BunkBlog

I’ve lived in Texas for 9 of the past 11 years. In all that time, I’d never seen a living armadillo. These stupid little critters are splattered all over the highways, but I didn’t see one actually moving. After so many years, I might be forgiven for thinking that the armadillo is actually a fictional creature, like the jackalope. I’ve seen plenty of dead jackalopes in souvenir shops, so it’s not too far to stretch for the fictional armadillo theory.

This weekend, Kat and I went on one of our occasional walks through the local nature trail, down by the water. At the beginning of the trail, we caught sight of a rabbit scurrying down the trail, which is a rare enough sight that we already felt lucky to have made the trip. As we continued down the trail, we encountered cardinals, squirrels leaping across the trail, and finally we came to a grassy field between trees and water.

Yes, that is indeed a live armadillo thrashing about, looking for bugs. The next day, we walked out there again and caught sight of another armadillo. Finally, the day after that, we went for a walk near a local campground, and a third armadillo walked across the road in front of us.

Thus begins the armadillo uprising of 2009. Mark your calendars.

Yesterday was a near perfect day. My morning began with a highly anticipated package finally arriving, (Gary’s Valentine ‘s Day present). The huge box is stashed in our bedroom closet so shhhhh…

Then my much-needed chinchilla shelves arrived via UPS. I spent the next two hours happily constructing my chin’s extreme new condo. I spent the next 30 minutes sipping tea in front of his cage and watching him explore his new digs. Then my boss at the Nature Center called. He bought me a Merauke blue tongue skink! I rushed over to see her and she is a looker. I named her Meredith. Gary was due home soon so I jetted back and made him drive me back out to the Nature Center to see and photograph Meredith. Afterwards I picked up my new glasses and contacts. I look so smart now.

After a wee rest, (it was my day off after all,) I helped Gary make dinner. He made me Indian food, (chicken korma to be precise). It was perfect but I distracted him at one point so the bread got burned beyond recognition. We watched TV and looked at pics of Meredith before we settled down to sleep. After our customary “I love you”s I turned to my beloved and said- “Bar naan, it was a perfect day.” His response? Sine Qua naan.

Ah- you gotta love him.

News from several fronts on fossils today.

First, there’s a great skeleton of a pre-whale about to give birth, fossilized with the fetus’s head facing out, which means the animal probably gave birth on land, even though the body is blatantly aquatic. Maiacetus must have been clumsy on land, but a great find. This was found in Pakistan, and is published in the Open Science journal PLOS.

Second, the remains of a 42-foot long snake dating from 60 million years ago, which would have weighed around 2500 pounds. This is the largest snake to ever be discovered; the titanoboa could swallow a cow. The snake was found in Colombia, the oldest rain forest on the planet.

Finally, sponges left fossil evidence as far back as 635 million years ago. This is 100 million years prior to the so-called Cambrian Explosion (an explosion that took tens of millions of years), and is the oldest fossil evidence so far. The fossils were found in Oman.

These last two stories are from the Feb 5 issue of Nature, a really expensive journal for professional working scientists. Wish I could afford the subscription some days.

Check out the Galileoscope – it’s an attempt by the International Year of Astronomy to create a $10 telescope that can resolve the rings of Saturn.

Have I mentioned we have a kitten? She moved in early in December.

(The Youtube version seems to not work for no reason I can tell, and their support staff is ignoring me. Thankfully, Multiply works just fine.)

Scenes from the Great Lazer Tag Massacre of 2009.

This is what passes for tactics in third grade:

First of all- I am not whom you would assume… This is the “Woman.” I was going to holiday hijack this blog in order to post sweet somethings for and about the man who brings me such happiness, but I am woefully and willingly computer ignorant. So when I hung my head low and told him the error in my espionage, he created an account for me. Only now am I prepared to woo.
Worse than my technical geekery however was the mantra I’d like to address, which I foolishly lived by for 15 years: Relationships are hard. The succinct point I’d like to make on this virgin post is that they do not have to be difficult whatsoever. We are the blissfully happy and content proof. The cracked foundations of past entanglements left me weary and paranoid that I would become another victim of my own broken wisdom. Thankfully I have been proved wrong. No arguments. No disagreements. No eggshells whatsoever. I don’t believe in luck, karma or soulmates, but I know my life has changed. Here’s to another great year!

Apparently, it is now time for people on my reading list (RSS aggregator, LJ Friends, whatever you want to be called) to make predictions for 2009, and review their past prognosticative abilities. I’ll play along, but I’m taking all sucker bets, so as to get a hit rate much higher than Sylvia Browne ever will.

1. The WorldNutDaily and other extreme-rightwing nutjobs will continue to berate President Obama throughout the year, calling into question his patriotism, his citizenry, and perhaps even his sexual orientation, just in hopes that something will cause people to care about the right-wing again.
2. Windows 7 won’t be the savior of all things computing in 2009.
3. Netbooks will remain nearly impossible to find in retail channels anywhere with a population less than 5 million (like, say, where I live now).
4. The economy will continue to suck.
5. There still won’t be a single-sign-on system that anyone uses. Sorry, OpenSocial and Facebook API.
6. There still won’t be a crypto system that anyone uses.  Sorry, PGP.
7. The Digital TV changeover will be a complete goat-fuck.
8. Our elected representatives will continue to play reverse Robin Hood, taking as much money from the middle class as they can and giving it to the corporate overlords Eisenhower warned us about.
9. Weather will continue to be remarkable, which will cause climatologists to point out they predicted just such a thing. Denialists will claim that anything other than blistering heat in Alaska and seventy hurricanes reaching into Iowa is proof there is no such thing as global warming.
10. Kit will continue to amuse and enlighten us all with her LE posts.

Since there was great hue and cry recently over the completely unprecedented level* of cold that great parts of the United States have experienced this year, it’s reasonable to assume the same people are following this week’s weather news as well.

Unseasonable warm weather is causing flash flood warnings through much of the midwest. Gee, if “winter” is now considered to be a disproof of anthropogenic global warming, is “warm weather” proof? See also, “weather and climate are not the same word.”

* – by “unprecedented” we mean completely precedented in every reasonable way

When I was 8 years old, I had two chemistry sets.  I went through all sorts of experiments, producing acids that I used to clean/destroy small objects, color-changing things, etc. I’ve seen several times over the past few years stories about the new chemistry sets, which apparently don’t contain any chemicals more interesting than tannic acid (tea extract). We don’t want our young people to grow up curious about science, obviously.

And then there is the curious case of Lewis Casey, who was arrested on suspicion of making meth in his garage. When it was proven rather easily that his chemistry lab was merely a chemistry lab (he’s a college chemistry major), the Canadian government charged him with making bombs instead. Have you ever heard the term “chilling effect” before?

Casey is no longer allowed to engage in chemistry experiments except under supervision in school labs. 

That’s insane.

Lou Dobbs (not the most unbiased fella on the tube) had CNN meteorologist Chad Myers on the other day, and the weatherman claimed that global warming is not man-made because that would be arrogant, or something of the sort. This has been one of the various anecdotes that are being touted as proving that global warming is not happening, and even if it is, the problem is not humanity’s fault and we can’t fix it so we should just keep fiddling.  It’s sad that this comes up so frequently.

The meteorological year, December 2007 through November 2008, was the coolest year since 2000, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis of surface air temperature measurements. It was the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880. The nine warmest years all occur within the eleven-year period 1998-2008.

Arctic sea ice has not, in actual scientifically verified fact, improved extent over previous years. It was, indeed, 220,000 square miles more ice cover than last year in November. However, it’s still 260,000 square miles lower than the average 1979-2000 coverage. Furthermore, the extent of coverage has peaked and stopped its rapid growth. Look at the graph linked above – we’re now seeing that the sea ice extent will likely drop below last year’s already-sad numbers by the end of 2008. Air temperatures above the ice remain unusually high, and this will cause a slowing of the ice growth. You may be familiar with warmth and melting.

Yes, it’s a blizzard. No, that doesn’t mean the climate is cooling, it just means there’s a blizzard right now. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”

I would like to point out that not all fruitcake is bad.  Alton Brown’s Free Range Fruitcake, for example, is yummy as heck.  And, unlike many fruitcake recipes, it only takes a week or two to age, not months and months.  Some recipes start with, “gather your ingredients in July…”  Not for me, buddy.

Of course, now my coworkers think that I only make desserts with a solid alcoholic base. In the past month, I’ve brought in Black Forest cake (kirschwasser in several places, as well as port wine), panettone bread pudding (rum), and now the fruitcake (rum and brandy). I am not a lush, honest.

Someone must think we are low on wine, because I came home to a ridiculously large box, containing a very generous gift basket and four bottles of wine.  Kat was heartened to see at least one bottle of white.  We have about ten reds but no whites until today.  Whoever sent this (the card was unsigned), thank you.  You rock.

What’s that, you say? Photos aren’t good enough for you? Fine, you greedy buggers, how about a quick 9-minute highlight video of our Caribbean trip? That should hold you!
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Galveston is still a mess, a month after Hurricane Ike. They only just reopened the cruise terminal, but the traffic lights didn’t work and there were a lot of boats in places boats don’t normally rest, as well as large piles of debris.

Very easy drive back to San Angelo, with almost no traffic the whole route. The dogs were excited to see us, and wondered if we’d brought them back a turtle to eat, or perhaps just one of the rum cakes. We’re glad to be home, and Kat’s already looking at cruises and shore excursions in the Eastern Caribbean. Better check the savings account…

Our last full day at sea, this was a truly lazy day. We had breakfast and watched flying fish jump away from the ship in vast numbers. We sat in a hot tub for a while. We read our books, and just generally enjoyed a gorgeous 80-degree day in the Caribbean. No clouds all day, just relaxation and sunshine.

We spent all of five minutes on the island of Cozumel, all of it standing in line to move to the ferry or racing back to the ship after the ferry dropped us off in the evening. Our ferry is the yellow catamaran on the right of this photo, while our ship (the Conquest) is attempting to hide behind the Triumph over on the left.

We had a great historical tour today, with our guide Manuel being a magnificent source of information on all things Mayan. This guy is a college-educated archaeologist/historian, and he was a delight to listen to. I’ve never seen a tour guide who so completely knew and obviously loved the material he was presenting. Anyway, we went to the ruins of the city of Tulum, an hour or so inland from the port of Playa del Carmen. The ruins have been restored and preserved very well, and the vast numbers of temples in such a small area was almost overwhelming. The equally vast numbers of iguanas was fascinating to one member of our couple (I’ll leave it to the reader to determine who that was).

We did do a little shopping, including picking up a Mayan cartouche and a couple blankets and t-shirts. Of course, we arrived at the ship just before it was time to leave, so no shopping in Cozumel itself.

Yesterday was our thrill ride tour, today was our nature tour. The weather was beginning to look a little wet, due to what had just become Tropical Storm Paloma. There was rain on the ship as we docked, and the ground was wet on the pier when we hit land, but the rain that threatened us all day didn’t arrive. We wandered around the three shops that were open in the port of George Town, then hopped on a bus to hit our several destinations for the day.

We stopped in a tiny little tourist trap area named Hell. It is a bunch of very dangerous-looking rocks that have been colored black over time, and the locals have put up a post office that sells Hell postcards and will even mail them so they’ll have a postmark from Hell.

After Hell, we hit the road to one of the many many Tortuga rum and rum cake outlets. Since they had the same prices and selection as the one at the pier, we decided to not haul a bunch of rum cake around Grand Cayman. The Turtle Farm is a fabulous place, with a truly astounding number of sea turtles in their tanks. This place is not just a tourist attraction, but keeps a breeding program going as well. Of the hundreds of turtles that hatch each year, over 10% are released into the ocean, while 70% are kept as part of the exhibit and breeding program. The other 20%? Um, they generally become soup. Sorry animal lovers. Sadly, we didn’t get to spend nearly enough time at the turtle farm, because we had a schedule to keep. We did meet our friend Flappy there – he really wanted to get back in the water.

Then, it was time for the main event, the grand finale, the claim to fame of the island of Grand Cayman – the Stingray Sandbar. This is a truly amazing location, out in the bay off the northern coast of the island. For many years, fishermen would stop here, in this relatively calm and very shallow area far from shore, to clean their catch. After so many years of free fish, the stingrays on the sandbar are nearly tame. We swam with them, pet them, fed them, even got to hold them. Absolutely one of the best experiences ever. We couldn’t understand why there were several able-bodied people who paid for this tour and refused to get in the water. Mystifying.

We ran around George Town for about an hour, picking up souvenirs and the freebies that the jewelry shops seem intent on handing out, then back to the ship. The ship left an hour earlier than originally planned, due to what had now become Hurricane Paloma.

Back aboard, we had a couple hours of down time, and then the second Formal Night. Some folks seem to have a very relaxed definition of formal; the table next to us had a gentleman in a rather formless flannel shirt. He sure looked comfortable, anyway. Baked Alaska for dessert, first time Kat had tried the dish.

We really loaded ourselves down with shore excursions – only at the Caymans did we have even an hour of time between the tour and the time we needed to get on the ship. Not complaining, just explaining the relative lack of photos of the towns we were ostensibly docked at or near.

We went on the Zipline Adventure today. This involves climbing up hills in order to rocket from treetop to treetop to ridgeline via steel cables and pulleys. We had a great trio of guides to keep us safe and entertained. Hollywood was the leader of the pack, with his constant patter of “bing bong, party like a rock stah!”

Mighty Mouse and Dean were the other two guides, but I didn’t get good photos of them. Mighty Mouse (real name Shakila) insisted that we were lucky because we had the pretty guide. Gotta love confidence.

After climbing and zipping for the better part of two hours, we wandered back to the ship for a supposedly relaxing massage. Our two South African masseuses apparently didn’t get that memo. We felt like we’d been tenderized by the time they were done, but Kat (former massage therapist) complimented them on their technique.

A great dinner of smoked duck appetizers (tastes like ham!) and seafood newburg, and then off to the magic gymnast show. We wandered into the showroom, thinking we were early, and most of the good seats were taken. Then, one of the crew handed us VIP seating, marked as “just because,” and we got to sit so close we could see pores on the dancers.

Another day at sea, with the temperatures climbing into the low 80s today.

We really just relaxed around the ship most of the day. We did win an 80s trivia game and got a little plastic trophy for our efforts. And we lost at bingo, cuz mostly that’s what happens at bingo.  That’s about it, really.

Our first morning aboard the ship was great.  It didn’t get above 75 today, but it was still a very pleasant day. We had breakfast with some Texans and a Canuck chef, then sat near the bow and read. We had a little wine-tasting, which was marred only slightly by a table near us which seemed to be surprised we were interrupting their rather boisterous conversation with some sort of wine-related event.

Dinner included lobster, where they sang a happy honeymoon song to us, and we finished the evening with a drink while listening to a jazz trio. They were very good, and Kat seemed to really appreciate the drummer, having been one herself.