OMG, time off will do that to you

(a-HEM)

For some bewildering reason, it feels like time to re-start the blog.

After a hiatus of 10 months, thoughts re-emerge that I want to document concerning school, politics, Portland, friends and family, films, and the 48th round of public knitting that I call my life.  Good time to grab a beer.

Since facebook has become the newest blog-substitute among my blogging pals, it is almost the fast-food of blogging; too convenient, chuck with filler to distract the writer and the reader, and so seductive.  ”Wow, look what her friends commented about her last post, pretty catty,” then I wander off to one of those catty friends’ facebook pages and anonymously read about their life.  I don’t know them, they don’t know me, and here we are in each other’s inner circle somehow, a fly on the facebook wall.

It’s a public space, we all know, and you get to determine who can see what, and people do willingly post updates and pictures and links and videos and banal Twitter-like blips of mundane gas.  But it’s only for your friends, and they love you, right?  I’m afraid to ask any of my 25 friends on facebook if they have set me on “hide” function so my posts don’t show up to read.  I’m easily crushed that way.

But two recent occurrences have made me re-examine the whole idea of facebook, my using it, and why it would have an appeal to anyone over, say, 30.

Occurrence number one was my dentist’s absolute horror at the idea that I may have dissed him in a blog or on my facebook page.  He’s in his late 20s and thus in the demographic of those completely fluent in all communication technologies.  He was seriously not pleased that I may have said anything derogatory about him as a professional, to be read in a public way.  I tried to snicker and wise-crack my way out of what was becoming a very uncomfortable situation for both of us.  He felt bad that I may have had some painful effects of procedures, then felt even worse that I was posting about it for people to read.  I reassured him that I didn’t have that many people reading my posts, if anyone, but that didn’t seem to help.  Shit.  What an unconscious and dumb thing to do without thinking.

The second occurrence is still in process, because of my being totally frozen about what to reply to someone who answered my facebook friend-request by saying that he didn’t know who I was.  Very humbling.  I have to think about this some more.

Way Too Much Television

This presidential campaign is too distracting to me, and everything is beginning to suffer.

School, family, work, friends—especially school.  I just can’t go more than a few hours without some kind of political fix from CNN or the New York Times, what’s going on today, what happened last night, who said something stupid, who’s endorsing Obama today, who groaning about Palin today, what are the poll numbers?

Bad.  I cannot wait for this to be over.  

Piles of textbooks, spiral notebooks open with notes—and Wolf Blitzer in the Situation Room, Anderson Cooper and David Gergen hammering out the hard questions.  Somebody call a time-out.

Hillary’s on, gotta go.

if he had it to do over again…

Right at the tail end of his generous talk last night, with just a hint of fatigue showing, someone in line at a microphone asked Dr. Leakey if he had always wanted to do science.

There was some tittering from the crowd, the high school student who had posed the question may or may not know of the scientist’s stupendous pedigree.  But then again…

“No, absolutely not, I spent a great deal of my early life trying to get away from it, I hated school, never even graduated high school,”  Dr. Leakey expounded.  ”I certainly had a phase of rebelling against what my parents were doing, wanted no part of it.  But luckily I didn’t waste too many years feeling that way, there was so much going on that I had to get involved.

“But…” and he paused for a few moments.  ”You know, if I had it to do all over again…” another long pause, and we all leaned forward with wild imaginings, “I wouldn’t spend any time looking for the earliest beginnings of human fossils, the origins of the branch that eventually became Homo sapiens, not at all.  I mean, how much does that really tell us?  It’s profound and necessary, but what really interests me today is the earliest phases of human cultural development, how we came up with agriculture, language, and complex groups of populations living together.  If I was just starting out today as a young anthropologist or archaeologist, that’s the area I would begin with and concentrate on, there’s just so much about that time that we don’t know.”

Like I said, gobsmacked.  Struck by lightning.  Frozen in a moment.  Like I’d smuggled it into his lecture notes.  Because that is exactly what I have been wanting to do, the area and time frame I am most interested in. 

The elderly man sitting to my right had been poking fun at my note-taking throughout the lecture, and kept trying to engage me in some sort of defense of science chat, how I should attend a lecture about creationism at his church and write about that for a balanced point of view, what snobs scientists are about “their little theory of evolution.”  

Great, I thought.  This is who randomly got the seat next to me, a well-off, elderly white Christian Republican from Lake Oswego who’s going to mumble comments of objection all through Dr. Leakey’s talk and make ‘harumpf’ noises when there’s a moose-dressing joke and mentions of climate change.  Just great.  And that’s just what the guy did.  He’d nudge me during an amusing slam of anti-science and mumble, “better write that down, that’s gospel,” and “that was a good one, better note that down.”

Grrrrrrr. 

But when Dr. Leakey mentioned how difficult life in East Africa can be, with little water and few resources, and that he’d lost his legs in a plane crash many years ago that compelled him to think long and hard about the role of bipedalism and its role in human development, the guy finally shut up and left me alone.  Dr. Leakey thinks that bipedalism, for all its advantages, made us uniquely vulnerable if we were wounded and unable to get our own food or escape danger on our own.  That bipedalism was accompanied by making bonds between individuals and within groups that favored survival, that cooperation propelled the species forward so that we could maximize other advantages that bipedalism offered.  That standing helped us see farther and enabled us to carry more.  He said he’d had hours and hours to contemplate these things while recuperating in the hospital and at home.  And that both of his artificial legs were getting tired and he’d take three more questions and get back to the hotel.

Now I have to read his books.  And replace the mental picture of him that I retained after seeing a documentary from the early 1980s when he was in the field with his team, and he was taller, younger, leaner and jumping around from dig site to lab tent to trench in khaki and boots.  I hadn’t heard about the plane crash, and forgot that the show was from so long ago, it may have even been from the 1970s.  As much as I may feel like it, I am not one of the young eager anthropologists just starting out that he referred to over and over again.  No years in the dirt trenches for me at this stage.  But he stressed how 4-year-old kids need to absolutely learn geography, and stick with science all through life, and stay passionate about discovery and learning, that they are the generation coming up that will blow the doors off of what will be old science then, what is new today.  If he could do it all over again…

bones and stones

Tomorrow night Dr. Richard Leakey is giving a lecture at the Arlene Schnitzer Theater, and I will be there.  In the midst of a group of awe-struck PSU Anthropology students, faculty and assorted paleo-heads.  Talk about being in the right place at the right time.  If classes hadn’t started this week, I’d have read about it in the Willamette and kvetched about not being able to go.

The extra-credit essay is only a small part of my wanting to go, I am missing two previously scheduled events for the privilege of attending and hearing first-hand research and newest discoveries from Dr. Leakey and his team.  Honestly, I was going to watch the VP debate, squirming and biting through the ropes tying me into the chair.  And the tacos camarones at “por que no?” will still be there when we go another time (sorry Mike, you can’t move yet) but this ticket to the lecture was a gift from Darwinian Heaven and one of the rare perks of being in a Human Evolutionary Genetics class on a Tuesday morning in September.

Last night the National Geographic Channel had another one of its “China Nights” featuring ancient cultures and emperors, and happily for me, the Caucasian Mummies of Western China.  This episode was updated from the previous “Mummies of Urumqui” feature from two years ago with new results of the DNA analysis and genetic results of these tall, red-haired tattooed people wearing plaid woven woolen clothes of prehistoric Celtic origin.  And the curious fact is that these people were already genetically a mixed population with Tibetan, Indo-Asian and Siberian genes, inspite of being near six feet tall with pale skin and red hair.

I could hardly sleep—how can I spin this into a specialization in anthropology?  The crossroads of the Near East, funneled out of Africa through Egypt into Mesopotamia, up into the steppes of Central Asia and Western China, Neolithic cultures mixing together in this basin of the world, trading, and creating written languages, agriculture and art?

As one of my Classics professors would say, being a Hellenist, “You really need to narrow your focus to one era or culture unit, this idea is three lifetime careers.”

But but but but, it’s all related, interconnected, threaded through with the same technological leaps, domestication of plants and animals, creation of art.

I can’t be a paleogeneticist, too.  Or paleoclimatologist.  Or geologist.  Help.

By the end of this term, I will be a senior already.  Holy shit.  There are decisions to be made, grad school to apply to, funding to find, graduation and a degree.  My advisor is on sabbatical this year.  Crap.  I’m not into CSI.  I want to read Linear B.  Our entire threshold of human culture lies on that swath of land between the Mediterranean and the Tian Shan mountains.  Out of Africa, north and east, following rivers and valleys and striking off across plains.

Dr. Leakey may discuss Homo floresiensis, which acquired the unfortunate nickname “Hobbitt” and has been in the news over the past few years, found in Micronesia in 2004.  I’m sure he’ll discuss “Lucy” and other paleoanthropological findings of the last 50 years in the African Rift Valley.  He’ll talk about the history of this field, and where it may be going for those of us just starting out.  Many of the assumptions made by the pioneering scientists are under examination by students and researchers today, trying to extract as much of the 1950’s biases and point of views as possible to leave a neutral evidence record.  My hope is that the tendency to have too narrow a focus in the field may be one of those ideas up for re-examination.  Or I’ll maybe have to just dive in and see how far I get with my approach.

But I’ll be in Row G tomorrow night, taking a flurry of notes.

Irish Whiskey Amnesia

There’s an Australian blog I dearly love, written by an artist who sounds like she’d be just the Portland type who I could befriend and hang out with, getting into the same scrapes and adventures we seem to be doing by ourselves on two different hemispheres.  Her name is Shula, and she’s getting ready for a big exhibit, and raising her teenage daughter, becoming a yoga master, writing like a genius banshee, and it sounds like also breaking up with someone and needing to move immediately.  

Fuckin-A, as I like to say.

So she did what seems like total sense, actively do something that would have been out-of-the-question while still in the relationship, with her daughter safely at art camp.  

She opened a bottle of Irish whiskey.

Ahh, yes, the Lost Evening to be had, the oblivion to be sought, the momentary clearing of the broken illusions from the corners of your heart and mind, the scouring of your soul with bitter spirits to remove every last particle of that dream of love and ever after.

But then there is that next day.  Hopefully you awake at home, intact, alone, and with headache remedy nearby.  She did, and after succeeding to crawl to the shower, find clothes, and start to attempt being vertical, to her horror she discovered something she’d done while oblivious, because her computer was still on.

She’d subscribed to the Country Woman’s Association.  There was the confirmation email.

That would be like signing up for the AARP here in the US.  When her headache faded, she let herself laugh at the absurdity.  Then posted it all for her global fans to chuckle over and console.  And she does feel better that this binge was done thoroughly, but is now past.  There is something to be said about letting yourself go ahead and feel bad when you really feel bad, and to quit assuring your friends that you’re okay, and to physically dive into the pain that you are carrying emotionally so that you feel it physically, too.  If you know that you aren’t going to hell often, or permanently.  I mean, the asshole you broke up doesn’t deserve that much energy, right?  

The experts on addiction and self-destructive behaviors usually react as a Greek chorus at this point, with dire warnings and threats of rehab and the like.  If you need to stay sober, then do something else, like eat a gallon of Ben & Jerry’s or enough BBQ ribs to frighten a cardiologist.  The key here is that then you stop.

Stop binging, stop blaming yourself, stop rehearsing what you should have done differently, stop hoping they’ll change, or change their minds about you, stop checking if they called you—this time you get to draw the line in the sand and then step over it into a new chapter of yourself.  Sometimes a little drama keeps it from being just another night out with a few drinks and friends.  THE Hangover is something you remember as a pivot point for a long time to come.  ”I was done with ________ THEN, absolutely no going back THEN.”

Country Women’s Association.  Too funny.  Shula is the anti-frump, her online friends laughed at the idea of her sitting with doilies in the parlour with scones and tittering small talk.  She can always reassign it as a spam mail, or keep subscribing and amuse herself with a picture of something that either deeply appealed to her in a weak (and drunken) moment, or get a snicker at the absurdity.  Then spam it.  But then—she does blindingly small needlework.  Hmmmm….

David Foster Wallace

NYTimes essay about David Foster Wallace

NYTimes book blog about David Foster Wallace

Many years ago, I had a friend who was simply marking time until he finally “did it”, as he put it.  He had more than a striking resemblance to Dale Earnhardt, was a grandfather in his early 50s, funny, caring, a devoted friend, a reliable co-worker, and deeply loved by his friends and family.  After spending a few weeks with him as a co-worker, we became fast friends, and when he finally talked to me about his mental illness, I was at first stunned into mute shock.

He had been doing such a great job at “passing” for a regular guy.

The few of us who he had taken into his confidence had all the usual questions.  Was his doctor really doing all he could do, had he tried this new medication, was there a clinical study in the area he could be included in for experimental drugs, had he undergone electroconvulsive shock treatments which were coming back into use, how much support was he getting from his family?  He answered all of our questions pretty thoroughly, he was willing to explain his illness to the extent that the person was willing to listen, so some of us knew a great deal more about his history than others.  

It was heart-breaking to think that this wonderful man had been burdened with this horrible condition, and that we were all traveling forward to some inevitable horrible day when he had finally had enough and had the determination to be done.

I’ve read the essays about David Foster Wallace for years, and honestly envied his talent and ability to not just carry it all around in his head but that he got it written and published and out there into the world. There is a generation of readers and writers who carried a beat-up copy of “Infinite Jest” around like a compendium of perspectives, along with a thinner ragged copy of Palahnuik, Sedaris, Chabon, Danielewski, and Augusten Burroughs.  They appreciated the craft as well as the brilliance, and heard the thunder in the distance when words like “manic”, “scattershot”, and “over-amped” were used in the mixed book reviews. You didn’t have to like the book, but you did need to appreciate the unique application of language and prodigious talent.  Often we read the editor failed in “Infinite Jest”.  I don’t believe it.  Too few of us can handle a book over 1000 pages, unless it’s the Bible.  Which is sad.

My friend threw a big party before he “did it”, three days before Christmas, and we all dressed up and brought gifts and had a great time.  He lavishly took care of everyone there, and the police didn’t show up until really late when he and his best friend had hauled out the ritual spare toilet and hoisted it above the basketball hoop on someone’s roof.  We realized on the 23rd that he had planned it all to work out this way.  And there we all were back in his family room again, with all the same Christmas decorations up from the weekend’s party, and no one would be going out into the garage.  

Deep grief, of course, but also a weird relief, and it took us a while to be able to talk about that.  All the time I’d known him, he’d been very honest about not wanting to live with his torment anymore, how obsessive it was, how his doctor was merely ‘managing’ his condition because there was no cure, how unfair it was for him to drag his family and his wife along with him on this nightmare journey that had only one ending. Since I’d only known him a short time, I still hoped something would arrive to change it, a new treatment, drug or therapy.  He had so much still to give to the world, beloved grandchildren to nurture, his hilarious practical jokes to pull.  His family had been worn down and were sitting with their exhaustion and abrupt release from constant vigilance on his state of mind. You love the person, but you know why they went through with it.  Holding them here seems so selfish when they can’t be helped to health.  Do more, explore more options, lock them up, do anything.

My friend wasn’t a famous writer, but he also decided that he’d endured long enough.  David Foster Wallace may have had more amazing books to write, or he may not have.  He may have wanted to do something else with his view of this place, and strike out into something else entirely.  I’m sure writing was just one of his passions, but we only got to see the books.  When I consider his life being over at 46, what I want to see fixed is the ability to help someone who is trying to be helped, that the torment the person is enduring can be treated with something that can reach them where they are, so that not only do we get to keep them here with us, but that they again see how to be here in a way that makes them thrive.  Not just exist. Not just to win over the pain.  

The day of the wake, I left my friend’s house and drove straight to the beach.  The late winter afternoon sun was washing the shallow Boca world with a luminescence that reflected my own sense of suspension in wonder.  Here was this breathtakingly splendid day, and he missed it.  This gorgeous day could not have changed his mind, he couldn’t be reached even by this anymore.  Sitting in the chilly offshore breeze, I watched a stream of raptor birds float in a thermal a few hundred feet over my head, and I started counting.  After a hundred or so I stopped and just sat there on the sand until the thread of them disappeared into the glowing twilight.  Helplessness had faded into appreciation, somewhat.  He would have really laughed to think of a procession of chicken vultures seeing him off.

tech tock

For all the complaining I hear and read about technology, there are many more moments of sheer beauty and connection to be had no other way.

Like a half-hour chat with a dear friend in an airport in South Africa on his way to Paris while I’m enjoying my second cup of morning coffee here in Portland. How is that bad? He tells me all about his trip and people he met while going off on his own, and I catch him up on all that’s going on in the neighborhood, and he sees photos of our young neighbors camping from two days ago, almost in real-time. This is wonderful!

(true confession) I did manage to delete the videos I took yesterday, of the spectacular last days of summer on a cloudless blue sky above. So I’m still working out the details of the tech-nography. Fortunately for me and our friend flying to Paris, the week’s forecast promises more of the same brilliant dry weather so I can reshoot AND I determined how I lost the video. I do love the technology.

Yesterday I had a long afternoon on the porch, soaking up sunshine, blue light rays, and new cultural information from a new tenant here. Specifically about the phenomenon of texting.

“Why not just call?” I asked. “It takes so much longer to type out words on those tiny phone buttons, what’s the appeal of texting?”

The young woman just looked at me.

“Really,” I said, “I don’t get it.”

“Well,” she began, “you don’t always want to actually speak to that person, you just want to let them know something.”

“In real-time,” I said.

“Yeah, in real-time, and you can’t always have your phone ringing in certain situations, so you text instead,” she concluded.

“So why not voice-mail?”

She sighed, “Like if you’re in class, or at work–”

“So it’s a kids’ thing, like notes passed in class, chatting during a boring lecture, in the car with your parents there—”

“Yeah, exactly! But it’s not just kids, you don’t want to interrupt a meeting to answer a vibrate phone call so you text back instead, or whatever.”

I had to look at my own bias here, having sat in classes with rampant texters all around me in the under 20 age group, wondering why they were taking up space in this class if this was what they were spending the lecture doing. Texting may have real applications, but it seems created by people who don’t want to be overheard saying something unfavorable about people around them. POS–parent over shoulder. My best friend’s 13 year old daughter spent an entire weekend in a snit because her cell phone needed a battery replacement and my friend wasn’t going to take care of that soon enough for her kid. “You’re speaking to me on a working phone, so why doesn’t she use this one when you’re off the line?” I asked stupidly.

“Because she can’t text,” said my friend.

Big pause from me, as this all rolls around in my head looking for how this makes sense.

“So can’t she go online and chat online then?” I tried again.

“Not if Heather’s in the car with her mom or at dinner with her dad,” she sounded exasperated. “Look, when we were teenagers we spent hours on the phone with our friends, tied down with a long stretched out phone cord sitting on the bathroom floor with the door closed. Our parents went nuts. Now they text and it’s the same thing, and today’s parents don’t go as bonkers as ours did over tying up the phone. They text, it’s what they do.” She’s a parent, I am not. I’m beginning to understand now. It also makes parents’ lives easier. Got it.

When I upload some great pictures I took, and email the link to my mom, she says she can’t open the link to see them. I get exasperated with her, and send them in smaller jpeg file sizes. She still can’t figure out how to open them. I try sending one small file per email, to not crash her mail files, and she still can’t see them. She wants to know why I don’t just have them developed and send her copies. It makes me want to scream.

So I see how ridiculous it is to not absorb the new thresholds in technological advances—it would make me become like my mother. Women understand that instinctual shudder when it happens and veer 180 degrees in the opposite direction, no matter where it may lead.

That timeless image just flashed through my head of thousands of lemmings, hurtling over the cliff and floating like flotsam out to sea. I won’t supply an interpretation for that metaphor, time to process needed.

Utter Brilliance

Wow, what a week for politics—I just have to comment.

Sarah Palin was a brilliant move on ol’ John’s part, and he showed a great restraint in waiting (and not leaking) to announce his VP choice until this morning. A feisty 44 year old NRA member, governor of an oil state bigger than Texas, career woman with five kids, attractive brunette with no frump-factor—nice job. This is exactly what we need to keep the next 60-odd days from becoming a battle of the Washington Beltway Terriers, and keeps McCain from looking like a far-right puppet king. If Obama’s nomination shook up the campaign, McCain woke up all the people who dozed off since Hillary left the race in June.
Sure, I want Obama to win in November. Never will I vote for a candidate who wants women to go back to the reproductive prison of 40 years ago, even if RU-486 winds up being the secret remedy for pregnant soccer moms everywhere. Because I’m a dreamer and visionary, I hope that some of these Republicans are truly Republic-ists, meaning that states’ rights are important and that the time of tying the government to the pulpit is over. The last of the Nixon Interns who pulled George’s strings for eight years are riding off into the sunset, joining the ones who bailed as soon as the Dems took over the Congress in 2006. The oil cronies got all the windfall millions George promised them in return for electing him, and it’s time the Republicans come back to the mainstream so our country can begin to solve some of its serious problems. Reagan is dead, deal with it. You got to cash out, so let us get on with running our country.
So Sarah Palin might be an extreme nightmare, but I doubt it, or McCain wouldn’t have picked her. He’s a smart guy, I respect him a great deal. I haven’t been able to say that about too many Republicans in recent memory, but he’s not one of those nuts like the hyperventilated talk radio guys like to tell us are the Real Deal. Please. I’d like to see Sarah and Hillary reach across the aisle and forge some great health care legislation, let’s join together and get something done.
Watching Al Gore’s speech last night was a great reminder to me how much money there is to be made by getting us re-tooled to Green Energy, so the capitalists should be jumping on this transitioning (like T. Boone Pickens has) and let this be the solution to Detroit and the American auto industry devastation (I grew up in Michigan). Serious money to be made. Clean up coal, find a use for all the C02 produced that can’t be scrubbed out (algae farms for biodiesel?) and get off the non-starter that a few more off-shore rigs and ANWAR drilling is the answer. The first runs of the windpower ads that Pickens did had him saying that we can’t drill our way out of this crisis. Then that line was edited out of the ads. Now with Sarah Palin in the running, she’s an Alaskan with a pro-ANWAR drilling stance (big bucks for Alaskans, right?) that will really ignite this argument going towards November. The Republicans have been accused of so focusing on short-term results over the last eight years that they have no long term strategy for any of the shortfalls their short-term tactics have created. They’ll be voted out of office, so it’s not their problem really. Drilling is an example of a really near-sighted, short-term (and heavy investment) band-aid for what really needs a long-term strategy of innovation (and heavy investment). This is where some of the generational shift could throw some more momentum to going forward, and not retreating back to failed tactics. If Sarah Palin is really smart (I think she is) she’s enough removed from the Washington Beltway Terriers that she can encompass a bigger-than-Alaska energy strategy of pro-capitalist pro-Green industry. The generational hand-off is in progress right now, in this election, and I am so excited to be able to experience this as it happens. And as John McCain proved last year after the assassination of Benazhir Butto when his campaign came back to life, don’t count him out, he can fire back with all guns blazing. I’m glad, he’s a good guy, it’s so nice not to despise smugly Bush running against my candidate, McCain is an honorable man. Yesterday, my neighbor and I talked about how the “gentleman’s agreement” of an running incumbent president having no same-party competition should be thrown out, so someone like McCain could have beat Bush in 2004 and cut short the reign of terror by having some competition from within to keep them in check. Bill Clinton could have used some more challenge in 1996 from other Democrats to keep him in line somewhat. But then, I want the whole campaign process to be shortened to six weeks so all those millions of dollars can be used for something else, instead of wasted on two-year-long primary and election seasons. Dump the money into healthcare, Social Security or education, stop the wasteful madness.

But I digress—

Hillary’s statement on Sarah Palin was very agreeable, nice job Hillary. CNN observed McCain’s pick was an “in your face” move to Obama. And they say CNN is too favorable to Democrats. Now I have to watch Fox for a while to see how they are spinning this. Funny. Then I will turn the TV off.

jasmine tree

jasmine tree crop

Here’s a splendid example of the local Jasmine Tree, imagine a spicy jasmine perfume swirling around you then haunting you the rest of the day…

New Blog, New Face, New Phase

Hello friends, and thanks for sustaining interest long enough to follow me on my trek.

The previous blog just didn’t suit me anymore, and I had to sit with the discomfort for a while to figure out where I wanted to go with a new one.  Did I really have anything to say, or was Facebook now enough?

And then, what would it look like??  Grrr, the hardest part really, since I had so many great ideas and had to narrow them down, research new templates, and then make a few false starts.  So here I am at WordPress instead of Blogspot.com, because the design options bored me there and I’m not fluent enough in code to create my own design.  Thank you WordPress, for having so many attractive page designs I spent hours trying them on for size.  Instead of going all artsy, my first impulse, I like this page because it looks like the New York Times webpages, and I’m conceited enough that that appeals to my loftier ambitions.  Shameless.

 

Jasminetree—I know, what is that?  Well, they are in full bloom right now here in Portland, and I so love them, and they were the perfume of my heady first days in 2000 when I first moved here.  So they are significant to me, and remind me of how rich my life is here, and get me all inspired to be creative and write.  There it is.  I’ll post a pic when I get a chance, and google the latin species name for it.

More later—