Hubris

A friend sent me this article from the LA Times, and I am appalled. Especially the last sentence...as if giving your kids daycare and Lunch-ables and living on a busy street is bad parenting. Hello, you TWAT, not giving your child needed medical care is beyond bad parenting, it is murder. To hell with your philosophical or religious values. I haven't read the bible in a year, but I can't recall reading anywhere "if your kid gets sick, let it die."

This woman is a promoter of the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS, even in the face of over-whelming scientific evidence that it does. Rather like the "global warming is not happening, or if it is, it's not caused by humans" crowd. GRRRRR.

Today I did some volunteer work at Moraine Hills State Park(MHSP). It has cooled off enough that I can now go outside and do stuff. All we did was weed out Foxtail Grass, an obnoxious non-native annual. It looks cool, but it doesn't belong so buh-bye. It was good weather for weeding...the ground was wet(it's been raining, YAY!)and it was a bit humid, but with a real nice breeze.

The really nice volunteer group at MHSP is falling apart. The man in charge of the park is dismissive of and has a venomous disdain for us volunteers...his idea of useful volunteering is that we should be painting picnic benches and picking up trash, instead of painting new bluebird nest boxes and doing restoration work. MHSP hasn't advertised for new volunteers in years. The state laid off 1 ranger, and demoted the other one who were very suppportive of us. Hence, the head of the volunteers, Dave, has fled to Glacial Park, which is a Lake County Forest Preserve. He gets lots of support there. Losing Dave was like losing a free biologist. Way to go, governor

I call MHSP the Nature Store. If I need some native plant seeds.....I'm permitted to take some. Today I got Large Flowered Penstemon, Prairie Clover, and Whorled Milkweed. I go seed shopping right up through November. It's not legal, actually. A person is allowed to collect on federal lands, not state or county. We are allowed to do it because we put in a lot of hours there, and restore that which is degraded, and there aren't that many of us anymore. We never take the rare stuff. Today I saw a clump of Silene Regia, which is a plant I love, but I didn't take any seed because it is endangered in this area.

Last year, in late October, I went to the nature store to collect some compass plant seeds...and every single plant had been stripped..the seedheads torn right off. That is how NOT to collect. You never, ever take everything. In the case of these compass plants, an entire generation was wiped out. This is a plant which can live more that 70 years, and takes 7 years to bloom from seed. I'll go earlier next year, and I'll collect 1 seedhead. In the next couple of years, I won't have to do it at all because my plants (bought from reputable sources) should bloom.

I no longer collect Big Bluestem, Little Bluestem, and Indian Grass because my plants provide me with all the seed I care to have. Other seeds I no longer collect are: gentian, asters, goldenrod, pale purple coneflower(echinacea pallida), side oats grama, verbena stricta, boneset, rattlesnake master, culver's root, cardinal flower, alum plant, pussytoes. All these plants that are giving me seed now are plants that I bought at native plant sales, which are numerous in the spring.

Happy Bird Day

A nice photo, courtesy of Ron Austing. Well, it says I notice stuff, so today, and yesterday, I noticed lots of hummingbirds in the garden in front of work. I've seen more HB's in the last 2 days than I've seen in my entire life so far. They're all Ruby Throated hummingbirds(Archilochus colubris), which are the only HB's that are native to this area. This is the time of year that they migrate. The only reason I can think of that I'm seeing so many of them this year is that the last 3 days have been really windy, and they've gotten blown off course. Or maybe I just didn't notice them in the last 4 falls I've worked where I work, but I'm pretty observant about stuff like that.

I work in Evanston, which is on the shore of Lake Michigan, which is also a major flyway for migratory birds of all stripes. Lots of hawks and owls use this flyway, too. If the damn things would only hold still, I could maybe tell you what kind they were. If the HB's use the Mississippi flyway, then the windiness of the last few days could explain their presence here.

They are attracted to the Salvia and the "Mexican Petunias" that are in the planters. I'm not a hummingbird nut, but they're very amazing little creatures. They look like overly large bugs, they flit in and flit out almost before you have the time to realise that they're little birds. I did see one visit the Mexican Petunias, then flit up to a tree branch and sit there for about 30 seconds. That's about as long as they rest, unless they're sitting on their pea-sized eggs.

I just imagine the little suckers hurling themselves across the Gulf of Mexico, on their way south.

Hey, We Just Re-discovered This Bird

That's the holy grail of birders....that's been considered extinct since 1940, the rarest bird in the world...why NOT start fucking with it's environment RIGHT AWAY!

As long as the rice farmers get the water for their endangered rice...........

Sorry, this was too good to not share.

Passed on from the Daily Kos..a screen capture.

Then, there's this evidence that the media may be developing a spine again.

It's seed time

I received a fine gift from my doctor yesterday...the rest of the week off. Lord knows how this will play out with the clip-cloppy ones at the hell-mouth. If he exists at all, he also knows I really can't afford a week off....My temptation is to go in there Saturday morning, clear off my desk, and never set foot in there again.

Since the doctor gave me permission to start hobbling around today, I will go out and collect some seeds, which I can then trade for better seeds. maybe by Saturday I can plant a few of the seeds that I planted last winter, and grew, and have been sitting in pots ever since because it's been too dang hot.

I fell off the....porch

I went outside Monday night to move the car, so Dan could pull around my car when he leaves for work in the morning. The kitchen was bright, the outside was dark. Temporarily blinded, I stepped off the side of the porch, expecting a step to be where one was not. I landed with my full weight on my left leg and heard something in my hip go crunch and pop. Ow. I moved the car, went back inside, and went about my business. By the time I got into bed, I couldn't move. I had an almost sleepless night. Dan took me to the emergency room Tuesday morning. No fracture, so far, but torn ligaments in my hip. Hopefully, good for the rest of the week off. I'm seeing my doctor today at 3PM in Chicago, and will use the opportunity to hang out a bit in the city, which I get a bit wistful about sometimes.

Oh, and Darvocet is a hell of a drug. I'm kinda diggin' it.

Thank god for Celebrities....

Sean Penn pulls a swift, "hey, look at me!" move, and his efforts sink. What a moran(see previous post)!

Does anyone else besides me think that these celeb fund-raisers and helpers are not so much about helping the afflicted but are about turning the public's attention back to the more important things in life, i.e., themselves? Call me cynical, call me late for dinner, but this is what I suspect.

I just remember the celeb fund raiser after 9.11, which I watched, and couldn't help but smell the desperation of the celebs...hey..don't forget about us. look at us. pay attention to us again. Please. We might even talk to you if you call in with a donation.

The brilliant minds of the pro-war folks

Don't be too harsh on him...he probably graduated summa cum laude from Texas A&M.

American Refugees

Never thought you'd see those 2 words together in a sentence, did you?

See that big-ass blob of clouds heading towards the gulf coast and New Orleans? About 1 or 2 days away from landfall? Please explain to me why we did not have everything in place.Why were we not prepared for this? Why were people dispatched to shelters, only to sit 5 days without food, water and sanitation?

Welcome to something worse than 9/11.....physically, at least. To be totally self-centered......at least there is not this ball of fear at the top of my spine, which I had after 9/11, and was this almost palpable thing sitting in the back of my skull about the size of a tennis ball...because people out there wanted to kill us, or me. I can understand the seeming mean-ness of nature because nature is insensate..what I cannot understand is the meanness of human beings.

The hurricane....This was just nature, egged on by global warming(that doesn't exist, according to die-hard conservatives, even though your president finally admitted it was a problem), an abnormally warm 90 degree Gulf of Mexico, and nothing personal.The link shows temps along the coastline, the picture above has a legend that tells you what the surface temp was in the Gulf. The strength of this hurrican was man made, imo. Everything that has happened since the hurricane is totally man-made. One man's story. Scroll way down to "Broussard". Listen to how un-caring Russert is, as per usual. The whirring sound you hear is a desperate conservative pundit trying to spin this federal failure into a state and local issue.

Dan and I have donated to the American Red Cross, the Humane Society, and have volunteered to relay phone calls and e-mails between displaced family members. I'm trying to reach someone's grandparents right now.

I am a southernor by birth, a yankee by raising....and I am always figthing some kind of war in my head. I hate the south, mostly because of the huge spiders and complete lack of culture and critical thought and cynicism in the small, strange, republican ass-kissing town my parents live in. We'll get that food and water out to you in a few days, bubba, and maybe by then pick up some of the corpses, too. The Department of Homeland Security could not even prepare for a catastrophe that they knew about 3 days ahead of time. What in the hell will they do for us when something un-expected happens? Our stupid president chose to go fund-raising and golfing while the gulf-coast was being razed, then sat on his hands while refugees were dying. Yesterday, he finally appeared to get his shit together. 5, 6, 7 days after the fact. This man is not a leader.

Why did Kristina happen? 9/11? Well..the answers are right here...brought to you by devout christians! Every soldier killed in Iraq is a victory for a vengeful god, who hates America for her toleration for gays and abortions! Can you understand why i think evangelicals should be thrown to the lions, toute de suite?