The Cuddly Cactus

I came across this while working a fair for our nature center:



My Scottish genes mean that I will try anything fried at least once. I sampled both a fried snickers and a fried oreo. The fried snickers was too much even for my sweet tooth, but the fried oreo was delicious - it had gone all cake-like and yummy.

I love the look of dogfennel, even though it's a weed and doesn't contribute much to the ecosystem other than building up the soil once it dies in winter.



Although some horses like it. I wish I still had money to ride.



Here's a monarch caterpillar on some milkweed. There are still quite a few butterflies bravely daring a lowcountry fall - at night it gets into the low 50s/upper 40s, and during the day it reaches the low 70s. Mostly the common ones - monarchs, gulf fritillaries, cloudless sulphurs, long-tailed skippers - but yesterday while taking a walk in downtown Charleston I saw a zebra longwings along the Battery. It's only my third of the year, and to see it in a semi-urban setting was neat.



Last is a giant milkweed bug, also on milkweed, though not the same that the monarch cat was on. I'm thinking since they feed on milkweed like the caterpillar, their bright colors might signify that they are poisonous too. However, my dedication to discovery did not extend far enough for me to have a taste.

Sadie has finally stopped waking up at 5:30 AM and is now sticking to 6:30. I don't think I've slept past 7 AM in a year or so. Probably good for me, early to rise and all that. I got a particularly enthusiastic waking this morning in which the 70 pound dog climbed under the covers and licked and chewed and quivered and thrashed around until I let her go out to chase the cat that was hanging around outside. Now, having come back in and ate her breakfast, Sadie is groaning melodramatic groans at me which I can translate as: "Get out of bed and off the computer, it's time to get outside and go for my morning walk!" But my comforter is down and I'm really, really happy putting that off for another 15 min or so. Poor abused dog.

Here's an ailanthus moth, a very common bug to find in South Carolina this time of year.





It's a day flying moth and, though I've never read one way or the other, I bet it's poisonous. Must be, with such bright colors.



This moth is much trickier, and I haven't got a good moth guide book yet, so I'll leave the ID for later. I don't think it has as much pink in it as the photo captured; I bet it's the iridescence of my car shining through the semi-transparent wing panels of the moth. When you look that close at the paint job on my car, it reminds me of the paint job on a sparkly amusement park ride.

I had car anxiety nightmares last. Of course by now the details are slipping away but I remember the tires being made from cheap cloth, not rubber; stains on the upholstery; and several dents and scratches appearing on the body. I woke up crying. I had to go out this morning juuuust to make sure that it was fine. (I did scratch the interior a bit loading and unloading my bike, but the interior is very cheap plastic, so that was to be expected.)

Answer: Anywhere it wants to.



I got a call from my boss's boss: There's an alligator in the middle of a golf club driveway. Go over and see what you can do about it.

I went over with a coworker and sure 'nough, there was a 5, 5 and a half or so foot long alligator sitting in the middle of the golf club driveway. Only half the size of a big male, and not big enough to kill me unless I was very unlucky, but hefty enough to, say, bite off my arm.



Given the size of the alligator in ratio to my lack of training - I've only rescued gators 3 feet and under, never something this big - we decided to use the van as a hide. As my coworker Kyle maneuvered the van, I tried to herd it using a big metal pole. Or rather, I poked it with increasingly forceful pokes until I could feel the metal reverberating with the force of hitting the alligator's skull. No worries about animal cruelty, though, alligators are tough. Here's the view from inside the van.



The alligator took it in stride - or rather, lack of stride, since it wasn't thrilled about moving. I did manage to push it from the road to a little traffic island, but when I tried to poke it from the island and across the other road to the pond, it bit the van and scooted underneath it.

After a while we gave up poking and I noosed it around the upper jaw. Unfortunately, given the alligator's continual lethargy up to that point, I wasn't quite prepared for the immediate fight the alligator decided to put up. As I clung on for dear life to the pole, the steel rope snapped at the weaker attachment point and broke free - luckily the alligator wasn't stuck with a big metal loop around its jaws.

We gave up completely at that point.

I heard later that the alligator had remained in the same spot for more than 12 hours, and they had to continually post a security guard there as tourists kept on trying to take close-up pictures of the gator. Some brave/idiotic guy eventually dragged it off by the tail. We'll call him brave because the alligator was probably sick and didn't try to attack him; if the alligator had attacked him, we would call him foolish. Thus is fate. Anyway, there have been a series of alligator deaths on that part of the island lately and poison is suspected; cause is still a mystery - perhaps there's a serious gator hater going around poisoning alligators, or perhaps the gators are ingesting lead from fishing lines and cast nets. Anyway, from my position in the van I got a very close view of the inside of its mouth when it hissed at me, and I can vouch that it looked dehydrated, for an alligator.

Anyway, it was a pretty sad experience overall because I hate messing with wildlife. Well, there was some base, vile part of me that got a thrill from poking an alligator with a pole. But I didn't like having to do it, because it was so undignified for the alligator. Here's a creature that is the perfectly evolved water predator - like the shark, alligators haven't changed their body plan in hundreds of millions of years. And here come us impertinent humans who enjoy building golf courses and shooting all the alligators over 3 feet. Supposedly because large alligators are a threat, but frankly Hummer drivers pose a much more deadly threat to my little life than an alligator does and I don't see anyone outlawing Hummers.

But I think it's jealousy and possessiveness - we humans like being the ones on top, and we can't stand to see an animal that we must respect and give a wide berth to. We like the power to allow an animal to live or die at our whim, and we don't like being in the opposite position. Admittedly the island that I work on has a progressive policy towards alligators and, unlike most developments, does not kill alligators simply because they are big. They will kill them if they show aggressive behavior towards humans, which is always a direct result of being fed by people who want to watch a very boring stationary predator move around and eat stuff.

As much as I want humans and wildlife to get along together, I get so frustrated with the lack of both respect for and common sense about wildlife. The more I see the more I lose hope with our ability to live on this planet without tearing it apart, and ourselves in the process. What a dour but predictable stance.

On a lighter note, there's a possum in my shower right now. She's eating radishes. I just baked a buckwheat bread from scratch and despite being too earthy and whole grain to rise very much, it's got a great flavor.

I just finished watching Lord Love a Duck - a bleak, strange and disturbing 60s teen movie. I think it's the only bleak, strange, and disturbing 60s teen movie, period. Fresh and bizarre, lots of bitter satire, some weird plot and character choices, and some great acting, including Roddy McDowell, whom I've always had an inexplicable soft spot for, as long as as he's not in a campy chimpanzee suit. Highly recommended but approach with caution! There are some disturbing scenes and no amenable characters to root for. (Not even Roddy McDowell.)

Another 60s movie that was equally bizarre to watch in 2009 was Boys Night Out, a fairly raunchy sex comedy (for 1962) with Kim Novak, James Garner, and Tony Randall. It's not a particularly good movie and it's got a very clunky plot, but it did strike one chord - it's about 3 would-be but ultimately (and extremely unbelievably) unsuccessful philanderers that commute from Greenwich to NYC and back every day. The depiction of the idle, bored, insular, and classist Greenwich wives was spot on.

Gee, who's still bearing a grudge?

I made myself feel better after these two depressing movies by searching youtube for babies laughing uncontrollably. I've never found babies particularly interesting, but I dare a human being to watch six-month-old babies toppling over with crazed belly laughs and not to laugh as well. Here are some recommended ones:

This one has a huuuuge mouth!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6iNxLir0bw

This one has a nice gravely laugh:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG5rQ3D_Zrw&feature=related

This is just sweet, I hope their relationship stays so warm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7mOzWQSnaQ&feature=related

Even more laughing baby:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wIEihDAcpU&feature=related

And the clincher, baby with massive amounts of hair finds ripping paper the most hilarious thing possible and continually topples over:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXXm696UbKY&feature=fvw

I got my CSA bag today, which had a very nice varieties of all things veggie...and 4 small turnips. We've had a steady stream of turnips and I'm running out of ways to cook them. They're very good, actually, but they're still turnips. So tonight I tried making ginger-turnip pancakes, under the theory that all things taste good when mixed with flour, egg, and salt and then pan-fried in canola oil in thin layers. And surprisingly they turned out pretty good. Not as good as pumpkin or carrot pancakes, but with turnips you take what you can get.

I know it's a cliche, but my favorite are the fresh heirloom tomatoes. Good lord. I always thought that those pale pink things you get at the grocery store are tomatoes, but it turns out I was totally wrong. I've only ever had tomatoes as good as these one time before, and those were also fresh heirloom tomatoes that I picked from the yard of Ava the german shepherd that I walked senior year of college. If I ever settle down in one place long enough to start a garden, tomatoes will be the first things in the soil.

The fresh corn also blows store-bought corn out of the water, though I'm used to fresh corn from New Jersey and Wisconsin, which is much better than South Carolina corn.

Other than tomatoes, all the greens are better than grocery store greens as well. The only type of green I won't touch are the mustard greens, of which I got a big bag today. Sorry, mustard greens, you're going straight to the bunnies at work. I don't trust greens with such little sharp hairs on the outside and such an agonizingly bitter flavor on the inside. Most of the root veggies are better - turnips, radishes, sweet potatoes, and carrots - plus I get the nice greens attached. Except sweet potato greens, which I am vaguely remembering are poisonous. Most hanging things, however, - cucumber, sweet pepper, green beans, and both winter and summer squash - seem about the same quality that I'd get at a grocery store.

I'm watching Sherlock Holmes on our public tv station now and when Jeremy Brett is on his game as Holmes, he is ON. Wow. Though the poor guy got so haggard and ill as the series progressed, and I prefer his initial cold-iron-pole look, same as I pictured when I read some of the books and stories. (The actor who plays Watson remains pretty much identical over the years!) I need to see a Basil Rathbone version now.

Oh, and I finished Bleak House today, all 820+ pages! Yea! Take that, short attention span of the Millenial generation. (I guess I'm squished halfway between generation Y and Millenial...) Next I really should finish up the Journals of Lewis and Clark, though I get so depressed as I learn more and more of what we've lost.

I swung by Old Navy to pick up some new khakis for work, and ended up with no khakis but a completely useless but wonderful sweater/coat/wrap thingy from the clearance rack that I still can't really categorize. It's knee-length, knit with a warm cotton/wool/nylon blend, wide tan and dark brown horizontal stripes, and only has 3 buttons in front. (Speaking of, it's a tad tight in the "girls" region, which seem to have taken no notice of weight loss in other departments.) Oh, and a hood and lovely pockets at perfect hand level. But whatever the heck it was designed for, formal or informal, I intend to use it for dog walks and lounging around the house watching Jeremy Brett. I love the fact that it's knee length, it makes me feel all sophisticated and cool.

It took me ages, but I finally found a pic online:

http://media.photobucket.com/image/old%20navy%20sweater%20coat/fashionunder100/1-109.jpg

The khakis, by the way, were rejected because they were far too cheap and flimsy feeling. I really ought to get some study Columbia or Patagonia pants, but given my Khaki Destruction Rate of 2/season, that gets too expensive! Now it's Goodwill or bust. This is the first time I've bought a new item of clothing in ages! Barring underwear and socks, of course. I'm so out of touch with fashions and stuff - not like I was ever in touch - but I was quite bewildered by all the new looks at Old Navy. That's the benefit of having a uniform, I only have to wear something different on weekends!

I've been waiting for this night after months of steamy hot Lowcountry weather. Especially those days when nighttime temperatures fell to 85 degrees. I've just finished taking Sadie on a walk through a nearby field and it's in the low 50s...not cold to my previous New England/Scotland adjusted body, but definitely cold to my current South Carolina adjusted body. Tonight it's supposed to be in the mid 40s, and I've turned on my heat for the first time since...um...February? March?

The best thing about cold weather are the clothes. I've grown more used to wearing shorts than I ever thought I would be, but can't exactly say I enjoy them. Ultimately I am a creature of warm comfy clothes. I realize this does not rate me high on the female attractiveness scale. However, ever since I lost so much weight I am making far more of an effort to wear more flattering clothing out in public than my previous 215-pound-outfits - jeans and a unisex t-shirt. Not like I'm wearing heels and lipstick, neither of which I even own. I haven't put on makeup since college, and that was only under coercion. I limit it to jeans and girly t-shirts that fit a little better than the two-sleeves-and-a-rectangle look.

But when it is pitch black out there other than starlight and the unfortunate tendency of neighbors to flood their houses with bright halogen lights, I revert back to my natural sloppy-but-comfortable state. I am so happy to be in my loose jeans, snugly hoodies, warm socks, sturdy boots, and a poofy scarf. Add binoculars and a dog romping somewhere in the vicinity and I am a complete unit of contentment. I don't know whether its is the clothes that put me into a chipper, creative mindset or the cold weather or merely the absence of hot weather...but I officially love November!

I think the best thing about having a dog around is that it encourages you to take joy in the most mundane tasks. I just took out the trash down our 1/4 mile dirt driveway with Sadie. Most of the way I can let her run off leash, but even seeing me pick up the trash and leash gets her excited. Walking out the door changes from something I don't even think about to a huge production number. If she could belt out gospel-esque showtunes, she would. I love watching her bound through the woods after last night's raccoon scents.

Now I'm doing the dishes, which she enjoys helping with when they're covered with cheese or other tempting food. Now that it's actually time for the washing, though, she's sitting in front of the door waiting to take the trash out again.

I had a green smoothie for dinner last night made from arugula, bananas, blueberries, and water. The peppery flavor of the arugula must have led to some strange dreams, because I remember a devastating dream in which Sadie's previous owners reclaimed her and dragging her back to their house to be tied up outside. I started composing a long angry e-mail to the rescue before I realized that she was still here, and in fact taking up about 85% of the bed. Glad I didn't send it.

Here's our native mantid species, the Carolina mantid. I have my itunes on random now, and as I am uploading this, it is playing the Imperial March from Star Wars. Just sayin'.



And just to prove I'm not a total dork, the previous two songs were Smiley Faces by Gnarls Barkley and Ripple by the Greateful Dead.

On second thought, looking back at my play history for the last few days, I don't think there are any non-dorky songs in my itunes.

Exhibit A: A perfectly innocent Salt Marsh Skipper (Panoquina panoquin) minding its own business on some frogfruit (Pyla nodiflora.



Exhibit B: A male Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phyleus) approaches.


Exhibit C: Mr. Fiery Skipper asserts his dominance


Exhibit D: Fiery Skipper victorious. Salt Marsh Skipper goes to another frogfruit to sulk for a while.

34.1 on latest Cube tank, yea.

I am doing one of our local CSAs this fall, and it's great fun, like Christmas every week. And it forces me to eat my veggies when my carb-craving body would prefer mac and cheese (mmmmmmmm). I have been getting away with eating some unhealthy food lately because I'm pretty active all day at work, plus taking Sadie for 3 walks a day. Next time I have a sedentary job I'll be in trouble.

I haven't had TV in years, but just this month got a satellite receiver and digital recorder in my room. I normally don't watch TV due to annoyance with commercials but this lets me skip through them, and I've really enjoyed getting the CBS Sunday Morning Show every week. I've also got it set to record old Twilight Zone episodes, which still freak me out but now with additional thrills of delight in how clever and insightful they are. And I just finished two episodes of Trigger Happy TV, which is somewhat like a bittersweet, weird British version of candid camera. It's amazingly therapeutic to watch. In day to day life, I fake-chuckle a lot at things that aren't so funny, and I smile at things that are mildly funny, but I hardly ever laugh in a genuine way. Most of my family seems to be the same way. That show made me laugh, hooray! I need to do that more often! Too bad it's laughing at situations that are slightly cruel. Not more than slightly, I hope.

I also laughed at Sadie when she crashed into a tree. I'm so mean.

I went to the doctors for a checkup today. I was a little nervous about getting bloodwork done, but the nurse was great and it was no issue at all. But the pap smear - ugh! It was one of the most painful and unpleasant events of my year so far. I couldn't relax, which only made it more painful. Yeesh. Next time I'm going to ask for xanax the day before. :-o

On a happier note, my cube got 34.54 mpg on its latest tank, yea! Another orphan squirrel was brought in yesterday, so he's sitting in a box on my countertop now. Sadie thinks its the best toy I've ever brought home. He survived the first 24 hours, and luckily is close to weaning anyway, so he shouldn't be with us for that long.

Upon which I have worked hard:

Indian lentil/bean/tomato sauce on a bed of quinoa with a side of creamy spinach. And, in a slightly more naughty vein, a pair of stella artois that a coworker had given me for doing him a favor at work. I love stella artois, and it loves me.

Sadie doesn't like rawhide, but she loves dried bull pizzles, so that's what she gets, even though they are far more expensive. The lengths we go for dogs.

I'm on page 724 of Bleak House, and I'm a bit depressed by how clever a writer Dickens is. I really enjoy the experience when clever people produce art, but leave feeling satisfied, which isn't always a good feeling. When I watch a movie or read a book that had some promising features but was generally boring and predictable, I'm always inspired to think of creative ways to develop the characters, sharpen up the dialogue, move the plot a bit more unpredictably, etc. Gets my brain busy and happy. When I read Dickens, I'm just impressed with him. I don't understand the fan fiction phenomenon when it comes to really nicely written books - like His Dark Materials - that trilogy pretty much stands on its own. But I see how I could get into writing fan fiction that is far superior than the crappy original.

This is the female version of the hot pink dragonfly I posted earlier. The roseates I've photographed so far (grand total of 3, but hey, you have to start somewhere) are very patient as I inch closer and closer, trying to get it in focus.



Dinner tonight was Unconventional Tostadas using various bits of leftover food: home-fried corn tortillas, chopped tomatoes, sauted mini sweet peppers and garlic, black beans, shredded cabbage, scallions, and goat cheese. Not as bad as it sounds, even with cabbage.

My nice productive day at work was Brought To You By Red Bull, a product I usually shy away from but couldn't resist as I dragged myself to an early morning bird tour. Which didn't go out after all because no one was signed up. Weird job I have sometimes with the wide variety of tasks.

First I fixed up a two week supply of opossum food, assembly-line style, all neatly packaged in little soup storage thingies. Then I met with some staff as part of my role as supervisor (I've been promoted to supervisor, but sadly won't get a pay raise because no one is getting any. As our CEO said: Employees, you're not getting any pay raises this year or probably next. But at least you have jobs.)

Then I programmed an excel spreadsheet to help us keep our expenses in line and understood by all supervisors. After that I spent an hour editing and/or writing various small publications that we produce. And then desperately tried to remember trigonometry so that I could calculate one side of a triangle for our new touchscreen computer display based only on its angles and another side. I failed at that. Probably because my TI-83 graphing calculator is long gone.

So therefore I regressed to preschool to color, cut out, laminate, and assemble an alligator hatchling growth rate display. After a late lunch, I created a 12-slide powerpoint presentation on edible wild plants of the island. And then to top off the day, I researched, designed, and bought a memorial stone for our nature rabbit, Hodge Podge, who just died at a nearly record-breaking age of 12.

I'm so glad I took that chance in Wyoming to pursue my true dream of working in the environmental field. I get so much fulfillment out of my job, it's almost hard to remember the great extent of my dislike for the south in general. There's bits and pieces that are nice, like the beauty of Spring Island, but the repressive conservative culture, heat, chiggers, rednecks, guns, overdevelopment, bare minimum of cheap-but-interesting cultural events, and distance from friends and family are really taking their toll.

Third tank of gas = 32.7, not quite as good but still better than the estimated mpg.

I wish all emotions were as easy to recognize and quantify as primal emotions like grief. When I feel grief it's a far more physical than mental reaction. Fear, lust, etc - that's easy to recognize. But love for a friend - that's tougher. It's so hard for me to understand friendship sometimes. Some days I feel like I don't love anyone, and some days I feel like I'm full of love for anything that moves. Can you love someone without enjoying their company? Or can you enjoy someone's company without loving them? What happens if you don't love someone that you should - like my grandpa on my dad's side. When he died I didn't feel at all sad because we weren't close.

This is all prompted by a recent rash of some life changes in coworkers - some of which I know and some of which I don't. Every time someone has a life change - move, family death, marriage, etc - we have to sign a card and write a little something. Mostly I just want to write something like "Heard you lost your dad. That sucks." Being somewhere on the border between atheist and agnostic, and certainly not believing in an afterlife, that's all I can think of in terms of genuine sentiment. I don't write that though - usually I just try to reword the trite sentiments a little so they are different from the other trite sentiments.

Big increase on gas mileage for my second tank - 10.272 gallons over 343 miles put me at 33.4 mpg. Not bad for a box-shaped car that is rated 28 city, 30 highway.



A box-shaped car is a bringer of slaughter and massacre to insects, though, which makes me feel horribly guilty every I drive past the fallow fields along my commute where the lovebugs are loving. I have to scrub off the guts of a hundred lovebugs every time I go to work.

I feel a sad little urge to attempt sourdough bread again; sadly, making large quantities of bread, even whole grain, is not a good idea for the ol' diet. A sample healthy meal for me was last night's leek, mushroom, chicken, and brussel sprouts soup; it was actually quite good, but it would have been even better with a nice crusty loaf of sourdough bread. Sigh.

Hunting season must have begun or will be beginning soon; every time our various redneck neighbors shoot off their guns, Sadie gallops around my tiny apartment and lets it rip with the barking.



These are seeds from Crotalaria spectabilis, an annoying weed that is just plain cool despite its invasive behavior. It's got beautiful yellow snapdragony flowers and fun boxy seed pods that are fun to snap and pull out those gorgeous shiny heart-shaped seeds...

All my cooking is vegetarian these days. I'll have the occasional chicken burrito at work, but at home I haven't cooked meat more than twice in a year or so. One of my local grocery stores was having a sale on organic grass-fed beef, so I decided to splurge on a London broil. I marinated it with garlic, rosemary, freshly ground pepper and kosher salt, then cooked it with a massive amount of fresh asparagus and mushrooms. It was incredibly delicious to the point where I swore out loud in wonderment. Nothing now but feelings of contentment, fulfillment, and an urgent need to proclaim to the world how tasty meat is, even a lowly London broil.

Sadie was very happy with the gravy on her dog food, but then again Sadie's happy with the days-dead frog in the driveway.

Luckily organic grass-fed beef is prohibitively expensive, so it won't happen often. Now if I can get a side of venison this fall during hunting season, that might be a different story.

I had a fun field trip with Sadie after all day at the desk. I shouldn't complain, as this is the first time I've been able to sit down for more than an hour at work, but nature tours outside will now be the exception rather than the rule because it'll be the off season in resortville. Though it means a lower salary until the busy season starts up again, it also means 8 hour days rather than 12 hour days and the chance to come home early enough to play with the camera and my lovely local bugs!



This is a viceroy, a mimic of the monarch butterfly. I had a tough time telling them apart until I actually took the time to look up the difference, and now it's easy. Viceroys are small and have a black bar across their lower wing; Monarchs are larger, faster, and lack the black bar.



Most people mistake these for monarchs too, but look at that crazy silver. Looks like someone painted it on. I found this female gulf fritillary resting on the ground, cool as a cucumber, as a male went crazy around her. Here he is showing off his wing agility.



After a while she let him approach and they got pretty cuddly for butterflies. Unfortunately, Sadie burst through the scene before they could get anywhere.




I also found this crazy caterpillar, who looked reasonably like the gulf fritillary caterpillars I've met but could be several other types too. I don't have a good caterpillar guidebook so it'll have to wait for a positive ID.



One more gulf fritillary, sorry about the super duper fritillary overload but they are much easier to photograph than the little yellow and sleepy orange that I chased down but never got a single image of.



I think this next one is the best shot of the bunch - the detail on the wings can't show up on my livejournal but on my computer it's awesome. Pure chance, sadly. I took 30+ photos of this dragonfly but this is the only one that came out with that level of detail. This is a male Carolina Saddlebags.



A praying mantis of some sort, I don't have a good guidebook. I'm keeping a larger species at the nature center who is too fat to fly. This one was a good flyer, and that combined with the way its head is shaped and the feelers hanging back over the head gave me an uncomfortable reminder of its family resemblance to cockroaches. Uck. Normally I'm a big mantis fan, but this one looked roachy enough to give me the willies.



Last is a roseate skimmer male, a surreal pink and purple dragonfly that is close as I'll ever get to a hallucinogenic experience since I've never taken an illegal drug and don't think I ever will.