Once-Feral Cat

By: | May 20, 2019

This cat is celestial. Brought to the house on a sled down a snowed-in road, he arrived in the deepest winter I’d seen in years. Fresh from a shelter, he entered our home wide-eyed, a couple years old, sniffing everything. My girlfriend said he was perfect.

The year before had been hard. We’d lost four cats, each a stray that stopped in. Understand, we did our best to keep them before they vanished. Eaten, no doubt. I wrote about them here.

In rural country, most outdoor cats mean meat for wild carnivores. The wiliest survive, while the rest of the barn cats are picked off by birds of prey, eaten by coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, squashed while running across a back road. You don’t get too attached to barn cats. Some aren’t named for ten years or more.

This one was from a shelter, not a feral that came sniffing around and decided we were the better option. Once we got records we learned he had, indeed, been a neutered feral from a mesa near where we live, traveled to the shelter an hour away just to come back home.

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The day I tried to love ticks

By: | May 17, 2019
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This post originally appeared in 2016, but now that my morning ritual involves picking at least one fat tick off the dog, I figured it was time for a reprise.

There’s a certain category of mundane but distinctly unpleasant discovery: The blueberries you just mixed in your oatmeal explode mold into your mouth at 6 a.m. You read that Donald Trump won the Nevada Republican caucuses. You roll over in bed to find a tick lodged midriff-deep in your shoulder, wiggling about with a tenacity that suggests she plans to spelunk all the way through to your lungs.

“Fortuitously, the antibiotic you take prophylactically for Lyme disease is also the one you take to treat Chlamydia,” the doctor tells me cheerfully a day later when he checks the bruised and swollen bite and gives me a prescription. I stare at him, wondering why he thinks I need this information. It’s unlikely that I’ve got Lyme. Though local incidence is going up, Oregon saw only 44 reported cases in 2014 and Washington generally gets fewer than 30 a year – with just zero to three stemming from local ticks. But the fact that odds are in my favor fails to cheer me as I pluck tick after ever-more-engorged tick from my dog over the next several days. They’re small and hide well in her fur, so unless they pop out of her ears and stroll calmly across her face (some do) I can’t seem to find them until they’re attached and on their way to becoming fat and shiny as coffee beans.

Their emergence is, of course, just as much a sign of spring as the lovely purple grass widows my friend Roger and I had been out looking for when tickmageddon started last Saturday. By tick 10, I started to wonder: Aside from their reputation for transmitting more diseases than any other blood-sucking arthropod, why shouldn’t I find a way to appreciate ticks, too – from a safe distance away? Maybe I could even learn to love them a little bit.

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The Marshes of America’s Space Program

By: | May 16, 2019
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Liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-70, July 13, 1995. Credit: NASA

Last week, on my visit to the Moon rocks, I walked across a bridge topping a marsh. To my right were tall grasses emerging from a long, thin body of water, bending toward the east. To my left was a space shuttle perched on a 747. I heard waterfowl piping and chirping, but I couldn’t see them in the already-humid morning haze. I could see the Saturn V, the biggest rocket ever built, the one that took people to the Moon. 

The incongruity of the scene was so incredibly disarming: A glistening natural scene interrupted by tall, skinny bombs made to throw people and machines off this planet.

But then I realized I’ve seen something like it before. Johnson is another of NASA’s marshes. A liminal space for people of liminal minds.

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Your birthday is bad for you

By: | May 15, 2019
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I know a guy who doesn’t have a birthday. Andy* was born in the Moroccan desert. His parents were nomads. There were no smartphones in the 1960s and a nomadic tribe didn’t have much use for the Gregorian calendar. And when it came to recalling the exact day and month of Andy’s birth, there were higher priorities.

Twenty years later, planning to move to Switzerland, he needed a national ID. Thanks to some artifact of Moroccan bureaucracy, he found himself with a state-issued birth certificate that listed only a date – 1969, his best guess at the year of his birth.

When he arrived in Switzerland, he needed a driver’s license. Because of the mismatch between required fields and available data, the compromise was an ID with the birthdate 0/0/1969. If you believe the science around birthdays. maybe that was the best thing that ever happened to him.

The Anvil Song

By: | May 14, 2019

“It’s made of solid iron, it weighs a ton or two, we know you’d like to meet it, it wants to meet you too!” – The Anvil Song, Animaniacs

My friend Brian spends a lot of time in a marvelous, mostly empty old barn. The barn is everything a barn should be – high wooden rafters dribbled in bird droppings, rusted farm tools, the smell of hay and cow manure. Chickens wander in and out, littering the floor with feathers and footprints. When sunlight shines through holes in the barn’s aluminum siding, it illuminates the interior like a punched-tin lantern.

This is where Brian keeps his blacksmithing equipment: a forge, anvil, and many hammers. I asked Brian to show me his shop because I’m interested in metallurgy, the science that brought us ploughs, swords, and the Industrial Revolution. I wanted to understand how we got from melting copper ore in campfires to skyscrapers and smartphones. And obviously, I wanted to hit red-hot metal with a hammer.

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The Zone of Proximal Development

By: | May 13, 2019

According to Lev Vygotsky’s psychological development theory, children should be given experiences that are in their zone of proximal development. That is, things that are beyond their own independent capability, but that can be achieved or understood with the guidance of a “knowledgeable other.” The adult’s help provides scaffolding that can eventually be dismantled as the child’s sphere of competence grows.

Physicist Brian Cox is on a world tour with his show, Universal, and when I saw he was speaking in our city, I was torn. Reviews complained that while the tickets were sold on the promise of “not a physics lecture”, it most certainly was a straight-up physics lecture, and it went completely over the reviewers’ heads. My 10-year-old, Oliver, was probably a few years away from really being able to engage with this sort of thing, and if I brought him to something baffling and boring, he might be turned off serious science altogether. Worse yet, it might be a blow to his confidence. This was not a children’s show, to say the least.

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Our Planet: Under Threat

By: | May 10, 2019

A few weeks ago, I started watching the eight-part series Our Planet with my daughter. I thought it would be a good alternative to cartoons. “Ahh, a nature documentary,” I thought. “She gets to watch TV. I get to feel like she’s learning something. Win-win.”

I was so wrong. The show delivers spectacular footage and animal antics, sure, but the content is hard to stomach. Even the soothing sound of David Attenborough’s voice can’t soften the main message: climate change is profoundly affecting all life on this planet and, unless we do something fast, we’re all screwed.

How do you explain this to a three-year-old? Mostly I don’t.

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In which I might learn the difference between baking soda and baking powder

By: | May 9, 2019

Despite having spent many years eating I still have much to learn about cooking. For example, I did not know there was any particular technique needed to fry an egg. When my husband walked my oldest son through the steps of egg frying, it was a night full of revelations—and not just for the intended student. These are just a few of the tips I picked up: sprinkle salt from high above the pan so that you do not get a salt clump; push the oil around with the spatula; do not leave the spatula resting on the hot pan. (Ok, I sort of knew that last one.)

What I can do is read a recipe. I can measure things and follow directions, more or less. Yet I know I am often just skimming the surface, as I did when I memorized things like the times tables and mnemonics like sohcahtoa. The unknowable lies behind the ingredient list, but I am usually hungry enough that I do not really feel like getting to know the unknowable at the time.

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