Be Here Now

The webcam is pointed into the Upper Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park; this morning steam is rising from Old Faithful, Giantess, Beehive, Lion, and Giant, among several other thermal features visible in this capture. I really can't complain, I will be in the park by Friday this week. It's been a long and exceptionally wet winter, things are just beginning to green up, and the wildlife, especially the top-of-the-food-chain predators, has been abundantly visible. I can't wait to get home!

A bit from my bio

At the request of a cousin, some months ago I started writing my autobiography. It's been a tremendously interesting exercise, though it is going slowly. But I think it might be fun to post sections of it here. The following is from my very early years:
In 1954, my parents took me on the first of several summer retreats to Martha’s Vineyard, when it was as yet undiscovered by many but well-to-do black Americans. As an interesting side note, I was entirely oblivious to that historic fact, in spite of several return visits as an adult, until only perhaps 10 years ago. A neighbor and friend, a distinguished executive of African-American heritage herself, happened to mention her acquaintances who had a home there. She expanded a bit, and eventually I understood that black doctors, lawyers, educators, and businessmen have been the builders and occupants of many of the stately homes on that attractive dot in the ocean off Cape Cod over the last hundred years. The TV movie, The Wedding, with Halle Berry, is set there, more or less contemporaneous with my family’s visits. Happily, children, (and, apparently, some adults), are color-blind.
We went again in 1955, 1956, and in 1959. It was during those halcyon summers that I discovered Nature. We rented a little cinder-block “cottage” owned by a man named Sisson. It sat among a couple of others at the end of Shirley Road (this latter information is thanks to Google Maps, 2008; it was gravel and very sparsely inhabited in those days, and it would not be surprising if it had not yet been named then) in poison-ivy-filled woodlands adjacent to the Lagoon. On the shore of the Lagoon was (and still is) the State Lobster Hatchery, freely open to our explorations. It delighted me to see the Brownian flagellations of millions of hatchlings in small, smelly concrete tanks with their churning bubblers. Also for my viewing pleasure were a couple of adult specimens of gargantuan size or with especially bizarre claw deformities.
The Lagoon was Nature-made, resplendent with sea life. Every day we found washed up on the little beach live horseshoe crabs and dried compartmentalized strings of conch egg cases, with a thousand fully formed miniature shells inside. In the water itself, and in the brackish wetlands behind the Lagoon, were healthy scallops with neon-blue eye-dots and blue crabs that blithely came to eat the chicken legs my father tossed into the water on strings, only to be scooped up in his net and boiled for dinner by my mother. Elsewhere on the island were tiny wild blueberries, and on the unprotected Atlantic side, below the spectacular cliffs of Gay Head, dangerous Portuguese-Man-O-War jellies washed up on the beach, tempting curious little girls to touch, or at least to throw rocks at them. In 1954, hurricane Carol made her way up the coast and, besides terrifying my mother (whose experience with hurricanes in Puerto Rico informed her fears) lifted the pleasure boats and those of lobstermen alike onto the sidewalks and the docks, and caused much other memorable havoc.
Unfortunately, whether because of the interference of man, or because of Nature’s whims, the last time I saw the Lagoon it had changed extremely and was no longer the fruitful cradle of the 1950s. The outlet under the bridge was silted up, thus the source of fresh seawater and nutrients was choked off.

Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mothers Day to Eleanor Lawton-Sebeok, March 10, 1912-January 24, 2005. I'm thinking of you, as I often do.

And I quote...

A student who works for us brought me a little souvenir mother-of-pearl bookmark from his home country of Korea. It's quite sweet, very pretty, and comes with the following helpful description on the back of the package:

The product which it sees bites Korean tradition and ocean it is beautiful the color which the materials is brilliant with the product which it manufactures with mother-of-pearl lacquerware technique the nature which will wind to express like that

I have to say, the spelling is impressive, it's just the punctuation that seems to be lacking.

They're alive! updates

Photo from Bob Smith/JH News...How 'bout this for a fine update of my long-ago post on this roly-poly (amazingly so following a long winter hibernating, and taking in nothing) family? Read the very good article about their current status in the Jackson Hole News. Let us hope the cubs soon decide to wander far from civilization and, in a few years, successfully make some cubs of their own. We hope very much to see them when we're in the Tetons again this May—what a thrill that would be—and as the article points out, this is very likely to be the last stretch of weeks or months that they will be seen together. YES!!

Clams make good pets, don't they?

From my neighborhood paper's want ads section...I've always thought a clam would be a good companion to me (and to my dog), but I never knew they merited $13/hour training, playgroups, or walks and jogs!

Creativity limited to...

I'm a little busy with other stuff, taxes, homework from my class, and just getting a grip on the general post-travel mess in my home. So my creativity will be limited to posting a few photos from our travels in southern California last week and the week before. More useful narrative follows, eventually, I hope.

OH NO! White shoes are in again this year!

So are bone! Just search on "white" at Zappos.com, if you don't believe me. ARGH!!

Back from SoCal

More photos and stories to come. Meantime, here's a pic from Joshua Tree National Park. Enjoy!

PhotoShop Phollies

My father, next to our 1959 Rambler Ambassador station wagon, a la PhotoShop. Yes, the car was bright red, with a white blaze on the side. Too bad (or, maybe it's a good thing) I don't have any photos of its predecessor, our very own pink Plymouth sedan.
With my thanks to Regina Antique Auto, Members' Rides, for the image of a pink 1956 Plymouth!

I'm not lost, strayed, or stolen

So here's what I've been up to, in a nutshell:

1. I participated in Lady Hawkers 2008, this year's annual fund raiser for SOAR (Save Our American Raptors) about two hours from Chicago in middle-upper-Illinois-beautiful-heartland-
breadbasket Earlville. This is a terrific event in which a bunch of women start by eating high fat, high calorie breakfast, and lots of it, followed by pulling on our hunting duds, gathering the hawks, and heading out to a quiet field, beating the bushes for cottontail rabbits, and yelling "HOHOHOHO!" when one is flushed to draw the attention of the hawk being flown (they normally fly up to a high vantage as soon as the falconer removes their hood and releases them). The hawk plummets very fast and calculatedly to intersect the rabbit's panicked trajectory. Usually three out of four stoops fails. This year we had only one bird, a female red tailed hawk named Niña, handled by Carolyn S. Niña caught her first and only bunny within 5 minutes of release. Carolyn released her again after collecting the bunny and giving Niña a little meat. We continued to beat bushes for another hour, flushing many more rabbits, but our hawk showed only polite interest. In spite of the cold, it felt absolutely wonderful to be tromping around outside in the early spring sunshine.
After hawking and a group shot of all of us looking a pleased mess, hair and socks full of burrs and boots all muddy, we head back to SOAR for an enormous pot-luck lunch, followed by much rowdiness and perhaps a little beer...and a raffle. Everybody donates stuff to the raffle. Usually there are a fabulous book or two, falconry bells that I've always wanted to draw but haven't (yet), original art work by one or another of the talented Lady Hawkers, and other unexpected goodies. This year someone must have robbed a hardware store because there were at least a dozen flashlights of different kinds: nice lantern-types for surviving blackouts, traditional torches, and so on. Many of us, including moi, scored several flashlights. Oh boy. It's lots of fun and earns a few bucks for SOAR, run by my friends, the tireless and charming Berni and George Richter.
2. Not long after returning from Lady Hawkers, and coincidentally it turns out, I came down with the world's worst case of viral enteritis. I have never, ever been that sick. I am now 99% recovered, due to the judicial application of a key controlled substance* and pure orneriness (mine). I actually missed two days of work and was mistaken by all for the Walking Dead on the one day I did go in.
3. I’m enrolled in Intermediate Manuscript Editing through the Graham School of General Studies at the University of Chicago. This is the second required course towards the certificate in editing. I so greatly enjoyed the introductory course, taught last fall by University of Chicago Press editor Erik Carlson, and if anything am enjoying this course by his colleague, Susan Allan, even more. I have good instincts but poor ability to remember specific rules (as dictated by the Chicago Manual of Style) but it’s all in the trying. Plus the course, three full days in a row, is at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business’s Gleacher Center at the foot of the Magnificent Mile, and it’s just perfectly beautiful. All of this leaves absolutely no time for other virtuous behavior, such as housekeeping. Hurrah!

*By physician's prescription for the occasion, of course.

Warning to my friends regarding COMMENTS

My last two postings each attracted a comment that links to a site that rapidly downloads and starts to run a purported "anti-virus" scan which, of course, is in fact something malicious. I've managed to abort it and I believe avoided any damage. Please use caution when reading comments after my posts. If the message says something like "look here" and contains a link, DO NOT click on it.

I've reported this to Blogspot twice (because if it's happening to me, it's happening to others) but they have completely ignored my messages.

Gunga la gunga, as they say.

I'm frozen to the ground, and very happy about it!

It's winter in Yellowstone
And the gentle breezes blow
Seventy miles an hour
At twenty-five below

Oh, how I love Yellowstone
When the snow's up to your butt
You take a breath of winter
And your nose gets frozen shut

Yes, the weather here is wonderful
So I guess I'll hang around
I could never leave Yellowstone
'Cause I'm frozen to the ground!!
~author unknown

(Passed on to me by a friend; if you know the origin please tell me!)

For my friend MRINZ

I took this photo from the air on the approach to Salt Lake City in February of 2007. Around that time I was having a bunch of molars crowned. This absolute desecration made me think of what the dentist must have seen as he fixed things in the back of my mouth. It's certainly what it felt like to my half-numb tongue.

It is also strongly reminiscent of Mrinz's photo of the gold mine near her New Zealand home. Of course, being Americans, we have to do everything bigger (preferably biggest) if not better. The Kennecott Copper mine has the distinction of being the world's largest man made excavation and is featured by the state of Utah as an attraction!

What I like best about the word sycophant

is that sycophant sounds enough like its poor relation, suck-up (you know, as in suck-up-phant) that even someone who doesn't know what it means might be able to guess. Also, the psycho part has kind of a nice ring to it.
Sorry, I'm not in a generous mood right now.