Florence Nightingale said:

[image below,
Florence Nightingale,
in 1851, at age 31]
Born into a wealthy English family, Florence Nightingale had a life of wealth, ease, and privilege until she was in her thirties.  Growing up in a home where servants cared for her every need, she hadn't dressed herself or done her own hair until she was 33 years old.

Then, in answer to a call from God, she went to Turkey to nurse the sick and wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War.  Her biographies tell in detail of her experiences.  She was there less than three years, from October, 1854 to August, 1857.  The stresses of her work and the horrors of war aged her far more than might be expected in just the five years that elapsed between these two images.

Those three years during the Crimean War are all that many people know about Florence Nightingale.  There was much more to her and to her life.  She made several original contributions to mathematics and statistics.  With a statistical method of her invention, she proved that 90% of people who became ill and went to a hospital died, while only 60% of those with the same illness died if they did not go to a hospital.

Like others of her time, she did not understand the microbiological causes of infection.  She believed that infections generated spontaneously under dirty and stagnant conditions.  Nevertheless, the sanitation measures she practiced and advocated prevented many infections and saved lives.

She grew ill of a fever shortly after her return to England in 1857, and spent most of the rest of her life confined to her room.   From 1896 until her death in 1910, she was bedridden.  She was acknowledged to be eccentric, and today would probably be considered mentally ill with depression.

It is thought that she had a chronic form of Brucellosis, called "Crimean Fever."  Its symptoms are very similar to those of  ME/CFIDS (myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome), which is why her birthday was chosen for International ME/CFS Awareness Day.

I can't help but be aware of ME/CFS every day.  For the past few days, I have been trying to decide what to write about it for this day, from my perspective.  I have written occasionally about various symptoms of the disease, all of which I seem to have had at one time or another.  I have often said that I don't suffer.  Buddha said, "Pain is part of life; suffering is optional," and I know the truth of that.

Even so, living with this disease is difficult.  The symptoms that give me the most trouble are the sensorimotor
deficits that can cause me to crush something I'm trying to pick up, or let it slip through my fingers, make me trip over my own feet, stagger into walls, or fall back to my butt when I try to rise from a seat, bite my tongue when I'm chewing food, choke when I swallow, and
that sometimes keep me from being able to read or listen to music.

The hardest part of it, however, is my dependency on my son and husband.   I value autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency, and I have been watching mine diminish.  That's difficult.  Greyfox manages to keep working and supporting us with very little help from me, even though he has his own physical challenges.  Especially, it bothers me that my son Doug has put much of his own
life on hold to be here for me, for those times when I am unable to do
for myself.  A cure for this disease would help us all, but it is not even clear what causes it, and unfortunately too few people even know that it exists.

This weeks photo challenge is hosted by Reed44

The subject is Dirty

I have been waiting days and daze for an excuse to post dirty pictures. 

I didn't have to look very far to find something dirty.

Wow!  I could use a manicure.

The steps up to my door are so dirty that weeds have taken root in the debris left from winter.

The dog is dirtier than he looks, which you would know if you were within smelling distance.

I thought I'd get cute and post a pic of just dirt.  There was an ant running around on the dirt that I intended to photograph, so I ended up chasing the ant.  The entire series is in my album, dirty pictures.  The one below is special because of that little green rock above and to the left of the big rock beside the red ant.  It is jade.
 

A couple of the pics in the dirty album are hi-res and big enough for wallpaper or background.

(and elsewhere in Alaska)

The muskeg, and "my" frogspawn - the tadpoles-to-be with whom I have bonded, like the silly sentimental fool I am - are drying up.  Yesterday, I carried water out there twice.  It's not going to be enough.  It is futile for me to continue watering the swamp.  I'm not going to be able to see them through to hatching, much less until they morph into frogs.

The puddles I have been watching and photographing were made by 4-wheel ATVs as they spun their wheels trying to get up, out of the ruts they've made through the swamp, and onto the road.   One of the holes is deeper than the other.  Yesterday, the shallower one had gone completely dry by evening.  That time, I poured all my water in the deeper hole and scooped up the frogspawn from the shallow one, put it in my empty jug and brought it back here.  It now resides in a bucket with some water, out in my garden next to the pots of pigsqueak.

California is on fire from what I have heard called, "the driest season ever."  Our fire season hasn't started yet, but there is enough dry grass and brush from last year, standing beetle-killed spruce trees from decades of infestation, and many new blow-downs of aspens weakened by several years of leaf miner infestation, felled by a big windstorm a month or two ago.  The fuel is there, waiting for a spark.  I'd bet that conditions in Siberia are pretty much the same, if not more so.  My thinking about fire conditions in Siberia is not so strange:  when Siberia burns, I breathe the smoke.

Out on the Y-K Delta (where the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers meet the ocean), they are trying to come up with a new word for a new kind of breakup.  Some are calling it a "slush-out."  Instead of great blocks of ice thundering down the rivers, hanging up in ice jams, damming the flow and flooding the villages along the rivers, this year the ice just melted away.  We had very scant snowfall during the winter, and an early thaw without any rainfall to swell the rivers.  The ecological effects of the absence of annual flooding are large.  Flood waters bring nutrients to every plant that lives in the delta.  And then there are the frogs without flooded bogs to nurture their spawn.

Down the valley at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial jail, there's a guy who is probably wondering if he really did all they say he did in his drunken blackout last Saturday.  Palmer Detective Kelly Turney and Officer Ed Mooney responded to a call that a pedestrian had been hit by a car.  When they arrived,

On my way back from the first trip out to water the frog eggs yesterday, I caught this little contretemps between the operator of the tree-eater clearing brush from the roadside ditches, and my neighbor Grayhorse.  The tree-eater had shredded one of Grayhorse's blue tarps.

Below are two samples from the photo album, Alaska Skies, that I started yesterday.

Yesterday, I took a little walk out the cul de sac to check on the frogspawn in the muskeg.  The embryos still do not have tails, and the puddle where the 4-wheeler tracks leave the road, one of few deep holes out there, is drying up so fast that I'm thinking I'll have to go pour some water in there to keep these eggs alive long enough to hatch.  There were intermittent rain showers while I was on my walk, but not enough rain to outpace the soaking-in and drying-up.

Each day there are more signs of so-called spring, including more insects, but still not very many yet.  There will have to be a lot more of these little flies, mosquitoes, mayflies and others, before the dragonflies will hatch out to eat them.

Equisteum ("horsetail") is popping up everywhere.

A few species of mosses are sending up fruiting bodies like this one, but most of them are still just wearing their winter colors.

As the snow melted away, live plants and the remains of dead things were not the only things revealed.  I know how this scrap of durable synthetic fibers came to be there, and if you're willing to read through the story, soon you, too, will know.

In 1998, JadedFey made her way north slowly in gradual stages by ground transport.  After a few weeks here, she left hurriedly by air, leaving behind many useful items including some shoes in my size and a warm, bulky, multicolored sweater.  A couple of years later, I got a puppy.  In an effort to keep him off my bed, I cushioned his basket with that sweater.  It held my scent, and he loved it.  It didn't keep him off my bed for very long, however, and he's no longer a puppy, but that's another story.

One of the first signs we saw of the malady his vet called, "dietary indiscretion," was when I woke one morning to find the sweater shredded.  Not seeing any point in taking it away from him since he loved it so and I had no desire to wear what was left of it, I took the vet's advice and substituted rawhide chews and dog biscuits to discourage him from eating clothing, firewood and furniture.

Eventually, he consumed the entire sweater and shat the indestructible scraps all over our yard and along the paths of his daily walks.  That was years ago.  Koji will be seven years old this month, and as long as we keep the biscuits and chewy things coming, he doesn't eat our stuff, but occasionally a storm or a thaw will reveal some bit of something I recognize from his earlier dietary indiscretions.  The sweater scraps, of course, always bring up loving thoughts of Sarah.

The first fireweed sprouts, one of our tastiest wild foods, are coming up.  Because of the dry weather, the ones coming up now are small.  In a day or two, by the time they turn green, their flavor will be bitter and their texture tough and fibrous.  I'm hoping for a big, soaking rain soon to bring up abundant succulent fireweed of a size that's worth the effort of foraging.

There are more pictures in the photoblog from yesterday's walk.  I went out again last night just before sunset -- days are getting long now:  sunrise at 5:23 AM, sunset at 10:29 PM today -- and captured a rainbow.  I still need to save those images and see what I got.  Maybe I'll get them posted later today, maybe mañana.

The Dreamr has interviewed me with the following questions, so here
goes!  If you would like to be interviewed, just read the information
that follows my Q&A.

1. As a child, what did you wish to be when you grew up?

2. What is your favorite hobby?

3. If you could give one bit of advice what would it be?

4. What makes you laugh?

5. Tell us a typical day in your life what it is like

6. What brought you to Xanga?

Now its your turn to play if you wish!

Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me." I will respond by asking
you five six, ten or a dozen (why be limited?) questions. I get to pick the questions, and I will message you with them and these directions. Just update your blog with
the answers to the questions and include this explanation and an offer
to interview someone else in the same post. When others comment asking
to be interviewed, you will ask them five however many questions.

<<<See what is on my desktop these days.  Can you guess what event Doug and I are eagerly awaiting?  Hint:  I adore Johnny Depp, but I love Captain Jack Sparrow even more.

Some bushes and trees are beginning to leaf out.

Raptors and waterfowl are competing for territory and finding mates.

Insects are more plentiful every day.  This is the first water strider I've seen this year.  Mosquitoes have been out for weeks.  I tried to get a shot of mosquito larvae in the water, but the camera shook.  I'll try again.  There will be no shortage of mosquito larvae.

Arctic wood frogs out in the muskeg across the road have been calling for mates for a week or so.  After I'd gotten the tree-bud, bird, and bug shots this morning, and took several shots of frogspawn in the muskeg, I decided to go back out this evening and see how fast the eggs develop.  I intend to get some shots of tadpoles hatching.  The eggs aren't ready to hatch yet, but I got lucky and saw these two frogs getting lucky.

Cute, aren't they.  They've been frozen underground all winter.  Biologists are studying these guys, Rana sylvatica, Arctic wood frogs, hoping to find a way to apply the frogs' freezabilty to human cryogenics.

Frog's eggs... the embryos don't have tails yet.  I haven't watched them at this stage before, have no idea how long they take to hatch.  I hope we get enough rain to keep the muskeg wet until the tadpoles hatch out.

UPDATE:
(9:36 AM Wednesday)

If you enjoy nature/wildlife pictures, here's VIDEO of a grizzly bear/moose confrontation on the Kenai Peninsula.  The story was in the Anchorage Daily News:

I would have been uneasy skinning and butchering that bear's kill, just a half mile away.