Susie is coming

(A mosquito on human skin.  Don't worry Susie, the mosquito that carries yellow fever will arrive in Ithaca due to global warming, but not for another three decades.)

Tomorrow my sister-in-law arrives from Cleveland for a 3-day weekend.  You all know what this means, right?  It means that my wife can not possibly be on the phone with her sister in Ohio, because her sister will be in New York.  The significance of this is that I could cut firewood this weekend in safety.  You will remember that my wife insists that I take the landline phone with me, which has an intercom feature to the house.  If I get in trouble, cause there are some "widow-makers" out there in the woods, I am supposed to call the ex-ER nurse for help.  Normally when I try this safety feature, the line is busy because my wife is talking to her sister in Ohio, so I would bleed to death, or whatever.

But my sister-in-law will not let me cut firewood this weekend, or mow the lawn, or weed the garden, or do any productive work.  She is coming to have a good time in Danby and, dammit, we will show her a good time. 

I have many activities planned; I hope she likes them.  First, we are going for a frog walk late Saturday morning.  I have a nice variety of species on the property, and they are quite interesting.  Then, we are going to work on our tree identification.  My sister-in-law only knows a few trees, but we have several dozen tree species native to the Danby area.  I have an extra field identification book, Susie, so don't bother to buy one in the airport. Saturday night will be very special.  I found a dead raccoon by the side of the road a couple of days ago.  Because Susie is an Operating Room nurse, I thought she might enjoy comparing the internal anatomy of this common mammal to that of humans.  Should be very instructive, and the raccoon was not all that bloated.  Sunday morning, we go birding in a nearby swamp followed by a breakfast at Dan's Diner, where eggs, bacon, grits, and home fries only contain 52 grams of fat.  This "fuel" will give us plenty of energy to take a leisurely hike through Poison Ivy Hollow in the evening.  Just before our walk, I will show her the site where our gas station used to be before it burned down, and we will visit the abandoned IGA store a short distance away.  It is fun to look through the big window at the IGA; I can show you where the ketchup used to be stocked on the shelves.

Best of all, you don't need to bring anything special, Susie.  I have plenty of calamine lotion, tick repellent, and iodine for scratches.  Then, at the end of the day, we can sit in our woods and enjoy a nice cold V8 together, and see who can find the Big Dipper first.  I can hardly wait to begin!

Results of an unreplicated sweet corn experiment

(The scientific method can be applied to some things that are practical in everyday life.)

The other day I reported ("Corn and crust") that I bought six ears of sweet corn at Iron Kettle Farm, and we ate four of them.   They were great, and I can only assume that the two ears we did not eat would have been just as good.  A couple of days after that, I bought a dozen ears at the same farm, and fixed them for students that very night.  They were not nearly as good as the six I had purchased earlier. Tonight, five days after buying the first batch of great corn, I ate it for dinner.  The two ears I ate tonight were not as good as their siblings of five days ago, but they were definitely better than the second batch that was eaten the day I bought it.  Are you following this?  I just gave you the Introduction, Methods and Materials, and Results section of this scientific paper all in a few sentences.  Try to keep up, especially if you received a C in my Field Biology course years ago.

Conclusion and Discussion: that while eating corn as soon after picking is important to its taste, that is not as important as the exact stage the corn was in when it was picked.  Picking at the height of its sweetness is the main factor in quality.  I have no idea how to determine this perfect time for harvesting; perhaps, corn farmers can explain.  An alternative explanation is that the second batch of corn was NOT picked the day I bought it, although the sign at Iron Kettle said it was "picked this morning".  So there you go.  Use of the scientific method applied to something very practical.  Who said my education was esoteric, irrelevant, and nerdish? Oh, that would be my niece, Andrea.

Literature Cited:  none.

Birding "au naturelle"

(A Sean John underwear model.  Now, this man is dressed appropriately to go birding in DrTom's woodlot.)

I like to sit on my deck in the nude on a warm, sunny day.  Nothing wrong with this.  It feels great and no one can see me except the Management and Zeus, although low-flying aircraft that circle overhead make me wonder sometimes.  I hate having a "farmer's tan", so either get a complete tan or don't get one at all.  On occasion, I will even venture out into the yard to check the garden donning nothing except a pair of Crocs.  Pretty bold for an old guy, but I've earned the right.  After all, it is not like I am strutting around naked in a national park or anything.  This is MY property, and no one can see me from the road.  But there is a potential glitch in the security of this activity.

A few times, I have even gone further from the house than my psychological tether normally allows.  Once I crossed over the driveway and a little wooden bridge over a drainage ditch, and entered the forest 150 yards from the house, walking along a path I keep mowed there.  On this particular occasion, I had taken the hand-set phone with me, thinking I would call one of my sons and brag how I am bird-watching in my birthday suit.  They think I am half crazed anyway, so why not really give them something to talk about.  It is always enjoyable to me when I can shock the younger generation, who thinks that senior citizens sit around and listen to polka music all day.  But at that moment, I heard a very disturbing sound--a car was coming up the driveway, which is located between the house and me.  The path to my pants was disrupted big time, but the flow of adrenaline was not.

The car drove up to the house, and three people got out.  I saw clearly through my binoculars that it was some former students of mine, two females and a male.  Ouch!  What to do?  Think MacGyver, think.  The problem was that Robin did not know I had taken this little safari nude, so when she saw the students, I was sure she would just tell them I was in the woods and to go find me.  I had only seconds to figure this out.  I got it.  I used the intercom feature on the phone (please do not be talking to your sister in Ohio), called my wife, and told her to take a pair of my pants and a shirt and to throw them down the basement stairs.  I would explain later.  Then, take the students onto the deck at the back of the house and keep them there until you see me.

I waited a couple of minutes for my wife to complete her assignment.  As long as my wife did not do something dyslexic, like throw my clothes on the deck and take the students into the basement, I should be ok. I sneaked through the woods to the side of the house opposite the deck, avoiding thorny raspberry bushes at all costs, zipped into the basement, got dressed, and came upstairs as if I had been organizing my tools down there.   Fortunately, Management had executed her instructions properly, and we lived happily ever after, although the students wondered why I appeared from the basement with a phone in one hand and binoculars around my neck.  Since then, I don't take excursions around the property without, at least, wearing a pair of my Sean Johns.

The big sting

(My friend Ida Lydiya, a Latvian immigrant who allows me to cut firewood on her property.)

For nearly 30 years I taught a course titled Introductory Field Biology at Cornell.  The course had many field trips to local natural areas where we could find amphibians, bog plants, and other features or organisms of natural history interest.  Near the end of the semester, I would bring the class to my property for our afternoon 3-hour lab.  I would talk about the birds' nests I had found the previous summer, woodlot management, forest ecology, control of invasive woody plants, etc.  But I always told the students when we arrived at the site that the property belonged to a widow who lived there named Ida Lydiya, who, I told them, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s to escape the Latvian revolution. 

I explained to the students that Mrs. Lydiya and I had an agreement.  I could cut firewood on her property, but I would give her 1/3 of what I cut for her to use in her wood stove in the winter.  This is a common agreement here in upstate NY, and is referred to as cutting firewood for "shares".  When we visited my property, it was always in October, the time of year when I had numerous piles of cut firewood scattered around my woodlot, often 100-200 yards from the house.  And October is the month I move firewood to the back of the house in preparation for use in November.  So the wood needed to be moved, and it is a huge job for one person, and I was getting older, and my children had left home, and my wife was not interested in this activity, and the wood was not going to move itself.  So I told the students that it would be a nice gesture to Mrs. Lydiya to move her share of the wood behind the house, in payment for letting us visit her property for this field trip.  Every year, the students would dutifully drop their notebooks and backpacks, pick up an armful of wood, and march to the house with their booty.  The class usually had about 40 students, so 3-4 trips per student resulted in a significant amount of work accomplished.  Isn't this the way the Pyramids at Giza were constructed?



When it was nearly time to board the bus for the return to campus, I would stop the wood-moving.  At that point, I explained that the name Ida Lydiya could be pronounced "I'd a lied to ya".  To watch the expressions on their faces at that point was worth every minute I had spent teaching these sophomores and juniors the previous two months.  There was always the danger that they could have become an angry mob at that point and turn on the old man, but they laughed and admitted it was a pretty good joke.  In addition, I opened the garage door at that instant, revealing a table full of donuts and apple cider.  Nothing calms down a 20-year old like the prospect of receiving a slug of sugar.  But the amazing thing was that one class apparently never revealed the secret to students who would take the course the following year.  They were naive about this subterfuge every single year for over a decade.