forget I live in Northern Idaho

2008-04-21T13:02:00.000-07:00

This afternoon:

Doorbell rings. I answer. There's a woman with a three-ring binder standing there.

Woman: I'm not selling anything -- I live in the neighborhood and I just wanted to encourage you to vote in the primary on May 22.

Me with a quizzical look: But...Idaho held a caucus in February.

Woman, with even more quizzical look for just a second: Oh yeah. But that was the Democrats.

Me, finally understanding: Yep. I'm a Democrat.

Woman, looking as if she's just discovered a new and interesting species of insect: Ohhhh, okay.

Me: Probably the only one in the neighborhood, eh?

Woman: No, there's one other guy. He lives over there. [Points behind her.]

Great.

Sunday morning

2008-04-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

Though right now the sky is blue, sunny and cheery, and my grass green, the weatherheads insist there will be six inches of snow on the ground by midnight, thereby placing me in the unusual position of looking forward to Indianapolis for its superior weather. This winter has been wearying in its relentlessness. Fortunately, everyone's talking about how unusual it is.

The problem I've been thinking on for about a week:

I want a goat. Thing is, right now we don't have a proper place for one, and even when we get one, we go back and forth between here and Montana too much. Sure, I could pack it up in the truck like the dogs, but we already have three of those and so I don't think there would be room for a goat as well. This has led me to wonder whether anyone in either area would be interested in sharing custody of a goat. Eventually I may have to put this to the craigslist readership.

I just realized this will all come as a big surprise to Mr. T should he read this in China.

But it probably shouldn't.

It's time for us to move from this vinyl village anyway. This morning I let the dogs out and returned to find them huddled near the back fence, scarfing something down. Turns out my neighbor discarded his (mostly eaten) roasted chicken carcass over my fence. Thanks, asshole. I'll send my dogs over to your driveway when they get diarrhea.

I clearly don't belong in a civilized neighborhood.

Half a world apart

2008-04-18T21:07:00.001-07:00

Though I know from our many years of marriage that he would prefer to spend next week pulling trout out of the Kootenai River, Mr. T has elected to make his sixteenth voyage to China tomorrow. His record at Old Company was five trips in one year (four of those trips occurred in four months). Fortunately, this will probably be his only trip this year now that he is at New Company, which still manufactures most of its products here. But he does have to make this one trip.

The Kid is at an age where he has affixed himself firmly to his dad, and resents any attempt at separation. This has gotten so bad recently that, when Mr. T leaves to go to work, The Kid has been known to fling himself onto the carpet, weeping. The Kid is the clownfish to Mr. T's anemone.

It's a unmistakable sign of the pettiness of my character that I am mildly pleased at this turn of the tables. When The Kid was a wee pup and reacted to my departures in the same way, Mr. T didn't really get how badly it sucked. Now he does. But this does present a problem for tomorrow's international trip, and as is customary, it's my job to deal with the fallout. So I've booked The Kid's favorite babysitter for Sunday and Monday, and then on Tuesday I am going to spend four hours on a plane so I can deposit The Kid with my mother, sit on the couch and press a cold cloth to my forehead. When I recover, I will execute my always carefully planned tour of favorite restaurants, accompanied by various home friends. The various members of my family will, each in their turn, annoy the living shit out of me. That is the routine. That is how it goes. It has been and ever will be thus.

My babysitter has agreed to superintend my ill-behaved herd of canines during my absence, which probably means she won't be speaking to me when I get back. The good news is that my mother actually got high-speed internet since my trip there in December. Which means that I might even blog.

For his part, Mr. T won't be too lonely. He and friend/commenter Tony, who has taken over Mr. T's former job, will find themselves in the same obscure south China city, in the same hotel, along with our Chinese friends O and P. It's almost enough to make me wish I could be there with them.

You know what's neat?

2008-04-17T12:54:00.000-07:00

What's neat is when you go out to lunch and put your 115-year old dog into your bedroom with bowls of food and water so the youngsters can't get in there and steal her vittles, and then you come back and open the door and step into the room and, too late, realize that said 115-year old dog has taken a dump in front of the closed door and you have tracked it all over the room and smeared it on the underside of the door.

That's what's neat.

She may look like a sweet old lady in a laundry basket,

but this rabble-rousing menace will defile the bedroom carpet without a second thought.

That's not good

2008-04-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

That seems to be the universal response when I tell people about this:

Fortunately, we have a fenced yard. So the biggest problem with this is that when I ask the The Kid to let the dogs out, he now replies that he is busy, and I should tell Thomas to do it.

And yes, yes that is dog snot on my door. We have that in abundance.

The Homestead

2008-04-13T16:50:00.000-07:00

About a mile south of the house are the remains of an old homestead built more than a hundred years ago. Dr. G and the Professor, with help from their dogs, horses and kids, have worn a serviceable trail out to the homestead over the twenty years they've been here. Even with their kids grown and gone, the G's and their dogs still make regular trips to the homestead. Their Newfoundland has treed more than one bear on that trail.

Mr. T and I have hiked out there several times as well. This weekend was balmy and sunny, and in accordance with the arrival of spring, we set out for the homestead with boots instead of snowshoes. We even put a dog pack on Alaska, to introduce her to the accessories required for her new life as a trail dog. The weather was glorious and warm, and The Kid abandoned his shirt after about twenty minutes.

Almost nothing of the original homestead remains except some grizzled old apple trees that still dutifully bear fruit every year. The trunks of these trees have been scored every which way by bear claws, but still they stand. At first I wondered whether the trees were contemporaneous with the homestead, because this would have made them quite old indeed. But then I read that apple trees can live to quite advanced ages.

The homestead is situated near the rear edge of a natural meadow ringed with aspens, larches and other evergreens, and with a clear view of the Cabinet Mountain range. The property was acquired by a lumber company long ago, and the surrounding area was logged two years ago. The lumber operation left piles and piles of discarded tree trunks, and the logging trucks carved deep tracks that still linger in the grasses. But the homestead is still and silent again, except for the twittering of the birds.

The meadow must have looked different in the heyday of the homestead -- the trees were no doubt older and taller, for one thing -- but the fundamentals are probably the same. Elk bed down here now, and the bears, of course, have broadcast their presence on the trees. Coyotes, driven off an adjoining mountain by a newly established wolf pack, traipse back and forth across the meadow and the trail, discarding bones and other pieces-parts along the path.

Looking out at the mountain range, I had a sense of what a felicitous place this would have been to locate a home in the late nineteenth century. Game would have been abundant. The home site was two miles away from the brand new railroad and the town growing up around it. The seasonal stream at the edge of the meadow offered water, and the river in the valley would have been thick with trout and, during part of the year, chinook salmon. Huckleberries grew on the mountain. And then there were the apple trees. The winters would have been harsh, and along with the abundant game would be grizzly bears and mountain lions. But if they could deal with the cold and the predators, this was as good a spot as any to make a go of it.

I wonder what happened to the people who lived here, and their house.

A day may come, very soon, when another home -- and another, and another -- is built in this idyllic meadow. The whispers in town are that the logging done on the surrounding forest was a "real estate cut." Plans have apparently been drawn for big houses on large lots. I worry, as always, about the animals, but particularly the bears. They need the space. The Professor and Dr. G have 130 acres that surround our paltry six, and they care about the wildlife -- The Professor thinned some forest last year but made sure to leave enough thick passages for the bears. But further fragmentation of habitat can only drive them further into the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, away from people. Always away. And then my own habitat becomes more sterile as the chances of seeing bears on the road I now share with them diminish ever further.

The dire real estate market has likely given the wildlife of the homestead a reprieve. This town has never really bustled, even during the most prosperous of times. As The Professor says, the best thing about this town is that it has so little to offer. And with the amount of housing stock languishing on the market, it seems unlikely that anyone would invest in this little corner of the world. But time and "progress" march inexorably on.

And I worry about the bears.

Yawn

2008-04-12T23:03:00.000-07:00

My newest fixation is sitting around with my camera trained on a dog, waiting for it to yawn.

I know.

But it's fun.

Reprint

2008-04-08T12:54:00.001-07:00

I'm feeling all stressed and busy, which customarily makes me retreat, turtle-like, into my shell. This isn't great for the blog, as you've probably noticed. So here's a rerun of pre-Sancho post involving one of my favorite places, and one of my favorite birds. It was originally posted in January, 2007. I'm dreaming of the Everglades now as I look out on a landscape that winter stubbornly refuses to release from its clutches.

Here 'tis:

Spindly yet striking, the anhinga is perhaps my favorite bird. Lesser souls may find the anhinga to be an ugly, awkward and vulgar creature, but these people have no taste and should not be listened to. No doubt these are the same folks who endowed the anhinga with its other, less glamorous names: Snakebird, or alternatively, Water Turkey.

How anyone can spend any time watching an anhinga live its life and not become an admirer is beyond me.

An anhinga has initiative. These enterprising birds dive right into the water to chase down their supper. Unlike the buoyant duck, the feathers of an anhinga are not coated with oils, so they can quickly get waterlogged. This allows them to swim for quite some time in search of fish.

And what a spectacle that is. Sometimes you can follow the progress of the submerged anhinga just by watching the water that's stirred up by fish trying to get away from it. Once they've emerged from the water, they have to spread out their wings to dry. While they're airing their feathers, they chatter noisily among themselves.

Recently, I was lucky enough to watch one of these characters catch and consume a meal. Between myself and spouse, we captured video and still images of the event. Here's the video. Forgive the running commentary from the four-year old, and the clicks of my shutter in the background.

I watched this same bird for another hour afterward. She'd spear a catfish (an exotic species in the Fakahatchee Strand), and she'd beat it against a branch for several minutes. Apparently, she has to make sure it's really, really dead before she swallows it, lest it thrash around and cut up her throat with its spines. I got no footage of this process; unfortunately, the above video took the last of my video camera's battery.

But the next day in Everglades National Park, I had the good fortune to run across a nest of anhinga chicks, and I'd had the foresight to charge my battery. Here's a (too) short clip of the two-day old chicks. I didn't want to spend too much time around the nest.

Support for the animal superiority crowd

2008-04-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

From my favorite [not-really a] misanthrope, Tony, a funny.

And then from Mike, a stark contrast to the former.

We're headed back to Portland this weekend to see friends and investigate renting out the House That Will Not Sell. Internet will be scarce.

I know I owe several of you e-mails. I apologize for the deafening silence -- things have been a wee bit crazed around here, mostly thanks to animals, children and the persistent expectations of my colleagues that I actually perform legal work. I would infinitely prefer to be communicating with you all, but alas, one must eat.

See you next week.

Double Take

2008-04-03T20:24:00.001-07:00

How often do you get to read a bit like this in the news:

After a lengthy fight in the Capitol and with residents on the coast, a public-private partnership to remake state-owned Jekyll Island has backed away from plans to place hotels and condos on a massive parking lot that for decades has given Georgia vacationers access to a popular beach.

Instead, the acreage will be changed to include a park and an environmental conservation center, the latter originally planned for elsewhere on the island. The condos and hotels will be relocated.

That last paragraph is the one that really makes my head spin.

Via this Kos diarist, whose work on this issue I began following recently.

Update: Here is the link to her primary blog.

Turtles

2008-03-31T14:31:00.000-07:00

I've been perusing this today. Read the stories of the individual turtles - they're fascinating, but sometimes sad.

And you'll find a familiar villain in some of the hatchling deaths.

Plastic.

Earth Hour

2008-03-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

Tonight.

A few rueful words from The Chairman of the Board, dedicated to my two favorite downtrodden artists -- Me and Toots

2008-03-27T21:43:00.000-07:00

Toots has been going through a bit of artistic anguish, as related in a thread below. And tonight, through a variety of events I won't bore you with here, I helped a bunch of people get their photographs published. Except me.

I'm frustrated, folks.

This song came on the iPod just after I tossed my Crackberry down in a fit of pique after reading the relevant e-mail.

That's life. And I can't deny it.

But if there's nothing shakin' come this here July....

Isn't it nice we're having weather? Or, bits about the emotional lives of boys and dogs

2008-03-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning and stumbled downstairs to let the dogs out (all THREE of them), whereupon I was greeted by the sight of two inches of snow on the ground. Folks, I am long past the time when I find the sight of delicately falling snowflakes even remotely charming. Goes out like a lamb, my ass. Not this year.

In other news, I've been reading "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys," and I'm about halfway through. I know I have a habit of beginning to talk about books when I'm only part of the way through them, but I'm an EFNP, so I can't stop myself.

The first requirement for me in a book about the problems of boys, and by extension, men, is that the authors not blame feminism, or the greater freedom of women generally, for those problems. Such simplistic argumentation is a sign of such impoverished thinking that I just won't waste my time. But in Raising Cain, the (male) authors, two psychologists who have spent years counseling boys, offer the closest thing I've read to a woman friendly analysis of the damage our culture does to boys. If you have a boy, teach a boy, know a boy, or used to be a boy, or just care about other people generally, this book is a must-read.

More on this when I've actually finished the book. Let's just say for now that it did nothing to alleviate my panic over the upcoming educational decisions we have to make for The Kid.

And in that vein, we'll be visiting a Montessori kindergarten program in the next few days. Last week was a school for "gifted" (whatever the hell that really means) children, where the kindergarten teacher was frank about the fact that the kindergarten is run like a first grade. Thanks, but no thanks. The Kid is arguably doing first grade level work in math, but is nowhere near ready for first grade reading. (Although he's demonstrated that he can sound out words, he still has not an iota of real interest in doing so.) This was a bummer, because they have a great phys ed program -- kids are allowed plenty of move-around time, to the point that they spend six Fridays every winter teaching the kids to ski. So, bummer. But I'm just not ready to subject the Kid -- already reluctant to go to school -- to a program where he's expected, out of the gate, to be doing work that's a year ahead of him. That's not the only reason, of course, but it's a big one.

In dog-related news, we have never found Alaska's humans. So it looks like we're her new humans. She and Thomas have negotiated a tenuous peace that occasionally breaks down over a rawhide chew or when she tries to steal his pink squeaky octopus, but they're mostly doing okay.
We took them to Montana last weekend, and the abundant space really helped them to get used to each other. On Monday, Mr. T IM'd me and said he wanted to keep her.

Perhaps realizing her newfound security, she promptly ate my silk duvet.

Mickey

2008-03-23T19:54:00.001-07:00

There are few sights more disorienting than a deer running toward you. I realized, in that quick moment, that I'd never actually seen a deer from that angle -- galloping at full speed down the road, straight at me. Oddly, even though she was running right at us, the doe was paying us no mind at all. At the last second she realized she was hurtling straight at a car, and veered off the road and up into the woods.

Mr. T and I looked at each other quizzically. "Something must have scared it pretty badly," observed Mr. T, as we continued down the road. Ten seconds later, a dog careened at full tilt out of the woods, a swollen tongue dangling joyously from its mouth. The dog was trailing a rope with a chewed end.

"Ahh," we said simultaneously. Mr. T got out of the car.

Oh hell, I thought. Not another one. "Now we have four dogs!" chirped The Kid from the backseat.

"Please tell me it has a tag," I begged Mr. T. "It does. And it even has a number," reported Mr. T. It took little persuasion to get Mickey into the car, and five minutes later we were pulling into his owners' driveway. It was the fastest stray-return we've ever accomplished.

But what gives with the strays all of a sudden? When it rains it pours, I guess.

Wherein my laptop dies a sudden and undignified death -- Updated for Idiocy

2008-03-21T18:10:00.000-07:00

I was reading a political blog, and apparently my laptop is just as angst-ridden over the Democratic primary as I am, because it apparently had a heart attack and died while reading a post about the nomination not being decided till the convention. Yep. It suddenly just went dark and won't turn back on. Buh-bye.

It's a little less than two years old. I hate how I have to blow a grand or more every two years just to keep a decent laptop.

I'm thinking of moving to a Mac.

Updated for Idiocy: Actually, I won't be moving to Mac until my laptop actually does die...and just isn't unplugged. Ahem.

Politics Thursday

2008-03-19T21:01:00.000-07:00

I suppose it only makes sense to share what's been very much on my mind the last couple of days.

If you haven't watched this speech, and you have a spare half hour, sit down with a cup of something good and watch a politician actually take a risk. It's a thing to behold.

And yes, I'm totally in the tank for Obama. But let's not argue about it. It's depressing watching former allies on the liberal blogs rip each other to shreds over this issue. If you're for Clinton, great. We can agree to disagree.

Our latest houseguest

2008-03-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, our babysitter, pictured in part here, has eight cats and is not in the market for a dog.

We're calling her Alaska. I know it's not terribly original, but that was the extent of our creative output the night we found her. We've searched high and low for her owners, but there were no tags, no microchip, nothing on Craigslist or other internet sites going back to January, and no flyers in the neighborhood. So now we're focused on finding her a new home. She and Thomas get along about as well as two angry wolverines, so keeping her is not really an option. I've made liberal use of the Dog Appeasing Pheromone spray in the last two days.

The legacy of Peanut

2008-03-16T23:14:00.000-07:00

Peanut was a dirty beagle I saw crossing the street in a run-down part of Indianapolis on a winter morning several years ago. He trotted along the crosswalk next to an old woman with a big shopping bag. I assumed he belonged to her, until she turned around and swung the bag at him.

I pulled over, got out of my car, and called to him. I was on my way to work in my lawyer car* and a business suit, but that didn't matter. Peanut came right over -- he didn't seem dissuaded by his encounter with the shopping bag -- and licked my hand. He was a very young dog. I could tell he had been out awhile, because his very small collar was nearly choking him. He had clearly outgrown it. And he smelled like hell. Wasteland Fan used to rib me and say I was really picking up animals that actually had homes, but I'd learned that there's a look (and often a smell) about a real stray dog, and he had it.

But into the Lawyer Car he went, and I turned around and took him back home, bathed him, cut off the collar and fed him. He was famished.

And he was also, as we discovered later, a complete doofus. It's really not possible to convey how dim this dog was. We would put him out in the sunroom and watch from the upper deck as he trotted a perfect circle around the sunroom. Over and over again. Without stopping. Mr. T took to calling him "Do Loop." He would not stop the circles until we intervened.

We had just moved into that house, which was a ranch with a walkout basement. An enormous deck stretched along the length of the upper floor. One afternoon, Peanut wiggled through the slats and took a flying leap off it, presumably to greet Mr. T, who had just appeared below. He landed on his head ten feet below with a crunch. I freaked.

Peanut got up and walked in Mr. T's direction, but careened leftward at the last second as if flunking a field sobriety test. He paused, shook his head and continued to Mr. T, this time accurately judging the directions.

He was quite a dog. I trolled Big Law Firm for possible homes for Peanut, and hit pay dirt in the IT department. The head of IT loved beagles, and was unable to resist Peanut's abundant goofiness. Rob and his wife had no kids, a lakeside home, a boat and a pool, and they wanted to share it all with Peanut.

Two weeks after Peanut moved, his new owner came to my office, chuckling, to tell me he'd had to jump in the pool after him that weekend. Peanut had fallen off the diving board. Eventually, Peanut grew to enjoy the boat, and I have this image of him riding on the bow, nose in the air. Before he jumps or falls off, of course.

Once we moved to Portland, the stray-finding ceased. Portland has remarkable animal welfare facilities, and in three years we found only a single golden retriever who'd busted his gate and gone on safari. We contacted his owners and he went home two hours after we found him.

Coeur d'Alene, it seems, has a much bigger problem with stray animals.

Ahem.

More later.

* Why, yes I was compensating for an empty and meaningless existence. Why do you ask?

I can haz spring?

2008-03-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

To all you people living in places where flowers and plants are actually growing: Pllllbttth!

I say that with the greatest of affection and respect. And envy.

Experience with big cats a plus, too

2008-03-12T21:32:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to change careers for about ten years now, and I think this is the job I want.
Except I'm missing the experience with crocodilians, so I don't think I'm qualified.

Wait -- do lawyers count?

Via Mike.

Politics Wednesday

2008-03-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

I used to live in this district. I miss it today.

Trailhead's trailheads

2008-03-08T11:59:00.001-08:00

I started tracing my family tree when I was a teenager. History is fascinating, and the opportunity to connect myself to it in some way was irresistible. Which is why, as a teenager, I found myself picking through overgrown cemeteries, haunting the historical society's library, and badgering my elderly relatives for details. This was a joint project with my mom, who was driven by the same interest in what happened before we were here.

This was all in the era before the internet, of course, and so getting access to the geneaological work of others was much more difficult. There were magazines to help, but no easily accessible, central repository of that work. So I did as much as I could, and drifted away from it when I went to college. I did find Eli Terry, who I posted about here when it occurred to me last week, for no real reason, to look for him on wikipedia.

Well, that and some e-mail discussions with an across-the-pond reader (Hi TP!) reawakened my interest. Perhaps, in the era of the internet, it would be possible to fill in the blanks I couldn't figure out in the 1980's. So I joined one of the big geneaology websites, and I've been researching these connections till the wee hours all week long. (I'm kind of tired this morning.) This time I'm doing my son's tree, which brings in a whole new slew of possibilities on Mr. T's side. According to my new work, Mr. T and I have strikingly similar lineages -- we are both from solid, salt-of-the-earth German and Swiss peasant stock. I haven't found a common ancestor (yet!) but several lines of our families were from the German communities in Pennsylvania.

But last night, I focused on a line on my dad's side. As the family lore goes, my father's grandmother appalled her very wealthy, well-bred family by marrying an intelligent, charismatic nobody. I had always wanted to know why that family thought so highly of itself. I had traced their lineage fairly far back, but had hit a wall back in the 80's. But last night, I was able to link into someone else's sources for part of this line, the Sheltons. Yay! Pay dirt! As I kept going, I found that the Sheltons came to America from England in the early 1600's. And I kept looking, until the woman popped up who married my ancestor John Shelton: Anne Boleyn. Wha? I checked the year -- born in 1475. So it couldn't be that Anne Boleyn. Moreover, that Anne was only married once and it didn't end well. So I looked at my Anne's parents. They were William Boleyn and Margaret Butler. Time for wikipedia. Turns out William Boleyn is the paternal grandfather of the Anne Boleyn, and my direct ancestress is the aunt of the Anne who was separated from her head courtesy of Henry VIII. And of course once you start following the Boleyns back you get to the Plantaganets and Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Ultimately, though, everyone in England and half the people in America can probably trace their ancestry to the Boleyns -- and certainly to the Plantaganets -- so it's really not a big deal. Plus you have all the caveats about proving each branch of the tree -- and googling around shows me that there are some documentary holes, though I'm not sure where they occur yet. But it's undeniably neat to think about a line from me directly to the Boleyn family. History in action!

Anyhoo, the Sheltons became the De Sheltons in the 1300's, and were apparently from a place called Shelton in Norfolk, England.

Also, in other news, it turns out Mr. T is Clark Gable's seventh cousin, once removed. This is fun.

Rejected by my stock agency

2008-03-06T14:20:00.000-08:00

It's always fun when you get an entire submission dinged en masse. Here are a few of the unlucky.

Forest burned in the 2003 fires in Glacier National Park at sunset.

A rainbow emerges at Logan Pass after a late summer rainstorm.

Mt. Hood and the Columbia River at sunset.

One thing that consistently cracks me up is how frequently, whether an image is marketable bears no relation to the amount of effort put in to getting the image. See that pic of the panther sign in the Everglades in the widget? I took that out of a car window with a 4 megapixel point and shoot just to use on this blog. I submitted it once I realized it might have some stock value, and it got accepted. Whereas the silhouette of Mt. Hood above was taken after I spent thirty minutes scrambling around a road off I-84 angling for the best angle, hopping around to avoid used condoms and broken glass. For stock purposes, the panther sign is just superior. But I had more fun with the Mt. Hood shot. So that compensation has to be enough for now.

Like I told Tony after I spluttered about it over IM this afternoon, this frustration is as old as photography itself. I just use this posting category as a means to vent it a little. For me, I cannot get past the rejection and onto the truth -- and therefore the learning -- unless I work out the frustration first. Complicating the matter is how little time I have to shoot. If I were able to shoot every day, the individual failures would not matter as much, because I would have an easy opportunity to correct them in the near future. But I am the mother of a five-year old who is not only trying to maintain some semblance of one career in a demanding field, I'm also trying to do this. That's hard. And the feeling of impotence that comes with that is sometimes hard to handle. Blogging helps.

Update: Tony observed that there were "birds" on the images. Or, as the case may be, dust specks from the scan. These aren't the versions I submitted. These are the low-res, less carefully scanned versions I use on the blog to prevent pirating.

Boring personal/historical nugget

2008-03-03T14:45:00.000-08:00

This guy is one of my ancestors, through my paternal grandmother. Funny thing is, that expression reminds me so much of my dad when he's being serious. Of course, it's entirely possible I'm imagining it.

Eli is not a direct ancestor -- his brother, Samuel, who's also mentioned there, is our direct ancestor.

The answer for what ails us all: sidewalks

2008-02-29T11:12:00.000-08:00

What is it with this country? Why is the thoughtful placement of those technological stumpers called sidewalks apparently beyond our ken?

I'm a coffee addict. I've been cold-brewing my joe lately, which is just as well since my coffee maker carafe busted last week. Well, for a variety of reasons, most of them related to my own personal failures, I'm out of cold-brewed coffee extract. So I decided to grab a cup from one of those teeny little espresso stands near the gas station just outside my neighborhood.

I walked. Because it would have been absurd to get into a car to go there. It is impossible to overstate how short this walk is, people, and how easy it should have been. But I found myself picking my way through a muddy field just to avoid taking my chances on the busy road that would have taken me to Microscopic Espresso Stand had I been silly enough to climb into my car to go there. There is an overwhelming sense, when you try to walk somewhere in settings like this, that you are some sort of vagabond operating outside the bounds of social acceptability.

Bill Bryson said this in A Walk in the Woods:

It was a warm afternoon, and it felt wonderful -- you can't believe how wonderful -- to be at large without a pack, bouncy and unburdened. With a pack you walk at a tilt, hunched and pressed forward, your eyes on the ground. You trudge; it is all you can do. Without, you are liberated. You walk erect. You look around. You spring. You saunter. You amble.

Or at least you do for four blocks. Then you come to a mad junction at Burger King and discover that the new six-lane road to Kmart is long, straight, very busy, and entirely without facilities for pedestrians -- no sidewalks, no pedestrian crossings, no central refuges, no buttons to push for a WALK signal at lively intersections. I walked through the gas station and motel forecourts and across restaurant parking lots, clambered over concrete barriers, crossed lawns, and pushed through neglected ranks of privet or honeysuckle at property boundaries. At bridges over creeks and culverts -- and goodness me how developers love a culvert -- I had no choice but to walk on the road, pressed against the dusty railings and causing less attentive cars to swerve to avoid me. Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without benefit of metal. One bridge was so patently dangerous that I hesitated at it. The creek it crossed was only a reedy trickle, narrow enough to step across, so I decided to go that way. I slid and scampered down the bank, found myself in a hidden zone of sucking grey mud, pitched over twice, hauled myself up the other side, pitched over again, and emerged at length streaked and speckled with mud and extravagantly decorated with burrs. When I finally reached the Kmart Plaza I discovered that I was on the wrong side of the road and had to dash through six lanes of hostile traffic. By the time I crossed the parking lot and stepped into the air-conditioned, Muzak-happy world of Kmart I was as grubby as if I had been on the trail, and trembling all over.

The Kmart, it turned out, didn't stock insect repellent.

Sidewalks, friends. If communities were intelligently connected with a reliable network of sidewalks, imagine the problems solved. Less gas consumed, and less carbon expelled. Fewer of us dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes. Fewer pedestrian fatalities. Greater feelings of well-being.

Tell me not of how this goes against the interests of the establishment. I know that already; if sidewalks put money into the pockets of the oligarchs, I wouldn't be able to swing a cat without hitting one. I have a radical suggestion -- probably the exact sort of thing that got my Dad accused of being a Communist sympathizer by one of his grade school teachers in the 40s: Let's structure society around what's good for ordinary folks just trying to get their hands on a little bit of coffee in the morning. What say?

Where?

2008-02-28T12:36:00.001-08:00

If you had no practical issues, financial, familial or otherwise, to worry about, where would you live?

I have this odd notion of finding an abandoned citrus farm in south central Florida with a beat up old house on it. I'd live in Montana from May to the end of October, and in the month of December. The rest of the time I'd spend on the orange farm, renovating the old beater house with green building materials and growing organic lemons, oranges, grapefruit and Key limes. Throw in a bunch of mango trees and a couple of avocado trees and we're good. (I don't even like avocados, but they're beautiful.)

I think that comes from the time I spent with my grandparents in south Florida as a kid after my parents split up. They had a huge lemon tree, a Key lime tree that eventually got uprooted by Hurricane Andrew, an avocado tree, a carambola tree, two prolific mango trees and a grapefruit tree that produced two grapefruits in its entire life. That is the deeply rooted symbol of abundance for me, etched into my old brain.

Of course, my citrus farm will be underwater in less than a hundred years.

Homesick today

2008-02-27T10:41:00.001-08:00

I get these occasional bouts of homesickness for Indy. Today it was when my brother called to tell me you can get takeout from the lunch buffet of our favorite Indian restaurant for four bucks. And that he had done that today, and had just been dining on nav rattan curry before our phone call.

Usually these moments hit when its time for me to go back and spend sufficient time to remember why I moved in the first place. But I'd really rather go to the Everglades and do some bird photography.

Life as a transplant, I guess.

Rejected by my stock agency

2008-02-25T10:34:00.001-08:00

This is going to be a new category. Because once an image gets dinged, this is a way to soothe my injured artistic feelings. Since it's just stock, some images I have no emotional attachment to at all (like the eggplants in the sidebar). But the ones I am attached to in some way will go here.

I really like this one, even though it's outside my standard nature photography. The eagle looks so indignant. It could have been a technical reject -- the light is marginal and the exposure tricky. I'll probably try the same shot next year in better light.

Update: Eh, my sister just responded saying, "I'm not sure I get it." Well, I guess that's the reason. It's one of those things I see that no one else does. Which happens from time to time. **Cough**

Thomas gets appeased

2008-02-23T20:28:00.000-08:00

The newly calm Thomas enjoys a good California chardonnay on a cozy winter night.

His PR people are going to kill me for writing this -- they've worked so hard after all, to keep the secret from the public -- but I feel like its really time to come clean now, so others can be helped.

Thomas is totally neurotic.

There. It's out. Now maybe other dogs won't be afraid to go public with their struggles.

Except for perhaps the week or so he spent in the shelter, we don't have the excuse of a traumatic puppyhood. We got him when he was only eight weeks old. He was pretty fearful back then, a little tiny scared pup who would curl up in our hands and try to bury his face in our armpits. But after about two days, he got used to us, realized he was home and let his fur down.

But he has this odd sort of uncertainty about his place in the dog world. He is thoroughly attached to me -- I can't get up to go the bathroom without him following -- but when he interacts with dogs, he gets confused. On his own turf he tends to be a real asshole. You can tell he assumes that any dog coming near is doing so for the sole and express purpose of taking What's His. Which he defines as everything, including and especially me.

Off his own turf, he's a great deal more inconsistent, alternating aggression and dominance with shows of submission, sometimes with the same dog. It's like he can't decide. He's had an ongoing psychodrama with the German Shepard down the road in Montana, who is bigger than he is and very dominant. She doesn't put up with a lot of crap, but she's gone fairly easy on Thomas. Still, he freaks out every time he sees her. Every time Bella and her comrade, an easygoing, sofa-sized Newfoundland, appear down by the road, Thomas lets out this tormented howl. Back legs stretched out, nose pointed to the sky, he yowls out a warning. He'll also do this if we simply mention their names.

Fortunately, none of this happens with people. He is uniformly submissive with people, to the point of peeing himself in anxiety when he meets people for the first time. And then there's the herding behavior.

I chalk up most of Thomas's issues to the fact that he's half Border Collie. Let's face it. Lots of Border Collies are nuts. Properly trained, managed, and worked, they can be great dogs. But they come with some mental challenges.

When we went to a new vet in Coeur d'Alene a few weeks ago, it was the first time Thomas had been to a vet as an adult. (He'd had all of his shots as a puppy, and there had been no illnesses requiring veterinary attention in the intervening year.) So the vet was able to view Thomas's neuroses in their full flower. I've done a lot with training, but sometimes I can tell he's just lost the thread of coherence and his anxieties are getting in the way. That's what happened at the vet.

So he suggested we try a Dog Appeasing Pheromone collar. It's a black collar impregnated with a synthetic version of the pheromones a nursing mother produces when she's feeding her pups. The idea with a DAP collar is that it ratchets down an anxious dog by several degrees, and allows them to face the world a little better, and also allows an opening for further training. One collar lasts for thirty days. I was skeptical. But it was only thirty bucks, so I decided to try it.

It didn't take long. The first day was remarkable. He was noticeably calmer and more reasonable after the first hour. I almost took it off the second day, because he seemed more like a sullen teenager, having lost most of the goofy charm that makes him who he is. But I decided to give it another day. And wow. We've gotten to the point where training is able to take place. He still herds, but has learned to respond quickly to the "off" command. He's less of an asshole to our other dog (free feeding helped that a lot too), he gets used to strangers much more quickly, and today he played with Bella the German Shepard.

When we take a walk down the road, it's not uncommon that one of the neighbor dogs will join us. This was always a source of angst for Thomas, especially when it was Bella. But today she joined us and they played. Hard. I was able to see for the first time what was going on -- Bella engages in a very aggressive play -- but it's just that. Play. But Thomas wasn't interpreting things that way before. Today he did, and they had just the kind of play session he's been needing -- lots of running, wrestling and jumping. We'll see if it happens again.

I'll be interested to see what happens after the thirty-day mark. The vet says that by the time the collar wears out, many dogs have learned a new way of thinking and experiencing the world
and don't need to wear another one. If you have a dog with anxiety problems, or is just generally kind of nutty to the point that its interfering with behavior or training, I'd talk to the vet about a DAP collar. I did a bit of research and in a small number of cases, the collar has the reverse effect -- more anxiety and/or aggression. So I think its something you want to watch carefully. But I can say pretty confidently that Thomas is a data point in favor of the collar.

You know what's not fun?

2008-02-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

1. Getting to your mountain house after dark on a cold February night and discovering that the roof, which has upon it two feet of rapidly melting snow, is leaking into your solarium.

2. Discovering shortly thereafter that your internet isn't working and the internet people have to come out and fiddle around with the doohickey while you twiddle your thumbs waiting to feed your addiction.

3. Downloading pictures from a brief snowshoe trip up the mountain and finding a persistent dust mote on the digital sensor.

4. Opening the refrigerator door and noticing that, just to add insult to injury, the refrigerator light is out.

None of this is fun. Nope. Not fun. Not even a little.

It's still better than being anywhere else.

Stock photography

2008-02-21T12:04:00.001-08:00

As you can see, I've just put up a thingie displaying some of the photographs I've placed with my stock agency. The "buy this image" button is prominently displayed, but please note I am not intending to hawk my photography to my regular readers. Stock photography is generally purchased by more commercially oriented outfits anyway.

The purpose of the thingamabob is twofold: 1) to remind me to get my butt out and shoot and 2) occasionally purchasers of stock photography will trawl the web looking for certain images. I don't usually post the better high-res stuff here (I need to get a watermark going so I'm more comfortable doing that), so if you are interested in what I'm shooting, feel free to click through and take a look. And if not, you're quite free to stay here and read my scintillating thoughts about moose, otters and my occasional existential crises.

What we did Sunday or, Why the long face?

2008-02-17T22:07:00.000-08:00

How many times have I driven around the back corners of northwest Montana, keeping my eyes open for a moose? And then in the last month I've seen three, all in fairly well-traveled
areas of Idaho. The first was along the highway south of Bonners Ferry about three weeks ago. The other two we saw today, a cow and her yearling, pictured above. They were munching on some plants just off the side of the road, near the Spokane River in Post Falls. Next to a house.

(Out of about 150 shots, I got one worth keeping. The ones above aren't sharp enough, and the snow is overexposed.)

Essay Question One

2008-02-14T10:02:00.000-08:00

The good professor saves me with an essay question on this post. He writes:

This essay test involves two questions. There is no time limit; however, each individual answer may not exceed 750 words.

1. Valentines Day: Love it or hate it? Explain.

2. The phrase "guilty pleasure" has been defined as "something that you enjoy[, but] that you think you shouldn't enjoy, either for personal reasons or because of the possibility of other's [negative] reactions." Describe your foremost "guilty pleasure" and explain why it fits the definition.

In grading your answers, a premium will be placed on irreverance and wit. Seriousness, soul-searching, and self-reflection should be avoided at all cost.
I turn in my blue book:

1. Love it, of course. But not for the reason you might think. And to that end, a question: How did the jewelry industry come to clutch the Valentine's Day narrative so tightly in its gold-plated fist? I suppose it happened in the same way most of these things do -- by endless repetition. For the last two weeks I've noticed the standard exhortations to Mr. T that he buy me baubles in order to get the sex we're going to have anyway. Although Mr. T has lovely taste in jewelry, he knows I'd rather spend the money on travel or a new piece of outdoor gear for us.* And vice versa. But really the nugget of it all is this: Once rampant consumerism takes over a holiday, it starts to feel forced. This is one reason I like Halloween; because it still has elements that can't successfully be consumerized.

So, no. I don't love the standard Valentine's Day narrative, which I find kind of boring. But what I do love is the quirky, authentic parts of it.

Like this (via):

Everything was on the table -- more accurately, on a video projector -- at Miami Metrozoo's Sex and the Animals event, a Valentine's Day tradition.

Hosted by zoo ambassador Ron Magill, the popular lecture attracted more than 400 people to see and hear the intimate details of how wild things do the wild thing.

(No, not Enumclaw. Miami. That's because it's about how animals have sex with each other.)

This is the sort of thing Mr. T and I would do on Valentine's Day if we lived in Miami. And we're not the only ones:

''This is the fifth time in a row this thing has sold out,'' Magill said.

And really, where else can you learn about the exhibitionism of pink tropical birds?

Magill dropped plenty of nuggets of who-knew? information, such as:

• Flamingos like to have sex with others watching them. Two of the birds will get down while 30 others look on.

• Frogs sometimes do it with two or more partners at a time. Most animals are not monogamous, Magill said.

• Female pandas only have a three-day window each year to get pregnant. Zookeepers have shown the pandas films of other pandas having sex to get them in the mood.

• Tigers in captivity are implanted with birth-control devices so they don't over-reproduce.

• Some animals are gay, too. ''Homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom,'' Magill said.

I suppose the entire kingdom Animalia Sodomitica is going straight to animal hell. Ahem.

In sum, I like this part of Valentine's Day. I like the graphic on Google today. I like the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' impeccable timing in striking down Texas's law against the sale of sex toys. (I like it all the more because the Fifth Circuit is one of the stodgiest, most conservative circuits in the country.)

Happy Valentine's Day! More dildoes, less jewelry!

2. I had to reflect on this one for quite awhile to really consider what I think of as a "guilty pleasure," and I realized that my difficulty stemmed not so much from a lack of pleasure as a lack of conscience. I had to reframe the "guilty pleasure" concept to "something I engage in that I know I shouldn't because doing other things would be much more productive."

And in the process of reframing it, I named it. My biggest guilty pleasure is anything I do to avoid work. Which feels increasingly like what I do for most of the day.

I should be researching the theory of collateral estoppel right now, but guess what? I'm writing this post instead. And when I consider my hourly rate, it's kind of stunning to realize just how much blogging and reading about politics on the internet is worth to me. I make a paltry yearly salary considering the earning potential reflected in my hourly rate.

This would, of course, surprise no one at my former law firm. Particularly my supervisors, who received my monthly timesheets with no small measure of frustration. Back then, though, what I did to avoid work was interact. I'm an ENFP, so interacting with people is fun to me. It was so much more pleasurable to be gabbing with someone, even if it was about strategy in a case or something, than actually doing the scut work of lawyering, which always must be done in isolation and quiet. (That kind of scut work now constitutes 100% of my work now, unfortunately.) So billable hours were and are a challenge for me. And perversely, those with the biggest interest in my achieving those hours often enabled my avoidance.

You see, people seem to find it easy to talk to me. They will often reveal sometimes striking personal details to me, unsolicited, very early on in our acquaintance. When I was at the firm, this led to a parade of people in my office, chatting with me about one thing or another. Half of them were partners. They'd talk about uncertainties about their career choice, their kids, whatever. Some of them would drop by for an hour to yak under the guise of "getting the associates' take" on some act or another taken by firm management.

Had they made me the Firm Ombudsman, I'd still be there. But alas, there is little upside to having such a position in a large law firm, and I burned out and left. If I could go back to my early twenties and do it all over again, I wouldn't become a lawyer again. I loved law school, but the actual practice of law goes so contrary to my temperament that it's frequently painful. It's purely an income thing, these days.

If I had a clear expanse of time in front of me as I did in my early twenties, I'd probably become a therapist instead. I don't really want to do that now, in my late thirties, but it's probably what I should have done to begin with.

These days, since I'm holed up in a home office like a fricking hermit, I avoid work through the internet. Political blogs, personal blogs, the news, e-mail, IM -- it's all good. I just wish someone would pay me my hourly rate for doing that instead of legal work.

But they don't. Back to collateral estoppel.

*I won't even go into the social issues involved with the production of certain kinds of jewelry. That's another post for another time.

Funk

2008-02-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

I'm in a bit of a funk. Doesn't anyone have any good memes or something? Clearly I need an essay question.

Hear ye

2008-02-12T09:39:00.000-08:00

Lewis has issued a protest about the dual uses of word verification and comment moderation. Like I said over at his place, I don't moderate, because I don't get very many nutjobs in the comments. But I do get spam. That said, I'm going to try and turn it off for awhile. I hate word verification myself, so if I can avoid inflicting it on you, then I will. But I'm also somewhat obsessive, so if my comment threads start sporting a lot of "This post has been removed by the blog administrator" comments, then I'll turn it back on.

From Trailheadquarters

2008-02-12T08:49:00.000-08:00

At dinner last night, the Kid said:

"I'm looking forward to turning six. So I can drive."

What's ten years to the DMV but a minor detail, really?

The Year of the Rat

2008-02-11T00:22:00.000-08:00

Chinese New Year in the conservatory at the Bellagio.

Just because I find the defining principle of a place revolting doesn't mean I don't want to spend time there

2008-02-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

Well, Rose and Kris basically wrote my last post about Vegas for me in the comments to this post. Kris touched on one thing that kept getting to me while I was there -- the excruciating loveliness of the surrounding setting. I'd go back to Vegas for the mountains alone. I spent lots of time gazing beyond the city to the snow-dusted mountains, dying to explore them.

Rose mentions something else -- the better hotels have a distinctly better atmosphere, both literally and figuratively. It's worth mentioning that there was a shakeup in personnel in Mr. T's company that led to us staying in one of the, ahem, less "luxurious" hotels. The difference in indoor air quality was one of the first things I noticed upon exploring other hotels.

Finally, as much as I dislike some of the faux outrageousness of the Las Vegas "scene," I left feeling that I hadn't even scratched the surface of the things available to do that I do find worthwhile. It was a quick trip, so we didn't see a show. There are scores of restaurants I still want to try. I didn't even get to see the shark reef at Mandalay Bay and there are two other aquariums at the Mirage and at Caesar's. And as Rose mentioned before I went, there are circuses and midways and a fair amount of things to do with kids. And even more to do without them.

So, yeah, I'll go back. I will be grossed out by certain aspects of the place, but next time I won't be obligated, as on a first trip, to do the Full Immersion Experience. And I won't. And at that point, it becomes like most cities -- you just separate the wheat from the chaff.

I'll say this. Anyone who is seriously interested in the concept of place should visit at least once. Las Vegas has a strong character. The process of observing it and analyzing it is even more fun than the things that are supposed to make Vegas fun.

First, what I hate about Vegas

2008-02-06T12:15:00.000-08:00

It’s no secret that everything is arranged in Las Vegas to facilitate gambling. The floor plans and signs in the hotels direct the unwary along the most circuitous route possible, winding through endless rows of blinking and bleating slot machines. Restaurants play loud, grating music, ensuring that patrons don’t linger too long over their meals. The casino area of one large hotel I walked through was ringed with several Starbucks – just in case you get sleepy before you make your money back again. You can even gamble in the swimming pools, and play Keno at the coffee shop. I eagerly await the advent of toilet slots.

In fact, there is almost no place where one is safe from the temptation to transfer money to the casino owners. From the moment you step off the plane to the moment you go back through airport security, you are forcibly entertained. Even the TSA video educates travelers by showing various hypothetical Vegas characters going through security. You see a showgirl stuffing her massive headpiece thingie through the X-ray machine. Visitors are allowed no opportunity for reflection or introspection. That might interfere with the ability to relieve them of their money.

Mr. T and I used to gamble occasionally back in our 20s, before my populist worldview hardened sufficiently to realize that gaming – at least in Vegas – is the most effective means, short of simple force, to transfer wealth to the super rich from the rest of us.* And all without giving anything in return except the frisson of imminent loss.

And when someone does manage to wrest some lucre from the clutches of The House, she need only walk a few steps to the stores waiting just beyond the casino area to give it all back again. I suspect that very little money actually leaves a given hotel, and even less leaves the city. This is a clever strategy, to be sure, but a dreadfully cynical one nonetheless.

In short, this industry preys on hopes and manipulates desperation for the gain of the corporate or the already wealthy. And while most people escape with no more than a headache and a bit of lingering self-disgust, others suffer more. One of the most appalling things I saw with some frequency were signs depicting an adult hand holding a smaller hand, with the caption: “Don’t leave your children unattended while gaming.” Dear God. It was enough to make me gather The Kid protectively in my arms.

But what really got me was the artifice of it all. As I walked through the airport on the way home past the zillionth public message congratulating me for my numerous acts of unrepentant decadence, I couldn’t help but think: Okay, I get it. You’re Vegas. You’re outlandish, outrageous, and totally transgressive. Whatever. Now show me something that's actually interesting.

But the thing of it is, there is nothing about Las Vegas – at least the famed Vegas that you find on the Las Vegas strip – that is remotely subversive of the establishment. Here is the order of things in Vegas: 1) First we’re going to get you to give us money by tricking you into thinking you have a good chance to take money from us; 2) If that doesn’t work, look over here at this nearly naked woman!!! 3) Be sure to smoke and drink a lot, too!

Perpetuation of the existing economic power structure through heterosexual sex, smoking and drinking. How original.

I kept comparing Vegas to Key West, which actually does have some genuinely subversive elements. I’m not a huge partier – I prefer ocean kayaking and scuba diving to doing the bar scene when I’m there. But I have no real objection to it, and people doing it in Key West aren’t being fed a line about it – they’re just doing it. By contrast, Vegas congratulates you for your edginess when you’re not really being edgy at all.

This is not to bash on people who like Vegas, and enjoy doing all the things that Vegas tries to get people to do. It can be fun, in its way. But look through the artifice so you can do it with a clear understanding of the elements in play.

Next: It's not all beer, babes and blackjack, or: Would I go back? You bet. So to speak.

*Except, perhaps, the credit card industry and our current taxation scheme. But the latter qualifies as a form of force, I think.

Wherein I break from slagging on Vegas to observe a happy occasion

2008-02-05T20:19:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Lewis! He and his partner were the 106th couple to enter into a domestic partnership in Oregon, on the first day those partnerships were allowed to be registered.

May they have many years of happiness.

Las Vegas: When you build a city entirely around appealing to the worst in people, that's usually what you get

2008-02-05T19:54:00.000-08:00

I am an extrovert, so why shouldn’t I like Vegas? Isn’t Vegas an extroverted city?

Well, not really. Vegas is extroverted the way a mugger is extroverted. Despite the unceasing hustle and bustle, the shows and the food and the endless displays of human endeavor – I mean, there’s a show dedicated entirely to demonstrating one’s skill creating soap bubbles, for crying out loud -- Vegas doesn’t really like people. This is, I think, the most cynical place I’ve ever been. Common courtesies that you take for granted elsewhere are frequently absent here. People either behave differently while here, or this place attracts a certain kind of person.

I started noticing this on the plane from Phoenix. The three of us were seated apart – each of us in a middle seat. We approached the flight attendant and asked for help getting one of us seated with The Kid. Usually we have at least one aisle or window seat to barter when this happens, and it’s easy to get the seats arranged. We knew it would be harder this time, but a five-year old shouldn’t be required to sit between two strangers on a plane, sorry.

“These are our seats,” snapped a woman who looked like she’d swallowed a lemon. The flight attendant explained the situation. She looked over at me, sneering. (Me, of course, never Mr. T – it’s always the brood mare on the receiving end of the hostility in these situations). “Well, he has to have an aisle seat,” she spat, pointing at her partner. “Fine,” I said coolly. “Only one of us needs to sit near him,” I observed. “So it’s either that,” I said pointedly, “or you have an unattended five year old between the two of you.”

She cast me another withering glance, and addressed the flight attendant. “I hope you have some comps or something for this,” she sniffed.

At first I thought this might have nothing to do with Vegas per se – there are assholes everywhere, and this is hardly an unusual event when you fly anywhere with a kid. But after spending some time here, I noticed the same sort of attitude again and again. We were walking down the hall to look out the window near the elevator one morning. The elevator had arrived and there was someone in it. They must have mistakenly assumed we were coming to board the elevator. Well, the occupant of the elevator was courteous enough to hold it, but not courteous enough to be patient.

“HURRY IT UP!” she bellowed. I ignored her, appalled. Apparently we were unforgivably delaying the loss of all her remaining money on nickel slots.

In sum, I find the attitude of many people here ranges from indifferent to nasty. I suppose that’s what you get when you combine greed, desperation and soullessness.

Next: This would be a great city if they got rid of all the casinos.

Here, kittykittykittykitty

2008-02-03T22:42:00.000-08:00

Someone went to the Lion Habitat at the MGM Grand. And no, I don't particularly approve.

Big rawhide, huh?

My triumpant return to the internet

2008-01-30T23:06:00.000-08:00

No more will I haunt the local Borders to catch a few minutes of internet time. I am hooked up now, friends. And I have the following observations to share with you that I've saved up over the past couple of weeks:

1. To the influx of new readers from Europe brought here by Sancho: You are wonderful people! I've heard from folks in the Netherlands, France, Austria, all parts of the United Kingdom, and Belgium. And I have been uniformly delighted by your friendliness, your impeccable manners and your deep concern for a giant otter and his human. This makes me want to travel to Europe as soon as possible so I can spend some time with such lovely people. (Of course, this also applies to the one reader from Thailand who was brought here as well by Sancho!) I love how the internet has made the world such a very small place, and I have so enjoyed talking with all of you. I hope at least some of you keep reading and participating.

2. Mr. T and I seem to have a penchant for moving from one state to another in snowstorms. We moved from Florida (yes, Florida! In the winter!) to North Carolina in early January of 1996. We had been told that North Carolina hadn't had significant snow in ten years. The first thing I saw when I turned onto our new street was a snow plow that had become stuck -- in the snow. People in Idaho and eastern Washington seem less concerned about this sort of thing, but one does tend to wonder whether the snow will ever stop.

3. Finally, I am taking a trip this weekend. Mr. T goes to a trade show every year in the winter. Last year it was in Florida, and I happily attended that one, of course. Every other year -- this year included -- the show has been in Las Vegas.

I've always avoided the Las Vegas trips. But this year, since Mr. T is working at a different company, going to Vegas offers the only opportunity we'll have for some time to see old friends from Portland (yes, that means you, Tony) and friends from Asia.

While I know some of my blogging colleagues have enjoyed Vegas, I've always been viscerally repulsed by the prospect of it. (For what it's worth, Rose's descriptions of her trip there were the first crack in my resolve never to step foot in the place.) And really, it goes against my liberal nature to condemn something without ever partaking of it. That's a little too book burn-ish for me.

So off I go to Vegas until Tuesday. But please don't laugh at the idea of me in my jeans, men's sweater and hiking boots, hair yanked back into a sloppy ponytail with five-year old in tow, on the streets of Sin City. Because as they say, what happens in Vegas -- ah, never mind. I can't even bring myself to finish that.

But perhaps there will be pictures.

Just pics

2008-01-27T16:45:00.000-08:00

Finally got my USB cable back. It was here the whole time, of course.

These were taken at our hotel on the Spokane River in Post Falls.

After three solid days of snow, there are now about three feet of snow on the ground and the sun is finally out. We've been waiting to leave for CDA till we're sure the plows have been through.

Give me a moment while my fingers thaw

2008-01-25T19:29:00.000-08:00

We've arrived. And it was a short trip, friends. Very short, compared to what we're used to doing. We left this afternoon and made it here before dinner.

Of course, it's a Montana winter and that means it takes the entire evening to warm the house up. The bedrooms have their own baseboard heating but the upstairs relies almost entirely on the wood stove. We got here 90 minutes ago and I'm still wearing my parka.

But I can actually type now, so that's a good sign.

Popping back in

2008-01-24T16:03:00.000-08:00

No internet at the new digs until January 29. How they expect me to survive this, I have no idea.

Right now I'm lucky to get my work done in the short time I have at the local Borders. But we're going up to Montana this weekend, so maybe I'll get something posted there.

See you on the other side.

Sancho, revisited

2008-01-15T23:13:00.000-08:00

It's been a little more than three months since I first saw Raising Sancho. I wrote about it then with no idea how many people Sancho would bring to this blog, including Carolina Vargas. (Those of you landing here for the first time from a search engine can go here to read those posts. Start at the bottom, and don't forget the comments, as Carolina has left comments on several of the posts.) Nor did it occur to me then that the scene would be revisited every time the show airs again. And the BBC aired it this weekend, and people from the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe have been visiting all week, as well as some from Asia.

And the scene replays itself. The queries come in fast and furious, the exact same ones I plugged in when I was frantically looking for an update after the show: "Sancho found," "Carolina Vargas blog," or the more desperate "Sancho giant otter Pantanal Carolina Vargas." Everyone is sad and torn up about the ending, but on one issue they split down the middle like a overripe peach -- what really happened to Sancho?

Some say they can just feel it in their gut that Sancho was a victim of a predator, or didn't make it for some other reason. And the reason they cite is that they feel certain that, given the bond between Sancho and Carolina, Sancho would have returned to Carolina at some point in the following three months after he left. After all, he would only swim a short distance from her side in the underwater scenes, never venturing too far before returning to her to check in.

This was, as a matter of fact, my exact opinion after watching the show. Through our tears, Mr. T and I agreed that the odds were heavily against such a bonded animal just up and leaving Carolina, the one other creature in the world to whom he was most powerfully attached.

But my opinion now is the exact reverse. In part that opinion is based on the facts Carolina laid out here: Sancho left at the beginning of the dry season, when otters will often follow the fish to the main water channel. He left after becoming acquainted with a pair of wild otters. He was nine months old, and otters of that age will occasionally just leave their families for long periods of time. And then, of course, the statement that sticks out most powerfully: "Some tour guides that work in the area where Sancho used to live told me that he was around...."

But what about that powerful bond?

Regular readers will recall that my view of the animal-human bond has been publicly developing on this blog. I wrote about it here, and here, both times in the context of my pet dogs. And I think my original belief that surely Sancho would have returned to Carolina, or not left in the first place, is an example of anthropomorphizing Sancho. (For those reading whose first language is not English and may not know, anthropomorphizing means to attribute human characteristics to animals.) I started to formulate this idea in a comment I wrote on one of the Sancho posts:

I understand your point, I really do. But after thinking about it for a long time, I think we may be expecting too much from the bond between Sancho and Carolina.

I think Sancho bonded with Carolina as his mother. Strong as it was, that bond could have eventually been broken even if Carolina had been an otter mother, by Sancho striking out on his own. (I do know that giant otters frequently stay with their family group, but they also sometimes break off to form their own, new family groups.)

Once I stopped looking at their bond in purely human terms and considered the other circumstances, it seemed much more likely that Sancho had simply grown up and done what many otters of his age do, which is to leave their family unit, sometimes for a long time, and sometimes forever.

In short, I think Sancho was being an otter. And I think he was able to do that because Carolina loved him enough to treat him as an otter.

In the posts linked above, I argue that people who view their animals as their children are bringing animals too far into their human world, and failing to venture enough into the animal world. Carolina's and Sancho's relationship is the opposite. Carolina did not bring Sancho too far into her world; rather, she ventured into the otter world as Sancho's surrogate mother.

This is strikingly evident in her refusal to keep him in captivity. She paid a high price emotionally for that decision, but it was a decision that honored Sancho, and saw him clearly for what he was: an otter. I think, for me, that is at the heart of why their relationship touched me so much. It was so deeply meaningful because Carolina gave so much of herself so Sancho could be an otter. Whether he lived or died, he would do so as an otter. It was a profoundly truthful relationship.

That is beautiful. And rare.

Toys these days

2008-01-14T23:44:00.000-08:00

I've never really spent much time obsessing over The Kid's intellectual development. He seems bright enough to get along, and I just can't bring myself to think much about it beyond that. Also, I've spent most of my adult life working in a field that elevates the intellectual over the personal, to the point where you'll have someone who's just a real jackass, but is canonized because they are -- gasp, ohmigod, so smart. I can't stand that. Drives me bananas. And half the time, the person being worshipped for his (and it always seems to be a man) intelligence really isn't all that sharp anyway.

So until now I've been focused on making sure my kid doesn't grow up to be an asshole, not on turning him into a little Einstein. There's something vaguely ridiculous about the parents who are bent on teaching their kids to read, add, subtract, or do this or that intellectual activity at some outrageously early age. Anyone watching such a spectacle can tell the issue isn't the kid's development, but the parent's ego investment in their kid being special. Screw that.

So it doesn't really bother me that The Kid is five years old and doesn't yet know how to read. A couple of months ago he started adding strings of numbers together in his head, so I figure he's doing all right. Plus, I can tell he's just not really interested yet. Why should he be when he has me to read him Shel Silverstein's poem about the eyeball in the gumball machine?

But then I realized that it was the Leap Pad's fault. Ever seen one of those? The model he has plugs into the TV and there's a keyboard attached. There's a program whereby The Kid can punch in a letter and an animal starting with that letter pops up. Nifty, huh? He can also type words and have them repeated back to him. But today Mr. T alerted me to what appears to be a serious defect in the system.

It won't type dirty words.

Apparently the Kid went to type "poop" into his keyboard and the program refused to let him do it. He got as far as P-O-O, and the keyboard refused to allow him to enter the "P." Enter "L" to make "pool" and the keyboard complied. But no poop allowed.

Is this what matters have come to? Our sensibilities so delicate that we must foreclose a perfectly valid means of stimulating a youngster's interest in spelling? Isn't that half the fun of these things? Way to kill the love of learning, people.

Maybe I'll come out with a series of scatological flash cards for the beginning reader set. Dog knows someone needs to. The Leap Pad people won't do it.

They're gonna love my bumper stickers

2008-01-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

Sweet Jesus. Your leftist pinko nutcase blogger is moving to Northern Idaho.

No, we couldn't find temporary housing that didn't suck on the Washington side. So we'll have a rental house till June in Coeur d'Alene. This house had better sell soon, because I don't think they let people like me live up there.

But on second thought, there are some very cool people who hailed from Idaho. Frank Church. Ezra Pound. And Lewis!

In other news, I think I left my USB cable for my camera in Montana. Which means no pictures of the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene area until I get it back or buy a new one.

With love to Riyadh

2008-01-09T23:45:00.001-08:00

You tried so hard.

First you arrived via the google query "russia vuck," which led you here. It appears -- ahem -- that you and The Kid were both laboring under the same misapprehension as to that word. Seeing nothing but a description of Mr. T's sink installation activities, you decided to take a more direct approach, searching the entire blog for the word "sexy."

You have got to be kidding me. No, seriously. This blog?

Now if you were more creative -- or maybe more thoroughly versed in English, I don't know -- you might have tried "mountain boobs" like the guy from Scotland last week. That would have landed you here. Not exactly what you were looking for, but hey -- at least that post had the actual word.

Still not finding what you needed, you tried one last, heroic measure: searching the "videos" tag. I'm guessing that "Bald Cypress", "Snakebird, I love you", and "Paddling the mangroves" all excited you a bit when you first read them, but sadly, I can feel your ultimate disappointment all the way across the globe.

But congratulations anyway. That was the most dogged search for p*rn I think I have ever witnessed. You persevered in the face of truly daunting odds. Some might tell you to just go rent something*, but -- well, it's Riyadh. As if there weren't enough reasons to lighten the hell up a little over there, maybe it would spare me from watching such pathetic displays unfolding in my statcounter.

So I have a better idea. Why don't you just go paddle your mangrove.

Calming down. Or not.

2008-01-04T11:21:00.000-08:00

We're off to Spokane to start hunting for temporary housing that doesn't suck.

I have to say, it's been an exhausting week. A lot has happened -- transitions, some anger, lots of well wishes, lots of ill wishes, a bunch of tense situations and much confusion. But I think it's mostly ironed out. For us, anyway.

I was standing in my kitchen last night looking around. Part of me feels like I never really lived in this house, that it was all just a temporary holding pattern, because we always knew this wasn't permanently home. But there are signs everywhere that we've been here for awhile -- dust kitties when we moved furniture last night, spices stuffed into odd places in the pantry, and so forth.

I stood there for a minute, realizing that it was actually time to pack up some stuff for the short-term apartment, and I felt like I had skipped a step or something, or hadn't adequately prepared for that moment. This happens to me fairly frequently. Life often feels like a train I'm trying to run and catch. That's something I have to work on. Hell, I'm the kind of person who skips the relaxation pose during a yoga workout because I'm too eager to move on to The Next Thing.

I really do need to relax a little bit.

But look, over there! The train's leaving!

Off to the races

2008-01-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

There are going to be some changes around here.

First up: Mr. T has landed his dream job in the Spokane, Washington area. Squee! So we'll be moving from Portland this winter. It's going to be a nonstop thrill trying to sell our house in this ugly housing market, but we shall persevere. One of the great things about this is we'll finally be about three hours from the Montana place. I'll be able to spend weekends up there, people. Weekends.

And there's the promise of new landscapes to explore and photograph. I've always been fascinated by Washington's wheat-growing Palouse region, and now I'll be a short drive from it. But we'll still be able to enjoy the parts of Oregon we've come to love so well, and the people we're close to here, because it's not too far.

Next up: Because life is never complicated enough for us, we'll be implementing our year-long supersecret plan to start our own company. We've been tossing this idea around for a long time. We'll be selling stuff made from environmentally friendly materials or with an environmentally friendly function. Our goal with the company is to work toward moving these materials and processes into the mainstream. We've got a name and a website we're working on, and I have to complete the incorporation documents. But we've already gotten some samples of items that we're really excited about. More on that as it unfolds.

So, my plan for 2008: Fewer suburbs, more mountains, new places to explore, and new challenges. I can't wait.

Staredown

2007-12-26T18:43:00.000-08:00

I can't be the only one who hears The Good, The Bad and The Ugly when I look at this picture.

Christmas Eve, Cabinet Mountains

2007-12-24T12:17:00.000-08:00

Hope you're all having a grand time. I know I am.

Solstice Moonrise

2007-12-23T10:42:00.000-08:00

There was a huge, beautiful moon rising on my drive through Northern Idaho Friday, but alas, there was no way to stop until it had shrunk significantly. So it's become the image I missed, now stored only in my own memory. I have many like that, and I treasure them, too, even as I grieve that I'm the only one to ever see them.

But I like the one I actually captured, too.

Sunday before Christmas

2007-12-23T10:41:00.000-08:00

Cloudy, 32 degrees. There are about six inches of snow on the ground. Thomas and I took our walk this morning, crunching companionably through the snow crust together.

Snow tells a tale of the mountain that's hidden the rest of the year. It reveals the intensely, almost manically nomadic nature of deer, and records the passage of other animals. This morning we saw rabbit tracks interspersed with bobcat tracks, a drama written in the snow, but with no discernible ending. Did the bobcat get dinner? Or did the rabbit live another day?

Snow tells part of the tale, but doesn't promise more than that.

Miscellany

2007-12-19T21:07:00.001-08:00

1. Mr. T and his dad got a bison cow. The Kid wept uncontrollably when he found out. That's what two former vegetarians get, I suppose. We never explained to The Kid why we didn't eat meat, though, so he's getting this on his own. I don't know, maybe it's genetic. Anyway, they proceeded through Wyoming this afternoon with a quarter-ton bison carcass in the back of my father-in-law's truck. Which is perfect, really -- they're in the one region of the country where no one would give that a second glance.

2. At lunch today, Tony helpfully pointed out to me that my internet profile is not as low as I thought. If you enclose my name, including my middle initial, in quotation marks, the first three results belong to me. One's an old profile from my Big Law Firm days, and the other two are from appeals I worked on.

3. Tomorrow I am going to load up the truck and ~~move to Beverly~~ drive myself, two dogs, and a five-year-old to Montana. Pray for me.

Venturing into the animal world

2007-12-19T10:06:00.000-08:00

Cold mountain rivers seem to feel good on arthritic fifteen-year-old joints.

It's a good thing Jon Katz started a blog, because he says things so much better than I can. I guess a man with a jillion books under his belt ought to have a way with these things. Today he explains beautifully the distinction I wasn't really getting at successfully in this post. I couldn't articulate why not seeing animals as our children doesn't diminish the power of our relationships with them. Go read.

It's not that dogs or animals aren't "as much as" our children. Rather, they do things in our lives that children cannot, or should not. They're ambassadors from another world that we've left behind in our rush to mini-malls and suburbia.

I'm not objecting to those who feel a nurturing relationship with their pets akin to what we might feel with our children. But if that's as far as we go, we're bringing animals too far into our world, and not venturing enough into theirs. And that's a loss for both of us.

Mountain Time, now with less sarcasm, more earnestness

2007-12-18T11:19:00.001-08:00

Someone googled their way here last night with the query "how to be comfortable with vulnerability." I'm pretty sure they didn't get what they were looking for -- Dog knows I have no idea how to handle vulnerability. I learned from the best, after all. My parents taught me the dangers of actually feeling early on, and until a perceptive therapist pointed this out to me a few years ago, I thought we were actually strong personalities.

Turns out we're just a bunch of emotional cowards. It's still my first instinct, to downplay or silence entirely the strength of my own feelings, fears and wounds. With the exception of a very few people in my life (and you know who you are), I'd almost always rather talk to someone about their problems than discuss my own. I'm pretty good at it, so that's led to an odd dynamic in my family. I'm the youngest of five, and probably considered the most all-around "successful" one -- married for thirteen years, no divorce, good career, decent financial position, nice kid, two dogs. I get to travel and I have vibrant hobbies.

Contrast that with some of the things my siblings have gone through and are still going through, and all of a sudden my relatively unremarkable life is transformed into some kind of winning lottery ticket, and I owe everyone else 1) penance for having it "easier" than they do, and 2) endless advice and support for their own pains and agonies with little or no reciprocation. This results in them being even less comfortable with my vulnerability than I am. Which kind of reinforces these things. It's sort of an unsavory blend of resentment and dependence.

Of course, the therapist observed wryly how well this fits in with my own emotional narrative, the one I'm comfortable with -- me as invulnerable, strong person. But it's fake, it gets old, and that narrative fails to recognize me as an actual, whole person. And it doesn't really help anyone else either.

So, Anonymous Googler, here's what my therapist advised me. Breathe. No, really, she said that. Breathe, and notice how you feel when you start to get that locked up feeling. It's not going to kill you. Really. Something else undoubtedly will, eventually. But feeling won't.

I still forget -- probably because it's so easy to slip back into old patterns unless you constantly remind yourself -- but the panic attacks usually remind me that it's time to go back to Square Uno. And find someone who is comfortable with you being vulnerable to talk to. These things don't happen in a vacuum. I bet if you think about it, there's someone out there who benefits -- or thinks they do -- from you playing the Rock.

Please do comment. I'll feel all weird and vulnerable if you all stay quiet. Then, back to our regularly scheduled sarcastic defense mechanisms.

Googlery

2007-12-17T22:21:00.000-08:00

Kristy has a post up about googling oneself, and how that doesn't necessarily reflect vanity so much as common sense in an era when even employers are looking you up online. Of course, I hopped over to Google and plugged in Mr. T's name. Let him be the guinea pig. The second result is an article he and I wrote together six years ago for the magazine of a local environmental nonprofit. Almost everything else is about an expert on China who shares his name. This is kind of funny, considering that Mr. T has been to China fifteen times, and so considers himself sort of an unofficial expert.

Then I popped in my own name. Back when I worked at Big Law Firm, my bio on that website was always the first result. Now that honor is held by a watercolor painter. There is also a psychiatrist from Eugene, an actress who did an appearance on Scrubs, and creepily enough, a alum from one of my schools who is dead. I got bored before I dug deeply enough to find an item that actually mentioned me.

For all the reasons Kristy mentions in her post, I've kept a low internet profile on purpose for the last few years. Maybe I'll do something outrageous soon and change all that.

Bison, head colds and anti-drug hysteria

2007-12-13T20:55:00.000-08:00

Mr. T is leaving tomorrow to go slay some free-range, grass-fed meat for the freezer. Well, actually he's going to watch his Dad slay some free-range, grass-fed meat for our freezer. See, his Dad has long dreamed of a buffalo hunt, so Mr. T started trying to find a hunt they could do together that offered significantly more challenge than a standard Dick-Cheney-shooting-
fish-in-a-barrel-and-then-your-hunting-partner-in-the-face kind of deals. And he found one on 90,000 acres in Nebraska. If my father-in-law gets a buffalo, our half will tally up to about 350 pounds. The deep freeze will be full for awhile. (And lots of friends will be eating bison as well.)

But I'm getting away from my main point, which is -- as always, really -- me.
So Mr. T is leaving tomorrow, which will require me to wrangle The Kid alone till we head up to Montana next week.

Cue head cold.

I was sitting here working this afternoon and I could feel it hitting me. First the stuffy nose, then the burning eyes, then the ache in the throat. And I looked down at the dog and said, "Hey, sport, would you be so kind as to hop into your time machine and fetch me some good cold remedies from 1998?"

Remember when cold meds used to work? I used to be a big fan of DayQuil, and then Tylenol Cold and Flu for nighttime. DayQuil could power me through an entire day at Big Law Firm with even the most wretched virus. Yeah, I'd be seeing vapor trails*, but it gave me blessed, blessed relief. Then one day, they stopped working. I took a DayQuil, and continued to feel like pickled ass. Last year's bout with strep was particularly vexing. I assumed I'd developed some sort of tolerance for it until one day it dawned on me.

Meth. They took the stuff that actually works -- called pseudoephedrine -- out of the meds, because in very large quantities, pseudoephedrine can be used to make meth. Now pharmacists are required to lock up meds that contain it and weary cold sufferers must produce a photo ID and sign the products out to get them. Most cold-med makers, afraid that they would lose bidness if their stuff was locked up behind the counter, caved and stuck some weak-ass substitute in their products to keep them on the shelves.

I'm going to go ahead and call this law and order hysteria. Listen, I'm down with preventing the production of meth. It's an environmental and social menace. But this goes too far. Back in the midwest, they would simply not let you buy more than one box of cold medicine at a time, on the theory that no one has that bad a cold. That was fine. But then the meth people would simply shoplift it, leading the lawmakers to insist that pseudoephedrine must be locked up! Oh Noes!

But you know what? I don't care. If someone is determined to make meth, a signature and photo ID requirement isn't going to stop them. It's not. Because no one has ever made a fake ID! Like so much of our security-obsessed society, this is so much window dressing.

Fortunately, some manufacturers have resisted the blacklisting of pseudoephedrine, and their stuff remains behind the glass. I will be going to the pharmacy tomorrow and getting some.

Perhaps I'll be a little bit more reasonable tomorrow, and will see the sterling wisdom of this law once my sinus passages are no longer the size of bratwursts.

Which will only happen after I get some decent cold medicine.

*not really

The Kid wants to know

2007-12-11T19:21:00.000-08:00

Actual conversation tonight:

Mr. T: Sit down while you have a sucker in your mouth, please.

Kid [continues jumping around]: Why?

Mr. T: Because I choked on a sucker that way when I was little.

Kid: Did you die?

Gone

2007-12-10T22:38:00.000-08:00

Eh, if Kristy can delete one of her posts for utter lunacy, then I can delete one because it makes me look like an ass.

I'll offer a picture instead.

SantaCon, last Saturday.

Dogs don't have existential crises. Lucky bastards.

2007-12-07T10:15:00.000-08:00

Thomas the Dog stares at his mobile food dispenser,
who has inexplicably produced a camera instead of a treat.

On these issues, I'm with author Jon Katz*. I'm not one of those people who thinks of her dogs as her kids. That would be an insult to my kid. And, come to think of it, to my dogs. My dogs are one of the purest, simplest joys in my life. I don't have to worry whether my dogs are going to grow into empathetic, decent folks. I don't worry about whether they are going to inherit my neuroses, or whether they will still call and visit in twenty years. Yes, I want to make sure I train them well, and teach them to live and get along in a human world that often doesn't understand their animal nature. But they do not carry my heart around in the way that my son does, and I have never awakened in the middle of the night wondering whether I'm doing right by them.

Perhaps I adore them so much precisely because they are not a part of me in the way my son is. They are a thing apart. Parenting the Kid is something that runs as deeply as anything can go. It's complex, rich and often frightening in its intensity.

I would do no service to my animals by trying to place such a framework on my interactions with them. To do so would be to project my own thoughts and feelings onto them. But they are different creatures, and absolutely not human. And thank goodness for that.

I try not to anthropomorphize my animals, at least in a way that can hurt them. People can and do hurt their pets by assuming they think and feel like humans. (No, your dog did not destroy your living room while you were out because it was angry with you for leaving.) Now, its probably impossible not to do that a little bit, because the line is so unclear -- animals clearly have their own characters or, to use the anthropocentric term, their own personalities. And they clearly do have emotions, though perhaps not of the same complexity as people, and their emotions do not interact, like ours do, with an established sense of cause and effect.

Make no mistake. My dog arrived at his "love" for me through the fact that I take care of him. He views me first and foremost as a mobile food dispenser.

But so what? Too many people would decry that statement as minimizing the depth of the human-animal bond. I don't think it does. After all, that's how my son thought of me for the first year of his life. And I don't think that's the sum of the human-animal interaction, of course. I've seen too much to the contrary to believe that.

But my dogs are not people. That's what makes them so wonderful.

*If you like dogs, farm animals, rural anything, art or life, start reading this guy. I'm thrilled because he just stated on his blog that his next book will be about his border collie, Rose, who is the dog of his that fascinates me the most. You may not end up liking him, or the decisions he makes (though I don't feel that way), but you will love his stories. I talked about Katz's work briefly here, and go here to see what his book A Good Dog did to me.

Endangered Species Thursday: NSFW edition

2007-12-06T09:29:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry for this, really I am. But Mr. T found this story through a local Indy newspaper last week and it's just too interesting to pass up:

A Dutch museum said Friday it is having trouble getting its hands on a parasite that just about everybody else is anxious to avoid: crabs.
The Rotterdam Natural History Museum has appealed for somebody—anybody—to give it a single crab louse for its collection, amid fears they may be dying out.

The culprit? Let's just say a form of clearcutting has led to habitat loss.

This does bring up an interesting conundrum. Why would we want to save crab lice from extinction, right? Well, the curator of the museum makes a valid point:

"We have over 300,000 species represented in our collection," he said. "Even though most of them are not on display, that doesn't mean small, unpopular insects are less important scientifically."

Anyone want to volunteer to set up a captive breeding program?

Frost on the woodpile

2007-12-05T16:17:00.000-08:00

It'll be more than frost next time, no doubt.

Texas

2007-12-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

I think I may need to spend more time in Texas. As soon as I stepped off the jetway in Houston this morning, my Quirk-o-Meter started blinking. I don't know whether it was the guy riding around on an airport cart playing the accordion and singing, the fact that at 7:00 a.m. the longest food line was at the barbecue joint, or the woman sitting next to me who kindly assured me before she relocated that it was the sun, not me and my family, that prompted her move. I've spent some time in the Hill Country doing photography, and I read enough Austin-based bloggers to know that's a pretty interesting place. But I'm starting to think it may be fun to nose around the entire state.

I'd love to find a place as quirky as Montana.

Off again

2007-11-28T21:16:00.001-08:00

We'll be getting up at three o'clock tomorrow morning to catch a red-eye flight to Indianapolis for four days of catching up with family and friends. My mother *still* does not have high-speed internet. Loverly.

A photo of your blogger

2007-11-27T22:40:00.001-08:00

No, I'm not the horse. Hint: I'm wearing an orange Please-Deer-Hunter-Don't-Shoot-Me vest.

Your post-Thanksgiving, Monday morning dose of nature

2007-11-26T09:14:00.001-08:00

From jlb over at Arboreality, go watch this video if you have a few extra minutes. (I didn't want to embed it due to the copyright notice on it.)

Try not to lose heart when the juvenile buffalo is attacked -- nothing about this video is predictable.

Well, at least it wasn't black this time

2007-11-24T16:32:00.001-08:00

What? Me vomit?

I was lying down in the living room in front of the fire when Thomas trotted over, plopped down, and promptly barfed two inches from my left shoulder.

This has left me quite speechless.

Late as usual

2007-11-22T16:20:00.000-08:00

It's late afternoon, and the turkey's in the oven. It's been a rather disorganized holiday, which is fine with me. Dinner is pretty late this year, because the grocery store got fresh Dungeness crab in yesterday and we decided to have crab cakes at the last minute for dinner last night. That's a fairly complicated process that pushed the dessert making off till this morning, which pushed everything else back as well. Eh, who cares. It's just me, Mr. T, Tony and The Kid. And all The Kid wants to eat is pumpkin bread anyway.

Time for a spell in the PornoHotTub.

There is absolutely no traffic on this blog today, but I'll ask anyway. How's everyone's Thanksgiving?

Help the googlers find organic Christmas trees

2007-11-21T08:51:00.001-08:00

Given recent google queries, it may be time to rerun last year's post about pesticides and Christmas trees (complete with video showing neat but carbon-intensive means of harvesting.) I've only had time to do a little bit of update research, but as far as I can tell, organic Christmas trees are still as rare as they were last year. My organic Christmas tree will be a small tree that needs to be cleared from my yard in Montana to create defensible fire space, but not everyone has an overage of conifers in their front yard.

Anyone have any leads for your area? Drop them in the comments, please. (And if you want to poll your readers for leads, it would be really nice to have something to offer the googlers.)

Here's a page with a few sources.

Free Rice

2007-11-20T22:28:00.000-08:00

Redneck Mother has introduced me to Free Rice, a website aimed perfectly at egomaniacs like me. It's a vocabulary game, and for every word you get right, ten grains of rice are donated to the United Nations Food Program. (Advertisers pay for it, duh.) I donated 3,300 grains of rice so far tonight because I'm all pissy that I can't get past Level 46. The FAQ states that people "rarely" make it past 48.

Thanksgiving dinner may have to wait.

Vuck Off

2007-11-19T17:26:00.000-08:00

So Mr. T is trying to finish up the last of the green bathroom remodel, which involves a great deal of grunting and swearing as he tries to connect the sink pipes. Mr. T is ordinarily a slow-tempered, easygoing type, but he was not winning the Bolt-Turning Battle.

Mr. T: AUUUUGHHHH! GUUUUUUUUUH!

Silence. More turning, more grunting, then a snap.

Mr. T: FUCK!!!

The Kid: Vuck? Daddy, what's vuck mean?

Me: Yeah, Daddy, what does that mean?

Mr. T: It, uh, has to do with the sink.

Later, Mr. T walks by, shoulders drooping, to turn the water back on.

Me: How ya doin? Get your vuck on yet?

Looking forward to the post-petroleum economy

2007-11-18T20:09:00.000-08:00

We'd made it about an hour outside Portland when The Kid announced that he was hungry, and might die if not fed. Because The Dalles, which is the town where he made this announcement, is the last readily available food for the next three hours, we scowled and pulled over. We ate lunch at a restaurant where the server dumped a generous quantity of ice water onto my right hip and butt cheek.

I looked at Mr. T. "Why is it whenever we leave the house....?" I began to think we may have a repeat of our Labor Day misadventures.

"So what do you think will go wrong with the vehicle this time?" I asked Mr. T after lunch, as we hurtled down I-84. Last June, you see, we purchased a lemon. Four weeks after we bought it, we spent $3,000 to replace the engine. Then, on our last trip, the engine refused to start at our hotel in Richland, Washington. I'll take A Brand New Alternator for 400, Alex!

But even I thought that was a rhetorical question, which is why ten minutes later, I was shocked to notice that my right foot was wet. The server hadn't hit my foot, so I knew something was up.

"It's leaking," I announced flatly to Mr. T, whose forehead was now sporting a pulsing blue vein.

"How much?" he asked through gritted teeth. I helpfully demonstrated the answer by saying "drip" every time a drop of water plunked onto the carpet. "Drip." I said. "Drip. Drip. Drip. Dripdripdripdripdrip."

Apparently it only leaks when a) it's raining and b) we're going downhill. Once we fix this new thing, the lemon will have been turned into lemonade -- a nearly perfect vehicle. There's only one problem.

"I hate this car," Mr. T snarled.

He's curled up near the fire with his laptop, looking for a new vehicle.

TTFN

2007-11-17T10:09:00.000-08:00

I'll be in transit for the next odd day or so.

See you when we get there.

I and the Bird No. 62

2007-11-16T21:50:00.000-08:00

The sixty-second incarnation of the I and the Bird carnival is up at Greg Laden's Blog. The endangered albatross post is part of the carnival this time. If you're into birds, there's no better place to spend some time browsing.

And hippopotamuses like me too

2007-11-16T15:43:00.000-08:00

So I was just going to swear off the animal-blogging for awhile, and I thought I'd post youtubes of my two all-time favorite Christmas songs since we're careening headfirst into the holiday season.

Oops:

A hippo and a pig. Which led to this actual instant messaging conversation with Mr. T yesterday afternoon:

Me: Ohmigosh! On youtube: [sends link] Hooray!

Mr. T: my god you aren't going to start the christmas music early this year are you?

Me: Wha? Okay, apparently you didn't get the memo. PORKY PIG'S BLUE CHRISTMAS IS ON YOUTUBE. What could be greater???

Mr. T: I saw.

I swear, some people.

Endangered Species Thursday: The ends don't always justify the means

2007-11-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

Thank goodness for the people who actually read this blog and send me things. I've been slapping myself silly this week trying to get images ready to submit to my stock agency, finish a project for the day job, get ready to go to Montana this weekend, finish some sewing I'm doing for Christmas, and a lot of other things you don't give the tiniest shit about.

But this means I haven't had much time to read the stuff that interests me on the internet and then share it with all of you -- you know, cheery stuff like turtles choking on plastic bags, the innumerable species on the brink of annihilation, and people who commit ugly acts against animals in supposed defense of those same species.

Michael, sender of all things good, is a cat-lover, and was appalled by this story. Me too. Apparently, a guy on the Gulf Coast is accused of shooting and killing a cat he claims was preying on endangered plovers in an area where he regularly leads bird-watching tours.

This has, of course, pitted bird lovers and cat lovers against one another, and the conflict has become somewhat ferocious. But why the binary thinking? Yes, of course feral cats preying on endangered birds is a problem. No, unilaterally shooting them is not an appropriate response to that very real problem.

One of the issues in this case is, no doubt, that the accused is being tried under a law where it's frankly a stretch for the prosecution. (Lawyerly Disclaimer: I am not a Texas lawyer and I don't know all the facts of this case.) It would have been a better use of government resources to round up and care for the feral cats in this area than it would have been to put this man on trial.

It's an ugly case. Look, I know how desperately depressing species loss is. But don't lose your head, people. Let's think of solutions that don't involve bloodshed. It's like that old joke: What do you do if you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?*

Well, damn sure you don't blow it away with a 22-caliber rifle, pally. Feh.

*Yes, I know domesticated house cats are not endangered. You still shouldn't shoot them.