Life rant

I wrote myself a note to clean the kitchen table in order to find my health card and the letter from my dad. The health card is the missing piece to making a doctor's appointment, and I was going to use the letter from my dad to post something poignant about a conversation we had.

I more or less cleaned the kitchen table, by which I mean I dug through a year's worth of stacked mail and moved some of it to other rooms and threw a lot of it in the recycling, and did not find my health card but I did find my Dental Insurance card. I figured that there's a chance that I could sign up for an online account with that, and get the ball rolling toward going to the doctor regularly like a grown man (I mean middle aged man). The application to get an online account seemed simple enough but when I got to the bottom to click "next," the blank page reloaded. Start again! After doing that 4 times I gave up.

I couldn't find my dad's letter either. I found a dozen other letters from him from earlier in the year but not that one. Suffice it to say: He documents me being a terse dick. But it's funnier than that sounds.

EDITED TO ADD:
No, wait, I'll tell the story the best I can remember it. My dad wrote it out and it was pretty funny so I'll try to approximate his version.

We were on Sanibel Island driving around, talking about Ding Darling (the cartoonist who managed to get legal protections against development on much of the island) and such when my dad said something like "Anne Morrow was out here at that time too." And then just let it hang there. Now I had no idea who Anne Morrow was, and I didn't really care. I forget what we were up to, but I didn't want to learn new history at that moment, we were trying to do one of our crazy fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants vacation style tasks. Both he and my brother do this, and I probably do too, but if I do please tell me because it's obnoxious: dropping a name or a fact out there, knowing that the person you are talking to probably has no idea what you are talking about. It's a way of dominating the conversation by leaving breadcrumbs that the other person has to pick up in order to complete the thought of the last sentence. Anyway.

I inhaled deeply and said "I don't know who that is."

"Anne Morrow's father was a partner at JP Morgan who became ambassador to Mexico and the Senator from New Jersey. Her mother was president of Smith College, where Anne went before becoming an important author. It was in Mexico that she met Charles Lindbergh, they married and she became a pilot herself. Lindbergh believed that Germany ... politics.... Lindbergh baby Kidnapping...." I confess at this point I dropped the thread of the narrative realizing that we had passed a shortcut.

"Can I stop you there, dad?" He did.

"She was Lindbergh's wife."

"Yes."

"Okay thanks."


My dad's takeaway from this exchange is that he talks too much. I'm not sure that's exactly right; I would say that we each talk a lot, and each have fairly deep interests in very different fields, and would do well to be considerate of one another. Also I diminished the important accomplishments of an important figure in history to simply being the spouse of another important figure in history. We should probably all know Anne Morrow better.

Anyway, thanks Dad! Sorry I was a dick.

3:00 snapshot #1509: Sigmund

This snapshot-from-my-phone idea was going so great until I left my phone in my pants pocket and then put the pants through the wash. My Beloved Wife went and got herself a Windows Phone the dimensions of a 1975 Texas instruments calculator and gave me her phone. (I'm fantasizing about the waterproof Sony phone with the really high megapixel camera. That thing costs a lot of bucks but I'll tuck it away on my list of material possessions that will fix all my shortcomings and make my life better if I could only afford them.)

So here's a nice snapshot of Sigmund the yellow-billed stork taken with my regular camera on Thursday. Sigmund is the largest free-flight bird in the tropical forest exhibit, flying wherever he likes but spending much of his time with the saddle-billed storks, similar but much bigger birds who seem to tolerate him.

I forgot my camera on Friday and took a snapshot with my interim phone which was Alexis' last pre-smartphone phone. I couldn't figure out how to send the picture anywhere, and it sucked anyway, so let's just let that one disappear between the cracks of technology.

3:00 snapshot #1510

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

More species in the yard

Here's a species that somehow didn't appear for either of the 100 species projects for my yard. It was there for most of that time, but it was invisible to me. Early on in our time at Contentment Cottage I went on Norway maple murder spree. I cut down more than a dozen of the little maples--invasive species that form monocultures when they escape, and produce thousands of winged seeds to ensure that they do--and turned them into firewood. Spores of a fungus called Trametes versicolor are always in the air, and some landed on this stump. They divided and invaded the still-living wood, for this fungus is a weak parasite that takes advantage of situations like the one I created with my little hand saw.

The fungus took the form of threads growing along the grain of the wood of the stump. As it grew it released enzymes into the wood, breaking down the lignin into smaller hydrocarbons that it reabsorbed as food for growth. Only after it had done this for more than year did it reveal itself by producing the beautiful polypore mushrooms called "turkey tails."

Turkey tails are much appreciated by foragers interested in wild-collected medicine. One such person on the Foragers Unite! facebook group sings the praises of the mushrooms as "powerful healers, [which] have clinically been shown to destroy cancer cells, fight infection, and drastically reduce inflammation in the body..." Usually they speak of brewing tea with the mushrooms, but another forager advocates plucking and chewing the fresh uncooked mushrooms. They have a leathery texture, and (apparently) no toxicity even at very high dosages. Should I try it?