My own cigars now intimidate me

(The last time that Arnold and I shared a cigar was, well, a long time ago.)

Last evening, I entered the realm of the cigar review. Mike's Cigars, where I buy cigars online, saw my blog of a week ago and asked if I would try my hand at writing reviews of cigars they would send me for their website. The other day I received eight cigars of three different brands, and so now the ball is in my court. Over the years, I have read many cigar reviews in the mags, so I thought this would be fun.

But last night I realized how intimidating this can be. I first read some reviews already written for Mike's website to sample the possibilities: "notes of wheat and oats, lightly sweet, fresh and surprising"; "of wood & ginger, with coffee & toasted nut undertones and a little tang on the finish"; "sweetness steeps up and blends with the current flavors to give a cocoa or coffee flavor"; or "begins to build in flavor and I can taste what I believe is wood and earth, possibly with a little leather on the back of my tongue". Are you kidding me? What the hell? Are they describing the taste of a cigar or a creme brulee? Forget that I already told you these were descriptions of cigars. Just read them, and then tell me in the Comments below what you think they might be describing.

I have been smoking cigars for about eight years now, and I have never tasted any of those flavors. Have I been smoking the wrong cigars? Is my palette not sophisticated enough to detect the flavors that are really there? Am I just too boring or pessimistic a person to see the world the way others do? Do you need to imagine you are sucking on a Hershey's bar while you smoke one of these sticks? Or, should I just pretend that I am Hemingway or Dickens and write a flowery vignette (minus the sex) from a previous century, then send it to Mike's and just tell them, "oh yea, that is my review of a Licenciados 5x50 Wavell". Would anyone know the difference?

So I smoked last night's assignment, took some notes, and thought about the damn thing all night in bed. Most of the time, I felt like I was describing a California Cabernet rather than a rolled up hunk of tobacco leaves that caught fire. But I noticed one very important thing from last evening's experience. With every single puff, I was studying the cigar, thinking about the flavor, examining the ash and the burn of the tobacco, and watching the smoke intently. It was a wonderful, sensuous hour, and the most enjoyable smoke I have had in weeks. It was not the best cigar I have smoked in weeks, but the experience was extremely memorable. Maybe when you have to concentrate (and I mean focus like a laser) on something you are doing in life that you find enjoyable or important, you enjoy and appreciate it even more.

This was an epiphany for me of sorts. Take more time to savor every well-prepared meal as if you were going to have to put it to words, every sip of good wine, every beautiful vista, every moment spent with a good friend, every moment spent reading to your child in bed. Maybe if we approached these events in this more "rigorous" way, rather than let them pass almost unnoticed, we would respect life more, need less, and live better.

The toad who loved traps

(Guess who came to dinner?)

Every summer I have an American toad (Bufo americanus) that usually spends some time in my garage. Insects accumulate in one corner, and I suppose this becomes a sort of toad luncheonette. For a few days in early July, I found an adult toad sitting during the day behind the open door to the garage. I assume it went outside to forage at night, when toads are most active, but I never really followed him at that time.

Completely separate from anything to do with the toad, we have always had a deer mouse (Peromyscus sp.) problem at our house. Deer mice regularly enter the house somewhere, and they end up under the kitchen sink. So, for years I have kept metal box traps, known as Sherman live traps, set in the kitchen and along a raised wall in the garage. The garage is my first line of defense, where I capture many mice before they even break into the house. This trap has a spring-loaded door, so that once an animal enters the trap, it steps on a treadle on the floor of the trap, which causes the door to snap shut, trapping the animal inside. It is a valuable tool used by biologists who study small mammals. (By the way, deer mice love dark cavernous places, so I never even bait these traps with food. Just open the trap door, set it in a likely runway, and it functions like a deer mouse magnet).

So in July, when I noticed that the trap in the garage was closed, I assumed I had another deer mouse to release far from the house in the woods. But when I opened the trap, a large American toad was inside. I released the toad on the floor of the garage, reset the trap, and had a good laugh about it with my wife. But to my amazement, the next day, the same toad was in the closed trap again. This time, I took the photo you see above, and released the habitual prisoner again. I never saw that toad after that second capture.

Now, this toad’s behavior is somewhat endearing, and it reminded me immediately of the “Frog and Toad” series of children’s books by Arnold Lobel, which I have read to my children and grandchildren many times. But the most interesting part of this anecdote is yet to come. Notice in the photo above where this trap was located. It is on a ledge about two feet above the floor of the garage, much higher than toads can jump. But also notice the lumber, stacked in stair-step fashion adjacent to this wall. The only way this toad could have reached the ledge is to have hopped up each level of lumber to get to that ledge and the trap. And, it performed that maneuver two nights in a row.

Why did this toad go to so much trouble to get to that ledge, and then enter that metal box? To get to the other side? To explore worlds unknown to other toads? To get featured in a DrTom blog? I have no idea. But it proves how entertaining nature can be, even in your very own garage.

Do I have to go to Ithaca?

(DrTom is about to go to town for grub, liquor, and loose women.)

Ever since I retired last year and my wife began working from home, we have a pretty regular routine. She works on her computers all day at one end of the house and I work in my office at the other end. When we get out of bed in the morning, we usually say "let's do lunch", and then we know to meet at noon in the kitchen half way between our respective work places. This goes on for many days until we run out of something. Understand that we have a chest freezer and a second old fridge in the basement, as well as the usual refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen. That is, we can store enough food to feed a U.S. Marine platoon for a month. (And, we are still working off our supply of paper products we bought at Sam's Club three years ago). In short, we don't care to go into Ithaca very often, which is 10 miles away, and I dread it like it is the most difficult thing I ever had to do. The less we go, the less we want to go. I guess this is a form of "use it, or lose it".

But eventually we run out of scotch or wine and someone has to go, usually me. Cigars and coffee beans are purchased online, so they are not a problem. On the day I have to go to town, I feel like one of those old gold miners who went to town two or three times a year to get grub and a chew of tobacco, to get a shot at the bar, and to carouse with loose women for a couple of days. Yesterday in town, I did my errands, ordered some takeout Mexican food, and had a beer at the bar in Viva Taqueria; I never even talked to the three women sitting next to me (loose?). I must say, it was a successful trip, except that the traffic at 5pm in downtown Ithaca is annoying. What are all these people doing here? I arrived home with the goods, but I spared Robin ("any news from town?") the gory details of my harrowing escape from the local metropolis.

Since we both began working from home, we drive much less, and we buy less. I am sure our carbon footprint has decreased significantly. If you don't care to drive anywhere, and the nearest store is 10 miles away, you tend to stay home, you don't spend as much money, and you avoid loose women. All in all, a pretty healthy way to live.

Tending my firewood garden

(DrTom with his firewood pile, cut and moved without the help of his wife, who was talking to her sister on the phone in Ohio.)

For the past few weeks I have been “bringing in” the firewood that will heat our home for the next five months. Cutting down trees, sawing them up, and moving the pieces to the house from the woods is a laborious process that I work on from spring to fall, whenever the weather is not too hot and not too cold. This is really hard work, but I enjoy it for two reasons: my wife and I benefit from the “harvest” in the form of inexpensive heat from November to March, and it is gardening at its best. How can this be gardening?

When gardening, we normally think of starting with a bare patch of earth, adding some seeds or small plants, and then nurturing them until they produce something usable. When I cut firewood, I am selectively removing individual trees from an already crowded palette. When this old cattle pasture was abandoned about 50 years ago, wind-blown seeds of maple, ash, and aspen wafted onto the site from the old forest across the road and took hold. Decades later the stem density of trees was so high that it was difficult to walk through this woodlot in places. So I have been reducing this density by removing trees that are misshapen or diseased, or trees that after removal will open up much-needed space for adjacent trees that I have decided are more valuable. Sun is limiting in such an environment, so opening up the canopy on two sides of a tree you hope to encourage is sufficient to hasten its growth. This is essentially like thinning a row of carrots or radishes that is too dense to allow these root crops to develop to a decent size.

Now, cutting trees down is potentially dangerous work. My wife worries about this and so she insists that I take one of our handset phones with me, because it has an intercom feature on it that allows me to call the house. If a huge branch falls on my head and knocks me out, it doesn’t help. If a tree falls on me and pins me to the ground many yards away from the phone, it doesn’t help. The other day, I thought I would test the system. I pushed the intercom button to the house, the phone was busy. I waited a half hour, tried it again, busy. And a third time, busy. What the hell? What good is this system if it is always occupied with my wife talking to her sister in Ohio? I’ll bet her sister doesn’t have a chain saw in her hands during their conversation. I decided if I was in real trouble in the woods, I would just scream loudly. That probably worked for centuries before we had all this technology.

But what is really interesting is that my forest garden has been changing. Originally populated by maple, ash, and aspen, whose seeds blew in from adjacent older forest, I now have hundreds of nut tree seedlings and saplings that have appeared since I moved here in 1980. Gray squirrels and probably blue jays have moved those nuts from mature oak, hickory, and beech from my neighbor’s forest to mine, and I didn’t pay a cent for them. It certainly appears now that my woodlot canopy will be dominated by these species several decades into the future, and I am helping this process along with my thinning. I always leave oak or hickory trees over red maple or white ash when I decide what to cut, because I have so many of the latter compared to the former. In other words, my gardening is helping Mother Nature move in the direction she “wants” to go anyway, and I benefit by obtaining thousands of British Thermal Units (BTUs) of heat.

But what about the global warming/carbon footprint aspects of woodlot gardening? I am burning wood, which releases carbon into the atmosphere. But I am thinning my forest, which increases the growth rate of trees left in the woods that are sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to support that growth. If the pounds of wood added to these trees due to my thinning exceeds the wood that I cut and burn, then there would be a net gain in reducing carbon. But to determine if that is true would require measurements I have neither the time nor expertise to make, so I can not be sure.

On the other hand, if I were not burning wood, I would be heating my house with electricity, which also contributes to carbon inputs. My colleagues who know more about this than I do say that I am doing about as well as one can. And so, I continue to garden in the forest, to heat my house, to stay physically fit, to enjoy the changes I witness in bird populations due to my "gardening", to admire the new palette, to endure bruised shins, to marvel at the changes, to justify it to students, to fight off leg cramps, and to sit with a scotch and a cigar in its midst. It is all good.