UPDATED BELOW

Doug called me into the yard to look at something today.  I said, "What is it?"

He answered, "Insects... and you might want to bring your camera."

So I put on my shoes, grabbed the Fuji and tripod, and followed him back along the side of the house.  On a skinny tree that leans over from snow load and cats climbing it, about shoulder high, I saw this:

I told Doug they looked like mealybugs because of the white waxy powdery stuff clinging to the tree bark.

At a crotch in the tree, just where the infestation started, there was a ladybird beetle.

In the above shot you can see a closeup of two of the parasites in the lower right corner.

It wasn't until I saved my pics on the computer and zoomed in on it, that I noticed the beetle had some of the powdery stuff clinging to its carapace.


Some other insectoid predators, maybe ladybug larvae, were munching on the tree parasites.

I didn't touch them.  I know none of them got down the back of my shirt.  Why do I feel so ITCHY?

"Disgust for insects?"  Who, ME?

It isn't insects per se, I'm only disgusted at plant parasites.  That comes from years of competing with them for food in my garden.  While I was keeping a garden, before it all got to be too much for me, I learned all about companion plants that attracted pollenators and repelled parasites, trap plants that attracted the parasites away from my food, etc.  That tree is definitely sick, has patches of lichen growing on it, which doesn't happen when they're healthy and vigorous.  Bug gurus say that aphids and other parasites are attracted to sick plants.  In recent years, every aspen tree in our forest around here has been infested with leaf miners.  Does that mean that all our aspens are doomed?  One of the most obvious signs of climate change, for me, has been the increased presence of parasitic insects on our wild vegetation.

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

As usual, I'm absent minded and forgetful.  Doug and I went to the spring for water today, and I forgot to take the camera.  It is greener down there, a wetter, wider-open space than here in the woods.  This was the first water run this year on which I didn't need to wear gloves.  I haven't worn long johns for a month or so.   Filling the jugs and buckets goes faster and easier when I don't have to use care to avoid splashing water on myself.  Water runs are always sweet:  the sound of the water, the negative ions, etc., but so much sweeter when it is not life-threateningly cold.  It is sunny and very warm today, mid fifties Fahrenheit.

The last few days I have been forgetting to take my nutritional supplements and eat on schedule.  That throws my blood sugar and neurochemistry off, and further memory lapses snowball, along with sensorimotor deficits.  I had been doing well for about five weeks, and am still more able than I was all winter, but I feel a need to stay motivated and pay attention to my nutrition.  There are payoffs when I do, and penalties when I don't.  There!  I said it.  Now... to do it.

Did you read my entry yesterday about unintended consequences and my mixed feelings?  I was sorta going somewhere with that idea when I sat down here and started on it, but I forgot my point before I'd gotten to it.  I had been thinking about my frog farm, affectionately known as Tadpole Ranch.  I didn't think it through before I rescued a bucket of frogspawn from the dessicating muskeg.  I just thought about those eggs drying up and the tadpoles never hatching.  That's what would have happened if I had left the eggs there.  It is what has happened to all the frogspawn I left behind.  The bog is now dry enough I can walk across it.  There is virtually no fresh green swampgrass, just a wide expanse of last year's dry grass.

As I started to think about how to adjust to the overpopulation of my little frog farm, I experienced some of those mixed emotions I was writing about yesterday.  Then, I started wondering about the long-term consequences to the frogs, from my rescue operation.  The full impact of my actions, I may never find out.  If I'm going to see any of those tadpoles on through the growing of their legs, losing their tails, and hopping away to find a place to burrow in for next winter, right now I have to deal with a gazillion freshly hatched tadpoles.

As Doug and I stood out there in the garden this morning looking at my tiny artificial ecosystem in a kitty litter pan, I said that what I need is a plastic wading pool.  Doug looked thoughtful and reminded me that we used to have a small inflatable boat somewhere.  I think that was over at the old place across the highway, and I don't know where that boat might be now or whether it will hold water.  For now, maybe dividing the tadpole colony into two litter pans will relieve some of the population pressure.

I am raising algae in a number of open water buckets in the yard, to feed my tadpoles.  There are water beetles in the pan with them, but they are newly hatched and will have to eat a lot of mosquito larvae (also there in abundance) before they are big enough to take on a tadpole.  By then, though, the tadpoles will probably have grown out of their league.  I could try to find out what, besides the beetles, is their natural predator in the muskeg, and import one or two, but I know how tricky it is to try and balance an ecosystem.  I KNOW that... so what was I thinking when I rescued those eggs?

Oh, well, anyhow, I'll keep providing updates on my efforts and the observable effects.  Some of you might even be interested.  I have had comments recently expressing envy for my beautiful natural surroundings and "idyllic lifestyle."  I consider my yard to be beautiful, much prefer its wildness and the edible weeds out there, to any urban landscape with lawns and such.  Literally, I love the swamp across the street, "my" muskeg, and the wild things that live there.  But lifestyle... that's something else. 

The Xangan who referred to my idyllic lifestyle has not been reading my blog for very long.  He might not know that our roof leaks, the front door doesn't even latch, much less lock, and the cats can push it open.  Before I mentioned today's water run, he might not have been aware that we don't have running water or an indoor toilet.  That's a relatively primitive or even squalid lifestyle, and makes me appreciate the idyllic surroundings all the more.

About the plan to tranquilize, shampoo and dye bears along the Russian River:

Several comments revealed that you Xangans (at least those who commented) have a grasp of the absurdity of the situation, the illogic of dyeing bears different colors to facilitate identification of "problem" bears so that Alaska Fish and Game officers don't end up killing the wrong bears.  I agree with you that the bears were there first and it is unjust for them to be killed because people choose to intrude on their territory.  I suspect that some of those guys working for Fish and Game would rather shoot the problem tourists or let the bears eat the fishermen than kill the bears, but it's not that simple.

I think the absurdity of the ursine dye jobs is an indication of the desperate nature of the situation.  If state officials do not act to eradicate the more aggressive bears, citizens and visitors will continue to indiscriminately kill any bear they see.  This plan might not work to save the bears from the people, but some plan is probably better than no plan, and nobody has come up with a better plan. 

People who live in the area, and especially the Fish and Game officers, come to know individual bears.  We give them names, become familiar with their habits, know at least approximately where their dens are, and pass along gossip at the general store about a certain boar with an injured leg, or a sow with triplet cubs, just as we talk about each other's family crises and celebrations.  Then salmon season comes around, and our bears are out there at the river, competing for their food against anglers from all over the world who hope to hook a trophy fish.

Alaska has very little industry as most people understand that concept, in terms of factories, mills, farms, etc.  Our commercial fishery is in deep trouble due to overfishing and climate change.  Mining and logging operators want to exploit the state's resources without restraint, and environmentalists want to restrain them.  Citizens want to earn a living, and politicians want to keep everyone happy so they'll be reelected.  Tourism is so vital to the state's economy that tourism issues affect virtually everyone here.  Ironically for the bears, the visitors who most endanger their existence are the people who are out there because they hope to see a bear up close.

In my neighborhood and the rest of the Railbelt from Seward to Fairbanks, most of the employment is seasonal, limited to the summer tourist season.  Roads that during winter carry only sparse local traffic and an occasional long-distance trucker are congested with RVs and tour buses all summer.  Most of us, even some who don't welcome tourists, will attempt to fake it and be nice to a visitor who asks a silly question or reacts in shock to the absence of some expected civilized amenity such as a bathroom or telephone service. 

The only way Alaska could support all of us Alaskans without that annual flow of tourists' money would be for more of us to hunt, trap, fish, exploit the mineral resources, destroy the wilderness and end up living in a cold barren hell that nobody would even want to visit.  Enlightened self-interest and respect for the natural environment demand that we find some accomodation with the sightseeing tourists from the U.S. Midwest, the European trophy hunters, and the sport fishermen from everywhere who stand along the salmon streams elbow-to-elbow with our local subsistence fishers and watch nervously for bears while they try to avoid tangling their lines.

I must admit that the prospect of pink and purple bears standing in the rushing water and slapping salmon up onto the bank lacks some of the charm of the mental image of the same bears in their natural earth tones.  But if it can keep some scared or trigger-happy tourist from blowing away that innocent sow and orphaning her triplet cubs, or help us keep track of where the wounded and angry boar is until Fish and Game arrives, then I'm for it.  I think it could have the additional effect of increasing the general level of awareness among our visitors that not all bears are alike.  It is the garbage-eating bears, the ones that want to scavenge the heads and guts left behind by careless fishers, that pose the most danger to humans.  I'd paint them all with polka-dots, if that could save the shy brown sow and her babies... but, still, I wonder how the smell of the shampoo and the sight of the dye is going to affect their social life and mating practices.  We'll find out.
 

UPDATED below

This is such a complex subject, I don't really know how to characterize my feelings about it.  I guess, "conflicted," is good enough for now.  The conflict within my own mind right now reminds me of the lifelong disagreement between Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead over action versus inaction.

Both were anthropologists, and early in their careers they were married to each other for a while.  Cathy Bateson, their daughter, is also an anthropologist.  She believes, with good reason, that she had the most observed and studied childhood in history.  Her mother kept her in a glass-walled nursery and filmed her every waking moment for purposes of anthropological research.  This probably isn't something her father would have chosen to do, and that goes to the basis of that argument between Mead and Bateson.

Mead's first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was controversial in 1928 when it was published.  But it caught on with a new generation at the start of the sexual revolution of the 1950s, and her name was a household word in my youth.  Ironically, Margaret Mead's anthropological methods were highly suspect (she converted some of her native informants to Christianity), and she was dangerously naive.  Some of her key informants lied to her, and that false data made up a substantial part of her most influential work.

Her missionary activity among the people she was supposed to be studying stemmed from the same attitude that was at the core of her classic debate with Bateson.  She believed that if one found "wrongness" or "evil" in the world, one should work to fix it.  Gregory Bateson said that it is not always possible to accurately judge the rightness or wrongness of things, and that in addition to the intended consequences of our actions there are unintended consequences that can have even greater effects.  Our efforts to fix things often just intensify or multiply the problems.

I think that the efforts of our bureaucratic government (spurred on by the insurance industry and medical profession) to protect us from ourselves is bound to have troublesome if not disastrous unintended consequences.  Recently, Greyfox found some fun magnetic toys in the dumpster at Felony Flats.  After a few hours of fun with them, I decided it would be even more fun to have more pieces to play with.  That's when I learned that the toys had been recalled because some little kids had swallowed the magnets, and one child had aspirated one.

In my opinion, people who have stupid (older) children, and/or those who allow young children to play with hazardous objects unsupervised, don't deserve to have their kids survive and reproduce.  For millennia, Homo sapiens has evolved through natural processes that naturally eliminated weak and stupid individuals.   Now some segments of our society are doing everything in their power to halt that process.

It has been a lengthy process to get where we are, but I don't think it will take that long for us to devolve into something none of us now would want to see, if we continue this trend of overprotection and fail to institute some rational eugenics along the line of the Population, Ecology, and Genetics Board that Robert A. Heinlein invented in Podkayne of Mars.  And I do mean rational eugenics, not the racially, religiously, and economically skewed version that would inevitably result from our current corrupt bureaucracy.

I did say that my feelings on this subject are conflicted.  That is because planet Earth continues to cull from the herd a category of individuals I don't think we can easily do without:  the adventurers and explorers, the ones with the courage to push the envelope.  The Alaska Range ate four more climbers in the past week, two on Denali and two on Mount Barille.

The National Park Service requires sixty days advance registration for climbing parties, and the rangers use that time to screen applicants, inform and educate climbers, and try to prepare them for the conditions they face on the mountains.  In one sense, their efforts are probably effective.  Most of the climbers who summit Denali and his companions come back alive.  They are easy to spot in the local shops and lodges, with their high-altitude burn, the pale goggle-strip across the eyes, and the special quality of their smiles, the look of mingled awe and pride in their eyes.

Maybe they should be encouraged to leave behind some of their eggs or sperm before they take off for base camp, in case they don't make it back.  It doesn't mean they are defective if an avalanche sweeps them away (as it did Andre Callari, 33, of Salt Lake City, and Brian Postlethwait, 32, of Park City, Utah, this week) or they fall to their deaths, as did Lara-Karena Kellogg on Mount Wake last month and Mizuki Takahashi and Brian Massey on Denali last week.  They have to be excellent specimens of strength and courage to even be there.

I'm not suggesting that they be required to donate their genetic material.  That would be sure to have some unfortunate unintended consequences.  Everything does.  But what could it hurt to just drop a little suggestion along with the rest of their orientation?  Don't answer that.  I know.  Everything has unintended consequences.

UPDATE:

OMG, here's more of it:

As part of an interagency effort to pacify a danger zone where hundreds of anglers daily mingle with bears expecting to dine on human leftovers, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game plans to make over several grizzlies in bright shades of drugstore hair dye. The idea behind yellow, green, orange or blue bears is to make them instantly recognizable to anyone who reports an encounter, area wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger said.

For public safety reasons, biologists have decided they need to kill bears that repeatedly intimidate people, he said, and making it easy for people to know exactly which bear they encounter may avoid any wrongful executions.

He and other biologists plan to tranquilize several bears that frequent the area, give them a shampoo, bleach the hair around their heads, shoulders and hindquarters, and then apply dye.

"This is their only chance at surviving," Selinger said.

It's a tactic that he predicted would draw scorn from wildlife watchers, though he says the state agency is "not trying to embarrass these bears.''

adn.com/news/alaska/wildlife/bears

As usual, I have mixed emotions.  I wonder how the bears will feel about it. 

I just might have to drive down to the Kenai Peninsula this summer to get some pics of punked-out bears.  I'm way overdue for a campout, anyway.

I think I'll accept The Great Greyfox's ruling on when breakup ends and summer begins.  He says it is when the fireweed blooms.  Little purple fireweed shoots are still emerging, and the biggest of those that have been coming up since the snow melted are no more than about a foot tall, with no buds yet.

Two nights ago, frost bronzed a few tender young leaves on poplars and birches, and nipped the tips of the new growth on some of the little spruce trees in open areas.  On a walk in the woods yesterday, I found some dirty snow in a shady spot, but it probably melted during the day.  That tiny baby spruce cone is so intricate... zoom in.

Below is the first grasshopper I've seen this year.  It's easy to tell by the color that it has just hatched out.  As they grow and eat green things, their bodies turn green.

This is my front yard.  The green ground cover in the foreground is a mass of tiny chickweed seedlings that will grow into great salad greens.  The taller, reddish, branching plants growing among the chickweed is Epilobium angustifolium, fireweed.  Somebody asked me what fireweed tastes like.  It tastes just like fireweed.  After the plants turn green, it is too bitter to eat, but in the tender purple stage they have a very mild flavor, something like asparagus.  Before anyone asks, chickweed has a flavor and crunch similar to lettuce, only sweeter.

No frost last night, but a dewy morning today.

Shelf fungi on poplar tree, possibly "turkeytail".

Basic Oatmeal Cookie Dough

Cream:

When butter and sugars are combined, beat in:

Combine thoroughly (by sifting or whisking)

Stir the flour mixture into the liquids, and when they are almost fully combined, stir in:

Drop by teaspoonfulls onto ungreased cookie sheets and bake ten minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

By altering additions to this dough, you can make many variations such as:

Raisin Raggedy Anns

Apple Grape-Nuts Cookies

When using cereal flakes, add them last and fold in gently.

First Class Fig Flax Almond Oatmeal Muffins

Whisk together or sift:

Beat thoroughly:

Add and beat in, one at a time:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
Line 4 dozen-size muffin pans with 48 paper baking cups.

Stir liquid into dry ingredients, and when the flour is almost completely moistened, add and combine:

Measure 1/2 cup of batter into each of 48 muffin cups.  Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.

I pack these in air-tight containers, freeze them, and nuke them for easy breakfasts and snacks.

This weeks photo challenge is hosted by WhataWonderfulNewWorld

The subject is Hands

I got a handy head start on this one last week, with my dirty fingernails.

As you can see below, my hands do clean up okay.

This is not only a picture of my hands, it is a picture of my tattoo... my only tattoo.  Look closely, or zoom in, on the tip of the index finger just below that top thumb.  That little blue dot is an accidental tattoo from a puncture wound with an ink pen years ago.

All hands below belong to my son, Doug:

in action,

multi-tasking,

with Suzy Creamcheese,

and holding Harley.

Actually, it is more like, "Awww darn!  Springtime."

The cats go out, eat grass, come in and puke it up on my bed or the floor.  The cats just go in and out and in and out, which can be inconvenient whether it is one of the ones who cries or scratches for me to get up and open the door, or one of those who can open the door for themselves.  When they do it, the door swings shut, almost, hanging up on the frame and leaving enough of a crack to let more mosquitoes in.  As if we need more mosquitoes in here.

It is uncomfortably hot in here now.  I just got up to look -- thermometer reads 73.4 F.  Yesterday was overcast and cool all day.  In the evening, the cloud cover began to break up and let what warmth we had down here float off into space.  I felt cold and kindled a fire in the woodstove.  The sun rose just after five this morning, and last night's fire hasn't completely burnt out yet.  Hot, hot, hot in here.  I'll be outside soon, capturing some light in my digital camera.

I try to be philosophical about it, but some of the effects of our weather have been getting to soft-hearted me.  The muskeg dried up before the frog eggs hatched out any tadpoles.  My bucket-of-frogspawn experiment hasn't worked out.  Little green things poke out through the soil during the day and get nipped during the frosty nights.  My marvelous Old Fart defines "sentimentality" as "loving something more than God does."  Mother Nature takes good care of me, but sometimes where the little greenies and the wiggly things are concerned, she seems like a heartless bitch.

There have been wildfires coast-to-coast in the lower 48 for a month or two already, and now our Alaskan fire season has started.  The snowpack last winter was less than 50% of normal, cutting way down on spring runoff.  Rainfall is down, as well.  I think we're in for some colorful sunsets.

Back later....

The answer to that question is, "any minute now."  Still some trees have bare branches, but most of them are showing some green.

Last night around nine o'clock, the sun was playing peekaboo with windblown clouds, giving me uncertain lighting and making trees and shrubs move around too much for close-ups.  At least the wind had grounded the mosquitoes.

The fuzzy-looking lime green plant above is an evergreen club moss, and the spreading reddish stems with glossy dark needle-shape leaves are Empetrum nigrum, crowberry, another evergreen and one of the best-tasting berries in our woods.  This shot wasn't taken in the woods, of course, but in the gravel along the edge of the cul de sac, where a few sprigs of new spring green can be seen.  Only out here in the sun, and in the margins of the woods, has the vegetation woken up from winter sleep.  Deep in the woods, the only green on the ground is evergreen.


Above is a new shoot of poplar, sprouting from an old root underground.  We call this tree cottonwood, and in early summer the fibers that form sails for its seeds collect in drifts like snow.  The coloring of this shoot, and the waxy sheen on its leaves, are indicators of this dry season.  When there is abundant rainfall, they come up thick and dark.  These leaves are thin and flexible, with a sticky coating that slows down evaporation.

It has been more than a week since I first noticed that the light of the setting sun was coming in our north windows.  At midnight, it is not yet full dark.  Soon, it won't get dark at all, just a long twilight that turns gradually to dawn.  Sunrise today:  5:05 AM, sunset:  10:47 PM.

I'm still working behind the scenes here on Xanga, and in the kitchen here at home.  

You are The Hermit

Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.

The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.

The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.

The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

"...all things hidden."  Fascinating... it doesn't seem to matter whether I pick up a deck and cut it, click a button for an online one-card reading, or take one of these quiz thingies (and I have done at least three different ones on the theme, "What Tarot card are you?").  The Hermit keeps turning up for me, and has since 1969.  I just asked myself why, under the circumstances, I keep playing these games. 

It is not because I want or need confirmation that I'm the Hermit.  I am so sure of it that a while back when tarotbabe suggested that we trade Tarot readings, and said she uses the Celtic Cross spread, I suggested Hermit as my significator.  She never did follow through with that.  I was disappointed.  Oh, well....

I have been working behind the scenes here, doing some revisions on old memoir episodes, thinking about combining several of the childhood posts into one, and trying to turn the "narrative summary" links list into something more coherent.  I have also been trying to remember more details of the late nineteen fifties.  For now, though, I'm getting off the computer and into some food... or some food into me, rather.

Over half of the people who have bipolar disorder also have substance addictions.  Over half of alcoholics have bipolar disorder.  Those statements are derived from numerous governmental and professional mental health and substance abuse sources that mention percentages from as low as 60% to as high as 75%.  I think that the true figures could well be higher.

I know quite a few addicts who would be surprised to learn that they are bipolar.  I also know some people who know that they are bipolar but are in deep denial about their drug addictions.  The statistical situation becomes even more absurd when you dispense with the medical euphemism, "chemical dependency," and acknowledge the fact that an addiction to a legally prescribed drug is neurochemically indistinguishable from dependence on an illicit drug.

The terms, "comorbidity" and "dual diagnosis" are used to label the coexistence of addiction or substance abuse with mental illness.  Some of us just call it Double Trouble.  I had been attending AA and NA meetings for a year or two when I attended my first meeting of Double Trouble in Recovery.  It quickly became my favorite 12-step group because there is more self-awareness among the members and less of the hypocritical bullshit I have found among some people in AA and NA.

The higher level of self-awareness makes sense when you realize that virtually everyone in Double Trouble has been in psychotherapy of some sort.  That's what therapy ideally is supposed to do for us:  make us more aware of our selves, our motivations, feelings, etc.  Additionally, there is a tendency in other 12-step groups to ascribe the addict's problems in life to, "character defects," or to whichever addiction is that organization's target.   DTR starts out by acknowledging that everyone there is mentally ill.  That works for me, and would work in every 12-step organization there is.  It is an error to view addiction, whether to sex, "love," gambling, meth or alcohol, as anything but a health issue.

But, to get back to self-medication, it is an issue across the board in those disorders that used to be called neuroses, as well as those that were formerly termed psychoses.  Current psych jargon runs more to words like conduct disorder, dissociative state, etc., but one common thread that ties the whole mess together is the tendency of crazy people to tinker with their neurotransmitters in an attempt to attain better living through chemistry.  Some vivid examples of how that can work out include Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer who always got drunk before stalking their victims.

It is fairly widely accepted that virtually nobody enjoys being depressed.  A drug-savvy bipolar being on a downswing is likely to turn to something that increases dopamine in the brain, such as cocaine, meth, X, or Prozac.  One with less savvy or fewer drug connections might just drink alcohol.  The drinker accelerates and accentuates the depression immediately, while the rebound effect of the other drugs would worsen the depression somewhat later on.

The other side of bipolar disorder, the mania, isn't so simple to nail down.  A relatively recent change in diagnostic criteria recognizes a "Type II" bipolar patient who is hypomanic, mostly depressed, whose upswings can easily be mistaken for what I laughingly call "normal."  My kind of bipolar is was hypomanic.  I used to welcome the manic swings.  Lots of other people do, too.  It feels ever so much better to be manic than to be depressed.

The problems come afterward, when we have time to reflect on our manic behavior.  Some of that reflecting gets done in jail cells, hospital beds, divorce courts, unemployment lines....  Veterans of manic-depressive mood swings eventually learn to fear the mania as much as they dread the depression.  The tendency is often to run to drugs as soon as one realizes that things are getting, "too good."

I hear it all the time at NA meetings:  someone says they're feeling so good that it is scary.  I see those same words in blogs, too.  Why would anyone fear feeling good?  That's obvious.  It is because they have been through the cycles before and they know that after the high comes the low, after being ten feet tall and bullet proof for a while, they always get shot down.  So, some of them take action as soon as they start feeling good.  They shoot themselves down.

It doesn't have to be that way.  With detoxification, adequate nutrition, healthful exercise and psychotherapy, especially if one has a strong support group as well as clarity of intent and personal motivation, most of us can level out our neurochemistry.  If for some reason that doesn't do it, there are whole new families of pharmeceuticals that are less damaging than alcohol, meth and the other old standbys.