Eulogy for Gretchen

Gretchen was our first schnauzer.  I know it was 2009 because I had just gotten back from Ruby. Our hunting dogs had both died within the past year, so we were dogless.  I didn't even want another dog, at least for awhile.  We had found a miniature schnauzer wandering stray at the market down the street.  Stacey and Savannah had decided to keep it, but the real owners came by that day to pick her up. They were so upset that I said, "Fuck that; we'll get our own dog." Stacey and I drove down to St. Louis and adopted a white miniature schnauzer puppy almost identical to the stray.  She was named Gretchen, and we ultimately decided to keep the name. When we got back to Canton, we stopped at Orscheln's where Savannah was working.  It was instant love between the two, and they always had a special relationship thereafter. We bought a crate and took her home.  She had a cold when we got her, and a steadily runny nose as a result.  She got over that quickly.  She didn't bark for about the first week.  Boy did that change.  She was so playful.  I used to throw the ball for her over and over, often while sitting in my easy chair.  She never seemed to tire of the game.  

Her feistiness was hard to handle.  I stopped her from play-biting by flicking her under the chin with my middle finger as hard as I could.  She didn't like to be picked up and would still growl whenever we did.  She liked to play rough, and she loved it when I'd wrestle her and get her all wound up.  On the other hand, she loved people.  She never met anyone she didn't go up to for affection.  She was quite fast and agile in her youth, but as she aged, her hips betrayed her and even walking became a challenge at times.  She didn't swim very well, though she loved playing in the water.  She would attack the water, biting the surface like it was the enemy.  She liked to go on walks, but when she walked with Savannah and got a bit tired, she'd lie down in the shade and refuse to go on.  Savannah would have to carry her the rest of the way.  Gretchen was great at skatejoring.  I used to harness up her and Big Guy to pull me around on a longboard. She would pull as much as him, and more consistently.  

She had tremendous play drive too, and scored a few kills on mice during her life.  One time she pounced on a spider an ate it.  Then immediately threw it up.  She never did that again. One time I was about to feed a mouse to my snake, so I let Gretchen kill it first. I'm certain she enjoyed that, and I don't regret it. She was always fearless, and largely immune to pain.  Typical of schnauzers.  Ever the watchdog, she barked at every car that came up the drive. She had a particular hatred of horses.  She'd bark like crazy when the Amish came by.  We used to take her garage saling with us, and we had to make sure to park away from horses so she wouldn't go nuts.  She had a similar hatred for the vacuum cleaner, and taught that to Big Guy.

She was full of mischief.  If she got a hold of a roll of toilet paper, she would shred it to bits.  She loved to roll in mud puddles and run through wet grass.  Her cream-colored hair was often tainted with natural dyes. One year we were going to walk in the St. Patrick's day parade with her, so Stacey dyed her hair bright green. The parade was rained out, and Gretchen was green for two months. She traveled with us on our vacation to South Dakota, and we took her everywhere with us because she couldn't stand to be left in the car or the hotel room.  I got kicked out of one store at Wall Drug for carrying her around.  Our first night we all spent the night in a tent during a near-tornado.

One time we drove across the state of Missouri to see the Snowy Owls.  We saw them, but we had bought the Chinese chicken treats that ended up being bad, and she threw up all over Stacey.  We took her and Big Guy to Nebraska to see the Sandhill Cranes.  They were well behaved in the hotel room, and didn't even bark at the birds.  She loved camping, but she always had to ride in the passenger's lap.  Often she would stand on the armrest, hit the button and make the window go down. She always wanted to go for a ride.  You couldn't leave a car door open or she'd jump in, which she did many times while we unloaded Stacey's car.

When we got Big Guy, our 100-lb Giant Schnauzer, she ignored him for about a week.  Then she started to play with him.  After that, they became best friends for a long time.  They played rough and chased balls, even though she was only about 21 pounds.  At some point, near the end of his life, she stopped playing with Big Guy.  I don't know if he accidentally stepped on her or what, but after that point she responded only with aggression when he tried to play with her.  

When we first got the Sisters of Chaos, Gretchen did play with them a bit, running around the back yard.  She would also attempt to play with foster dogs, especially the minis.

Gretchen was a very smart dog, and learned the usual obedience commands, like sit, stay, come.  I taught her a couple of tricks that were kind of fun.  She could do the poison treat trick, where I could put a treat down and she wouldn't take it until I said ok.  She could also stand on her hind legs and spin around to get a treat.

After Big Guy got sick, she would eat his leftover food.  She ballooned after that, and never really got  down to her fighting weight.  She played less than she did in her youth, but I could always get her to play ball with me outside.  She was always a loud snorer; you could hear her from across the room.

She loved our new place out in the country.  She especially like forcing her way through the clematis and common violets under the little windmill, and rolling in the spirea bushes.  A selfie of her and me has been my Google profile pic for years, and I'm not inclined to change it.

She had a couple of surgeries for benign tumors, but was otherwise healthy for much of her life. She did endure a nasty bout of pancreatitis after Miss Kitty knocked down a stick of butter that Gretchen then devoured. Sadly, she stopped eating one day (1/13/2021).  She had difficulty walking around, was obviously in difficulty and/or pain. We took her in to our trusted veterinarian.  Blood tests revealed anemia, and X-rays revealed a large splenic tumor.  She could have died any second if the tumor ruptured. The prognosis was very poor, options few, none of them good.  We elected to end her suffering.  We had expected her to make it more than 11 years, but, on the other hand, she had a great life.

We tried her at Barn Hunt practice. I thought she would attack the rat cage, but she seemed to learn that she could not get to it, and lost interest.  We tried to get her a CGC title, but she couldn't be cool around strangers.  She would have to run up to them to be petted.  Dear Gretchen. You were unregistered, not even a color recognized by AKC. You never earned any titles or certificates, unlike those that came after you, but you set the stage for them to do so, and will always be first in our hearts, Schnauzer Prime.

To see an insane number of cute photos of Gretchen Marie, look here: https://showmejoe.blogspot.com/2021/01/eulogy-for-gretchen.html

Biking biography

I wanted to write some of my biography of biking, from the beginning.

I remember not having a bike.  I must have been maybe 5 years old.  My dad picked a frame from one pile of rusty junk (as we had in various places about the ranch) and some parts from another and put together a whole bike.  It was a simple, single speed, steel kid's bike. He painted it green.  It was kind of amazing to see, for a young kid.  I don't know if that one had training wheels or not.  I do remember having training wheels at one point, but soon gave them up.  We had a huge yard on the ranch, with enough room for farm equipment to turn around between barns, corrals, sheds and houses.  But it was all gravel.  There was a small sidewalk around two sides of our house and a fairly large pad under my grandma's (next door) clothesline.  But those weren't enough room for a bike.  You had to learn to ride on gravel.  We could also ride on gravel out around the corrals and behind the big hay barn, which was known as "out in front of the cows."  We all got skinned knees at some point, but I think my brother Mark was bloodied the worst.

My worst bike accident ever happened when I wasn't even riding.  My brother Mike came down the street to pick me up. I rode on the back of his seat as he pedaled home.  Right about when we got in front of our house my left foot went into the rear wheel, and the spokes attempted to grind off my big toe.  I watched my Dad go over the fence up to his inseam (which I'd never seen before) as he came to get me.  A trip to the hospital resulted in stitches around the big toe and some bandages for road rash.  I missed a couple of weeks of first grade.  I remember that the Creedence song "Susie Q" was on the radio a lot then.  It still reminds me of that time.

At one point, my handlebars became loose in the stem, and no amount of tightening would help.  My Dad took an aluminum soda can, cut a square out of it and put that between the handlebar and the stem.  It tightened up just fine with that shim.  I've used that trick a few times myself.

Another time, my Dad pulled a fork off the junk pile, a seat post and the front wheel of a tricycle and welded them up to make me a unicycle!  I did learn to ride it with considerable persistence.

One summer day--I must have been around 10--I went with my Mom and Dad to Antioch in Dad's truck.  We picked up a big box from a big store (JC Penney?). It said "Bike" on it, but I was clueless about it and they weren't talking.  I thought this was just another routine trip to town.  When we got back, my Dad assembled my new 3-speed, a birthday present.  It was a banana-seat type of bike with the gearing in the rear hub.  The gears didn't work all the time, but there was an extra-low gear you could get sometimes if you pulled the lever down and to the left.  I rode the heck out of that bike.  I rode it on a lot of our country roads one summer, picking up aluminum cans.  At the end of the summer, I cashed in the cans and with  the money I'd saved up bought a motocross (BMX) bike.

I had looked at a lot of models beforehand.  Most of the stores had the crappy Huffy bike, but this Royce Union had frame gussets for withstanding abuse.  It also had that heavy double handlebar stem and various pads for protection.  I had no helmet at that age, but no one did.  It was about 1976.  I rode the heck out of that bike too, and was especially proud of jumping small irrigation ditches.  The bottom bracket stripped out, and Dad put some allen screws in to hold it together.  When I was 16 I sold the 3-speed to a waitress at the restaurant where I worked. I had used some silver paint to cover the rust on the handlebars.  She seemed happy to get it for her kid.

I used to go fishing for catfish on the Delta, which involved that BMX bike and some trespassing.  I could pick up the bike and put it over the fence into the irrigation district's property, then ride it down to the river.  I never caught many catfish, in part because I had a crappy reel with no drag.

When I went off to college I left the motocross bike behind, where everybody and their kids rode the hell out of it.  Years later I collected its remains and tried to restore it.  I replaced the wheels and some other bits, but I still haven't solved the problem of the bottom bracket.  It remains a work in progress.

When I went off to college I had decided not to take my car, a sweet 1971 Camaro.  This was an absolutely pivotal decision, affecting the rest of my life and then my daughter's life.  Instead, I bought the cheapest 10-speed, a steel-framed Kia.  Let's face it, it was crap.  Nonetheless, I felt that since I had a new bike I should join the bike club at UC Riverside on their weekly rides.  I was terrible at first.  It was a couple of months before I could keep up with  the others, even though my roommate Carl and I often took short rides by ourselves.  At Christmas break I sold the Kia and bought a real bike, the Univega Gran Turismo.  It was so nice.  By early in the spring semester I was able to keep up with others in the club, and sometimes join the lead group.  Those were fun times.  By the way, I brought my car down too. Years later, Carl gave me a newspaper clipping reporting that the Kia had been stolen.

I rode that Univega on many memorable rides in Southern California, and a few in Northern California when I went home.  I think I'll write another blog to summarize those rides because they were too many.

During my senior year, I got the bug to buy a mountain bike.  They had only been available for a few years, but I could see how useful they would be.  I sold my Gran Turismo to a graduate student and bought a new Univega Alpina Pro.  It was a good bike in its day, but fairly basic by today's standards.  I still took plenty of road rides, but I could go offroad on some of the trails near campus.  There was a double set of hills that I could get lots of air from if I jumped them.  Except that one time I did not stick the landing, went down and scraped the heck out of my arm.  FYI, the graduate student told me the old Univega Gran Turismo was stolen from the hallway where he parked it.

I had that mountain bike all through graduate school, almost.  I left my outside light on at my apartment one night so that a friend could pick up my staff for a karate demonstration.  In the morning, the staff was still there, but my bike was not.  The worst part was that the bike had my leather Ideale saddle on it, which I had broken in with about 3000 miles on my butt.  I had no insurance, so after saving my pennies for several months, I went to the local bike shop in Boulder.  Univegas were not available in the area, so I bought a Ross Mt. Rainier.  The Ross had gussets in the frame--a good sign--and it was a pretty blue color.  I did lots of rides around Boulder, but none as long as I used to do on the road bike.  Some of my friends had horses and we used to do combination rides where we'd take turns riding on the mountain bikes and on horses.  That was a blast.

My first job out of grad school was in Indianapolis.  There was a neat trail called the canal tow path that started right near my house.  It wasn't a long ride to it's end in the Broad Ripple neighborhood, but there were great places to eat there.  I did that ride many times on the Ross, until...

One day in 1991 I left the house for less than an hour.  When I got home I saw I had left the garage door open.  The Ross was gone and the eye bolt I had cabled it to had been cleanly breached with bolt cutters. Damn it.  This time, I did have insurance.  I found a Univega dealer in Indianapolis and bought a Univega Alpina Uno, which I still have.  When we moved to Illinois, I would frequently take a Sunday morning ride, as most people were in church and the roads were deserted. One of my favorite places to ride was Argyle Lake.  The paved road around the lake was scenic and smooth, but had some steep hills.  At one point they opened up a single track route around the whole park.  It wasn't well marked, so the first time around was a challenge to navigate. Once a turkey jumped out of the tall grass next me.  I about jumped out of my skin.

After we moved to Missouri, I generally continued with the Sunday rides, at least in good weather.  In some years, my last ride would be during Thanksgiving break.  I developed some neat rides out of Canton, usually with a mix of gravel and pavement.  One route went through a low water crossing of the Wyaconda River, which had no bridge at that site.  There was a lot of horse manure in the stream because of all the local Amish.  One time I was riding across it and ran straight into a big rock.  All forward motion stopped and I fell over sideways into the water.  The worst part was that my gloves got wet and bled black dye all over my hands. Another favorite was the Sunflower Road ride, which went over an old iron bridge on the Wyaconda.  Very scenic, and no traffic.  The trails at Wakonda State Park are great to ride, I discovered.  There's a nice hogback between Wakonda and Agate Lakes, though the rest is fairly flat and not challenging.  One day I rode every trail I could find out there and totaled about 12 miles.  When I was on the Canton Tourism Board I developed a map of all my favorite rides to be made into a brochure for tourists, though it was never printed.

Also while I was on that board I was appointed to handle local arrangements for the Big BAM, the first annual ride across Missouri, which was to end in Canton.  It was a lot of work and kind of fun.  We had a really neat ending planned for the ride, along the riverfront.  The last two days of the ride were rained out, so no one completed our ending as planned.  At least we got to enjoy the concert, which went on as scheduled.

The following year, we learned that the Big BAM was going to end in nearby Hannibal, so Savannah and I decided to ride it.  This ride would be our first multi-day biking adventure.  We trained fairly hard.  We both needed bikes though.  Savannah got a deal on a used Felt--a really nice woman's bike.  I looked long and hard and maybe a month before I found a used Fuji on Craigslist.  It was like new and fit me quite well. 

I'll save that ride for another blog, but we did meet some new friends, Deb and Matt, who we rode the latter half of the ride with.  The next year, the BAM ended in Louisiana, MO, which is not too far away, and we decided to do it again.  On the first day, Deb and Matt introduced us to Corky, and we became fast friends.  We rode RAGBRAI the following two years (2018 & 2019) with Corky and various friends.  The Big BAMs and RAGBRAIs deserve their own blogs, which may or may not appear.

A small photo album with pics of my bikes: https://photos.app.goo.gl/fwpfNaXpeevJ3kBk6

Belize 2018

Wherein the chronicle of my latest excursion to the tropics is written.

1/2/2018
I picked up my student Seth at the 18 wheeler and drove down to St. Louis.  When we arrived at the Embassy Suites airport hotel we found every parking lot around it that does not connect to it.  We had to make a fairly large excursion to get back to the single entrance.  There we met another student, Dylan, with whom we planned to share a room.  We had dinner at the hotel bar and enjoyed speaking with former football pro Hanik Milligan.
1/3
We got up at 3:15 a.m. and caught the shuttle to the airport to meet the rest of our group, totaling 17 and composed of 15 students, myself, and colleague Dr. Megan Boccardi. We checked in, passed security and took two short flights, first to Houston then on to Belize City.  It was sunny and hot upon deplaning, quite a contrast to the 15 below I had enjoyed at home just a couple of days previously.  We were greeted by an agent and loaded onto our bus.  We stopped at a nearby grocery store, where I was unable to buy a 6-pack of beer (I found out later this is one of their blue laws; one can only purchase singles out of the cooler).  The bus driver called in our lunch order and we stopped 45 minutes later and picked up our hot lunches to go.  Like most, I got beans and rice with chicken. It was pretty good, and cheap.
   We proceeded on through flat, scrubby tropical habitat, which gave way to more heavily forested, mountainous regions, interspersed with citrus groves and other ag lands.  Curiously, some of the orange groves were overgrown with vines, seemingly abandoned or neglected.  Also interesting were the numerous free-range chickens and dogs.  The somewhat rough bus ride of 5 hours became rougher over the last 20 minutes of heavily potholed gravel road.  I stayed awake until sunset, when I could no longer see anything out of the windows.  The gravel road to Blue Creek woke me right up.
   A veritable army of Mayan children from the village were there to greet us and offer to carry our bags.  I chose an adult male to carry my big bag, but my camera bag went on my back.  It was a muddy, rocky single track to the lodge, well worth the tip money spent on the porter.  We met our gracious station manager Byron, who showed us to our lodgings.  The male and female students had separate dorms.  Dr. Boccardi was given a nearby cabin, while I was shown to a charming treehouse, accessible only by a swinging bridge.  It was perfect, even with the large wolf spider on my wall.
   We had rice, beans and chicken for dinner.  It was delicious, in spite of the repetition of lunch.  All meals were prepared by local Mayan women Teresa and Serafina, and they were incredible cooks.  I led some of the students on a short night hike, where we saw toads, crickets, leaf-cutter ants and a big, black tarantula.  Birds I saw that day included turkey vulture, great-tailed grackle, Amazon kingfisher, a hawk and a dove, among others.
   Byron told me that he had been a zipline guide for many years and had rigged a number of ziplines.  I took the opportunity to pick his brain on the subject, particularly how they were tensioned.  He said they typically used a come-along with Bachmann knots to tension the cable, thereby avoiding putting kinks in it.  The exception was a 1500-ft cable that they tensioned with a heavy-duty chain hoist.
1/4
   I took the first of several unpleasantly cold showers on this morning, then hiked up the trail a bit before breakfast.  I saw a blue-crowned mot-mot, a hooded warbler, a common yellowthroat, a hummingbird and a bat.  Breakfast consisted of flatbread, eggs and beans.  While we were hanging about, Byron pointed out a large male iguana sunning in a tree across the river.
   We took the ethnobotany and farming hike with local Mayan guide Sylvano, who also claimed to be a shaman.  He reviewed the (often questionable) medical uses of many plants, including Jackass bitters, which I tried.  It wasn't bad at first, kind of minty, but finished with a nasty aftertaste.  He showed us a large vine from which water could be obtained and many of us had a drink.  I thought it was fine water.  He also showed us how to make roofing thatch from a palm frond.  The tour of his farm was quite interesting.  He had a nice stand of cacao trees, but the squirrels were raising havoc with his fruits.  Everyone tried the fresh cacao fruit.  He also showed us calabash, vanilla vine, and others.  I enjoyed his demonstration of tapping a rubber tree, which I'd never seen in real life.  He had a black orchid plant as well (national flower of Belize), but it wasn't in bloom.  Along the way, we saw a lineated woodpecker, various parrots and others.  When we got back to the lodge, we saw a slaty-tailed trogon that kept returning to a couple of fruiting palm trees next to the shelter.  Rita and Bobbie went kayaking.  Lunch consisted of  rice and beans, beef, pasta and banana bread. It rained a bit during lunch.
   We took a short hike upstream to begin the cave swim. We wore headlamps, life jackets and water shoes.I also wore a shortsleeve rashguard and carried the polaroid action cam. We arrived at a large cave entrance. At it's ceiling, there was a large, dead bee hive, the combs hanging from the bare rock.  We were told that it had been a problem, with many tourists being stung. Finally, the guides had built a fire to smoke it well, then blasted it with a shotgun. Just to be clear, essentially all honeybees in Belize are African (killer) bees.  It was sometimes hard swimming against the heavy current.  There were some neat limestone formations and a few bats flying around.  I had never done anything like this, and I'm sure the students hadn't either. We couldn't go as far into the cave as normally because the flow was too high.   It was easy floating out with the current.  After hiking back we swam in the creek in front of the lodge.  Some of us had a good time on the rope swing, and  I got some video of that.  Most of us swam up to the falls, which, again, was not easy in the current.
   I had a little spare time and took the camera out to photograph waterfalls, usually with a slow shutter speed to let the water look cottony.  I went back to my room to change lenses for full-flash macro. I leaned over and heard a small piece of plastic hit the floor.  When I picked it up, I found that it was the mode knob from my camera (Canon 7D).  This event was very alarming.  I tried sticking it back in and turning it, but nothing happened.  Fortunately, it was stuck in Aperture Priority mode, which I use a lot.
   That evening, I saw a large bat cross the creek.  We took a night hike up the trail toward the cave.  Specimens were thin, but we did see a tarantula, a couple of walking sticks, spiders, crickets and millipedes.  When we had gone as far as we were going to go, the guide told us to turn off our lights and be quiet.  Immediately, something flew past my head and screeched.  The prolonged quiet and profound darkness were much creepier, as it was fully overcast, and not even starlight penetrated. I learned later that many of the students were very freaked out by this episode, especially since we weren't told about it ahead of time and didn't know the purpose.  Some kept flicking their lights on periodically.  We were told that it was designed to allow us to hear owls hooting and possibly kinkajous moving about in the canopy.  I thought it was to allow more wildlife to approach closer, which we would then see when we turned our lights on.  None of those things happened.  It turned out to be just an exercise in stretching our nerves.  Upon returning, I helped Byron remove a big spider from the women's dorm. He also used a black light to find a scorpion down the trail, which was a big attraction for students.
1/5
   I walked down the trail toward the village to do some early birding. I saw great-tailed grackles, great kiskadees, hummingbirds, parrots, black-cheeked woodpecker, great egret, Amazon kingfisher, a becard, a thrush, and many others.  While I was at the edge of the village, I saw a young woman washing her clothes on a rock in a stream.  Before long, she was brushing her teeth, then stripped to her bra to wash herself.  Self-conscious of carrying binoculars and not wanting to appear creepy, I walked up the trail back to the lodge.  I got a lot of good, close photos of the trogons coming to feed on berries.  After breakfast we hiked down through the village to a downstream region of the creek to hunt iguanas.  It was on this march that on a trail through a corn field I was stung on the ankles by numerous small black ants.  Every time I would stop to take a photo, they would swarm up my shoes and sting as soon as they contacted skin.  The sting pain was insignificant, but over the next week my ankles were severely itchy and swollen.  At least I was able to photograph a couple of butterflies on this hike.  At the streamside we prepared for wading and went upstream a short distance, where the son of the guide climbed into the trees to spook iguanas into the water.  The students formed a line across the stream, but the first iguana got right past us.  Kevin grabbed the second iguana, receiving some wounds for his efforts, and Seth ended up lifting it out of the water.  The guides caught another small one by hand, as well as another big male.  While we were hanging about, I saw a blue morpho butterfly flit across the stream.  I tried to call everyone's attention to it.  I've not seen one in the wild before, in spite of several trips to the tropics.  We took multiple photos of nearly everyone holding an iguana. On the way back we saw three chachalacas fly out of a fruit tree.  Our lunch was traditional chicken caldo.
   We hiked down to the village again for the arts and crafts presentation.  Melina showed us how to prepare cacao. She roasted the beans and separated out the chaff. The students helped grind the beans. The final product, sweetened and served warm, was about the same as a hot chocolate.  She also showed us how to weave a basket from the fibers of the jipi-japa palm leaf.  Several students had a try at it.  We were also entertained by her charming children and their chickens.  I was fascinated by the construction of her thatch-roofed hut.  The timbers were round poles, locally sourced, no doubt, and bound together with vines that had been saturated in water before lashing and shrank when dry.  The walls were mostly rough-cut boards.  Hammocks for sleeping were pulled aside during the day to allow more living space.  On the way out of town the villagers had set up a craft fair with a lot of hand-made goods, such as baskets, beaded jewelry, carved calabashes, and baskets.  Prices were very reasonable.  We had a dinner of fried chicken and smashed potatoes.  The students enjoyed a wild game of spoons into the night.
1/6
   I got up and packed, putting my wet and muddy things into a trash bag.  Breakfast was pancakes, beans and eggs.  I will forever miss those beans.  We had told the locals we were leaving at 8.  They started showing up at 7 to carry our bags.  I chose Julian, a thin but stalwart 14-year-old, to carry my big bag down the trail to the village.  We stopped the bus at Lubaantun, a sprawling Mayan ruin that was apparently used as a marketplace and a stadium for ballgames.  I saw some parrots flying around, but could not identify nor photograph them.  One high point was getting a clear view of an agouti that ran across a clearing below us.  We went on to Hopkins to the Lebeha drumming center, where we heard some great percussion music, danced and ate fish and plantains.  Most of the students had a turn at pounding the plantains using a long stick and a big wooden pot.  To me, it was exactly like packing the soil around a fence post with a tamping rod, and I took right to it.  Onward we went to Dangriga, another coastal town.  We were met by one of the guides, who got our bags on one boat, while we got in another.
   It was a fairly short (45-min?) ride out to South Water Caye, and the lodge run by IZE, our outfitter.  We met Barb, the director, who gave us a short tour then showed us to our rooms.  When I pulled my wet clothes out of the trash bag, they absolutely reeked.  I hung them on the line outside to dry.  We went snorkeling right from shore off the south end of the island.  It was a nice, easy swim in fairly calm water.  We saw a nurse shark, and a big southern stingray, which swam right under me.  I also saw brain corals, soft corals, elkhorn and staghorn corals, a feather duster worm and a large hermit crab.  Interestingly, they had an underwater rack where they were growing staghorn corals.  I had a couple of beers at happy hour before dinner.  Afterward we enjoyed shining our flashlights in the shallows around the pier to see fish and invertebrates that came out at night.  This activity became our pastime every night.  Eventually, I discovered that by using my big flash I could get some decent images.  We shortly discovered some sea horses that clung to a tangle of rope hanging from the deck rail.  We also saw houndfish, bonefish, and watched an octopus move in to hide under the deck.
1/7
   After a breakfast of waffles we took the boats out west of the caye to snorkel.  The water was rough, and there weren't many fish in this locale.  I saw a rock beauty, parrot fishes, wrasses, lots of corals, and delightful ascon sponges in a variety of colors.  About halfway through my breakfast started feeling heavy in my stomach and the snorkel felt big in my mouth.  The up and down motion of the waves was beginning to make me nauseous.  Shortly afterward, I was stung in the calf by a jellyfish.  I never saw it, but it hurt much worse than the little ones that stung us in the Galapagos.  The pain began to pass and the time had come to get back in the boat.  I thought I was going to be fine, until I heard my student Abby starting to retch.  Normally, I'm not a sympathy puker, but I am vulnerable to motion sickness. I gave my breakfast to the sea over the side of the boat.  Guess I was chumming the fish.
   When we got back I took a shower, ate a benadryl and put hydrocortisone cream on my ant stings.  Feeling much revivified, I took a nap in the hammock on the deck of my cabin, which, by the way, sat among the mangroves and looked eastward over the Caribbean.  Lunch consisted of chicken empanadas.  Delicious.  I eschewed the afternoon snorkel, which being done on the fore reef endured heavy waves from the neverending Northeast Tradewinds.  I took a nap and did some photography.  Dinner was barbequed chicken.  I watched the students play volleyball.  I thought our kids would dominate, considering we had three varsity women on our side, but the locals, mostly our guides, were pretty good.  Night shining around the dock revealed a green moray (he's a regular), stingrays, squid, crabs, a lobster, polychaete worms, a sea cucumber, bonefish and a small barracuda. We saw a little squid on the surface quickly accelerate and catch a tiny fish.  One of the guides cleaned some lionfish at the pier, and the bonefish showed up to aggressively consume the remains.  Also, a huge puffer appeared, presumably with the same ideas.
1/8
After breakfast I took dramamine in preparation for snorkeling at "The Aquarium".  It did not disappoint. The coral formations were fairly shallow, allowing a good look. Conditions were calm, and no one got sick.  I saw many soft corals and sponges.  I saw a sea turtle, a spotted moray, two boxfish and two cowfish, many parrotfish, a rockfish and others.  This snorkel was, without doubt, the best of the trip.  Upon returning I took a brief outing in a sit-on-top kayak (Lifetime), followed by a short trip on a stand-up paddleboard.  It was kind of a cheap one, with no skeg, which may be why it did not track at all.  It was kind of cool paddling through a school of bonefish.  I took a little video of that.  I went birding with a couple of guys from the other group, from Sacramento City College.  We saw some warblers, including the yellow, black and white, palm, and Cape May.
  On our way out to the afternoon snorkel we saw a dolphin.  We stopped and it swam right under the boat, then breached a few times, giving us all a great view.  Snorkeling "Coral Gardens" was not bad.  The water was not too rough.  I saw several large stingrays,  We also saw two comb jellies and two regular jellyfish.  I took video of them.  Actually, I took video during all of my snorkeling, but most of the footage is very poor.
1/9  The day dawned windy and rough, so no one was in the mood for snorkeling.  I led a short nature hike starting from behind my cabin, where many tiny hermit crabs swarmed in the shallows.  I described the value of mangroves as incubators for many juvenile animals, and their role in stabilizing shorelines.  We also saw a sea urchin and fiddler crab, and I talked about coconut trees.  We walked out to the north end of the island, where the coral rubble created some shallow tide pools.  By turning over rocks, we found three species of sea urchins plus pencil urchins, a couple of species of brittle stars, chitons, conch, many snails, acorn barnacles and decorator crabs.  On the way out Kevin spotted a sea anemone.  I fed it one of the small snails as a demonstration.  Birds we saw included great-tailed grackles, brown pelicans, cormorants, and magnificent frigatebirds.  Also noted was the sea grape.
   We took the boat out to Carrie Bow Caye to get a tour of the Smithsonian Institution's research station.  It was quite nice, especially the wet lab with running sea water.  The station manager told us that the island used to be 5 acres, but it was down to about .5 acres since they cut down the mangroves.  I reminded my students of what I had said about the role of mangroves in stabilizing shorelines.  Thence we went to a small island where the frigate birds were nesting and brown boobies were hanging about.  The guide broke off some sticks and threw them in the air, where the frigates caught them and carried them back to their nests.  We looked for manatees around the Tobacco Range, but didn't see any.  We moored at Tobacco Caye and took a quick tour of the island.  We had a sobering view of fishermen cleaning conch in their boats and tossing the shells onto a giant pile.  We learned the Noni tree and a couple of others.  We returned to South Water Caye, enjoyed a couple of beers. We were given a few lobster tails for dinner, even though we had failed to find any lobsters ourselves (I had been looking hard during the snorkels).  We finally had a decent sunset.   All previous sunsets had them obscured by clouds, as were all sunrises.  I photographed the hell out of this one.
  I was reading in bed the works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu using the Kindle app on my phone when I felt an earthquake at about 9.  I fell asleep at about 9:30 but was awakened by knocking at my door at 10:30.  Barb said there had been an earthquake, and that we were under a tsunami warning.  I woke up Dr. Boccardi.  It was decided we should go to the second floor of the student dorm and don life jackets.  After I heard the earthquake was in Honduras, I figured there wasn't much of a threat because there isn't much water between the island and the mainland, so I lay down and half dozed.  In a half hour, we received the all-clear, took off our life jackets and went back to bed.  Upon my return to the states, I looked up the story and found that the earthquake had been in Honduran waters, and was magnitude 7.6.

Had I seen this map, I wouldn't have gone to sleep, I'd have shit myself.  There's a lot of water between that epicenter and Belize, our island being just off the middle coast.  This caye has no elevation, and everything on it could be easily wiped out by a decent tsunami. Here's the full story.  We sure dodged a bullet there.
1/10
   I packed early and got a little photography in before breakfast.  We loaded on the boats and hauled back to the mainland in rough water.  From there, a bus ride of a few hours returned us to the airport, where we were finally able to shop for souvenirs.  All the shops had mostly the same tourist kitsch, but that didn't stop us.  Our flight was delayed by 11 minutes, which made the layover in Houston a bit dicey.  We had to clear customs, immigration and security in a little over an hour.  I thought by the time we had gone through customs and immigration our bags would be waiting for us, but nooooooo.  We waited in agony at the baggage carousel for them to appear while the minutes ticked away.  After they finally came up, we grabbed them and ran through the airport to our gate, where our flight was already boarding.  Whew, that was a close one.  We arrived at St. Louis, said our goodbyes, then Dylan, Seth and I took the shuttle back to the hotel.  We got in our cars and headed home.

Photo albums:

Blue Creek
Iguana hunt
Lubaantun
South Water Caye

I'll be adding some videos later.
 

December 2016

December brought us a real, if thin, snowfall, and a genuine cold snap.  Below zero temperatures froze things up well enough for me to go ice fishing.  After several false starts, I found the honey hole over in Lowell's lake and brought home 8 decent bluegills.  The end of the academic semester finally came.  We had our insect folk song sing-along for the last lab in Entomology, and there was the annual Christmas carol sing-along/play-along.  These are always fun musical events, and give me an excuse to pull out the old charango.

Since final exams I've spent most of my time organizing my workshop and the other sheds.  I've built shelves and moved things around to places that make the most sense at the moment.  Stacey and I spent an afternoon recently packing things in plastic (presumably mouse-proof) tubs for long-term storage.  This event was essentially our final act of moving.

My friend Bob gave me a wood lathe, which I've always considered to be a highly specialized tool.  I've made some preliminary efforts with it, just with pieces of wood I had lying about.  I've turned some square pieces into round ones, and made two yo-yos and a top.  Lowell gave me his old fuel tank, so we spent an afternoon moving it over.  It needs refinishing and some other work, which makes for the perfect winter project.  It had sat so long that a tree had grown through its base and surrounded some of the angle iron.  It was an effort with chainsaw, splitting wedges and sledge hammer just to get that off.  We decided a welder would be useful, so we split the cost of a cheap one.  It will increase the range of projects we can attempt.

The dogs are about the same, and we still have Marshall.  We've had him about 4 months already.  Miss Kitty, now fully recovered from her surgery, is more spunky than ever.  She lost about 5 pounds, which probably helps.

Stacey and I went to the Therapy Dog Christmas party.  Sadly, dogs were not invited.  However, the hostess prepared a tremendous spread of diverse delectables.  It was fun to talk to people about dogs all night and some productive things came out of the meeting too.

We hosted the camera club Christmas party this year, which was a first.  We put all the dogs in crates in the (heated) workshop, which worked really well.  It was fun.  We have seldom entertained in recent years, but that may change now.  For Christmas day, we had Lowell, Savannah and her boyfriend over.  This was the first time we met the new beau.  He's gainfully employed, relatively normal, and a very nice guy.

I've been working as an expert witness for about 3 years on a wasp-related case.  It was finally about to go to trial and I had even booked a flight to Florida for next week.  Fortunately, the case settled out of court and I don't have to go.  I would have made a nice sum of money, but I would have had to drive back from St. Louis in the wee hours of the morning and be ready for my 8:30 class.  Both Stacey and I are quite relieved.

This may be my last blog for awhile.  I've been writing them monthly in recent years, but now even that seems a stretch.  Hard to believe I used to write them weekly.  They'll probably be restricted to special events or travel.  In the meantime, you can follow me on Facebook.



Click here for December photos.

November 2016

I took Isabel her first agility trial.  We had been training for over a year, so it was time.  She really did well in Jumpers With Weaves, making first place both times, and a perfect 100 on the second run.  On the standard course, however, she refused to go on the contact obstacles, and we did not qualify. It was fun to compete and I look forward to our next trial.

Kitty had surgery on a mammary cyst that she's had for some time.  It was quite a time getting her over it, with three return trips to the vet, and wearing a cone for 3 weeks.  She beat the heck out of the cone, as it grew to be her personal weapon.  On the day we were planning to take it off, she went outside and rubbed it in dog poo, which precipitated an early removal.

My dog class has gone really well, as I've had lots of dogs visiting and culminated in a trip to the kennel club to see dogs run the agility course.  We got some good PR out of it when QU did this little story.

About 11 years ago, Lowell dug up some snake eggs while getting some soil with his tractor.  He gave the eggs to me and I hatched out three of them: Little Ron, Little Joe and Little Lowell.  I eventually released the first two, but have kept the third happy and healthy for years, often using it for demonstrations in my class.  I was completely surprised to find 4 eggs in her cage last week.  I think because I overfed her last spring, she had nothing better to do with the nutrients than make eggs.  I have rechristened her "Lolita".  For those keeping track, I'm 0 for 2 on guessing the gender of my pet snakes, as I thought my Burmese Python a female for years, but it turned out to be a male.

We took the sisters and Gretchen to a barn hunt practice.  They all shoed a little interest, but were not exceptional at all.  I was surprised, given how they like to chase squirrels at home.  I certainly thought Gretchen, who has killed mice, would attack the rat.  We consoled them with a trip to Pet Supplies Plus, where they got many treats and toys.

The next day I took Indigo to the Therapy Dogs International (TDI) test.  I knew the test was coming and she needed to work on some skills, but I just didn't have enough time with all the late nights and special events.  Miraculously, she passed.  Now she's a certified therapy dog.

Because we are insane we took on another foster.  Lilith is a pepper and salt mini.  She has lots of energy and attitude.  She is learning to socialize with the other dogs, and playing with one of the sisters at a time seems to work best.  We only had her a week before handing her off.  She sure was cute.

Leaves are one of the drawbacks of living in a heavily wooded area.  I had to buy a leaf blower.  I found one that attaches to my string trimmer, so I didn't add another motor to my maintenance load.  After blowing the leaves away from the house, I roll them into a big tarp, creating a giant burrito to slide down the hill and dump in the valley.

Deer season came and went.  I hung a stand on a tree in the back yard, but soon found that I had faced it in the opposite direction of that from which most deer come.  I saw about 7 deer on opening morning, including one legal buck, but I passed on them. I moved the stand to another tree with a better view.  On the second morning I saw 11, which was very entertaining.  I still didn't shoot, as most were on the adjoining property.  On the last day of the season I saw none.  It was much colder and fairly unpleasant.  I didn't even hunt that evening, much to my chagrin, as the dogs spotted a nice buck in the back yard that sauntered down the fence line after hearing their barking.

We had a nice, quiet Thanksgiving, with Savannah and Lowell coming over.  I had a long break from work, which enabled me to catch  up on raking leaves and other tasks. I did spend most of one day at an auction.  Guy I knew died earlier this year and they sold most of his stuff.  I didn't buy anything too fancy, just some inexpensive things, like a bike carrier and some plastic barrels.  I did get a little, black, cast iron schnauzer though, now adorning our fireplace.

Click to see November's photos and videos.

September-October 2016

Either I've gotten very lazy or my live is so boring, that I didn't bother to write a blog for September.  Time to catch up.  Perhaps the biggest event has been our fostering another giant schnauzer.  Marshall is a leggy, 80-lb black giant.  He has been a lot of fun to have around.  Since he is young, he likes to play a lot.  He even wears out the sisters.

I went to the International Congress of Entomology in Orlando.  I was so sick of flying that I drove.  I learned a lot, presented my talk, and reconnected with some old friends.  I did not go to Disney or any of the other tourist traps.

My dog class has been going great. We have had dogs ranging from Newfoundlands to Yorkshire terriers.  I'm sure the students are enjoying it.  Indigo earned the Canine Good Citizen title, and we're working on the skills for a Therapy Dog.  Isabel is making progress in agility.  She did really well in our demonstrations at Responsible Dog Ownership Day at Quincy Mall.

I fixed up an old Hiawatha bike that my brother Mike brought out from California.  It originally came from my Grandpa's estate, then hung in our milk barn for years. I put new tires and tube on it.  It is rusty but ridable.  Savannah rode it in the Monster Bike Bash in Columbia and won a costume contest with it.

I got another vintage bike, a Raleigh, that also needs tires and tubes.  It's a 3-speed with a steel mixte frame.  It does have some sweet fenders on it though.

Anticipating the need to plow snow this winter, and given the need to move stuff around and work on projects here, I thought a UTV would be the ideal solution.  After considerable research, I got the Honda Pioneer.  Although I had to send it back for a new fuel pump after a week, it has performed well ever since.

I found a couple of vines of wild hops at North Campus and I harvested as much as I could.  They were so prolific that even after several one-hour picking sessions, there were still many cones left on the vine.  I dried them and stored them in my basement.  I brewed up a batch of beer with it and bottled it.  I will be drinking it soon.

I taught the bug and bird parts of a Master Naturalist class.  They seemed like people who were really into it, though we didn't see as many species as I had hoped.

After nearly 3 years of waiting, I finally gave the deposition for the expert witness case I've been working on.  I'm not used to having my authority questioned as part of my regular job, but the opposing attorney in this case had no problem questioning it, and every assumption I made.  It was a bit unnerving, but I think I made my points and even got him back on a few.

I helped set up and take down the equipment for the Responsible Dog Ownership Day that the Quincy Kennel Club held at the Quincy Mall.  It was a fun event.  Isabel got to demonstrate agility twice and appear in the breed parade.  We hung out and chatted with our kennel club friends, mall visitors and vendors.  Dairy Queen had the pumpkin pie blizzard, which I could not resist.  I got to see and visit with a lot of dogs too.

The last day of the month was, of course, Halloween.  One of my students surprised me by dressing up as...me.  He had the hat, jeans, khaki shirt, tennies, fake beard and moustache, and even the earring.

September photos

October photos

August 2016

I finally finished moving all our stuff and fixing up our old house.  It's for sale here:

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/707-S-Monticello-Rd-Canton-MO-63435/2097639398_zpid/

It's been a hot, dry summer, but we finally got some rains, nearly 3 inches one night.  So I had to mow the grass at the new place.  The previous owner probably mowed 3 acres of surface area.  I sure wasn't going to do that! A lot of the tree-filled area will go back to natural woods, with a little help.  I started with a zero-turning-radius mower that I had gotten from Lowell.  It's a Bad Boy brand, and he's had a lot of trouble with it.  It was working well for me until I nearly put it in the pond.  It doesn't like to turn uphill.  I stopped it, then pulled it back up the hill with my truck.  Then I was mowing the dam and it stopped responding to the controls.  The belt had broken.  So I switched to pulling a Swisher finishing mower with Lowell's little ATV.  That was working even better until I looked back and saw it smoking (and not mowing).  I had burned up another belt.  Fortunately, I was able to borrow Lowell's riding mower and finish the job.  It was still 4 hours, including string trimming.

While we have become accustomed to the presence of deer in the back yard, the appearance of a big buck was quite a pleasant surprise.  I'm not normally a very patient photographer, but I stood at the tripod (which I keep in the sun room at all times) for quite a long time waiting for him to come out from behind a tree.  It was raining and the light was so dim I had to use a very high ISO.  Consequently, the images were not the best ever, but at least I got the shot.

My brother Mike and his son Racin drove out from California.  He brought me an old bike I had been storing in one of our barns.  We aired up the tires and I rode it for a minute before they blew out.  It's a restoration project.  He helped me fix up the old mowers and organize my workshop.  We hiked the property and swam in the pond.  We went to Palmyra one afternoon and I bought a vintage bar to go in the family room.  We squished up all the blackberries and started a batch of wine.  We went up to Hamilton, IL, and dug geodes for one morning, which was kind of fun.  There was an auction down the road and we went to that.  I got a few good deals, but was outbid on some others.  On his last day here, we moved Racin into the dorms at QU.

While they were here, we received a bid on our old house.  It seemed reasonable, though they wanted the old mower with the house, and we accepted.  We'll be happy to not be paying two mortgages for long.

The fall semester approached with the usual series of meetings, followed by the onset of classes.  i have two new preps this semester.  One is the Biology of Dogs, which was my own idea.  The other is QUC, which used to be FYE.  It's been years since I've taught it, and it no longer resembles what it once was.  Classes are now in full swing, and I am enjoying taking the Entomology class out.  They are very motivated and seem to appreciate the skills they are learning.

On my first check on the blackberry wine, it smelled bad, like vinegar.  I was quite worried.  After I racked it, I found that the liquor was developing into a nice wine, the smell attributable to the cap of decaying skins and seeds.  The fermentation was going strong, and I have reasonable certainty that it will be an excellent vintage.

I had a spare moment and got the old Honda CT-70 running again.  I had switched out the carburetor and added fuel filters last spring, so I just added gas and it fired up without much trouble.  Naturally, I rode it all over the new place, and even used it to go over to Lowell's to pick pears.  Stacey and I have been chipping away at the unpacking.  We got all the artwork hung on the walls and have emptied many boxes.  The house is almost in the shape that we ultimately want it to be.

Savannah got a new job as office staff at a Quincy manufacturer.  It's part time, but at least it has normal hours.

Indigo and Gretchen have been taking Canine Good Citizen classes.  Both are very close to being able to pass the test.  Isabel has been still taking agility classes for about a year.  She's still a novice, but very accomplished.  She may be competing this November.

Picasa has gone extinct, so I can no longer embed slide shows in this blog.  At the moment, it seems the best I can do is provide the following link, which you can click through to see the photos.

Photo album