I have a new abacus toy, or actually, a soroban, with instructions in English, that I might just devote some time to. You know, these manual calculators have good quick methods for doing large and decimal multiplication and division and can also be used for roots; not just for tallying or for adding numbers without using your fingers.
Although the instruction booklet is in English, it was printed in Japan, and has a few funny things and misspellings like thumb without a b, and more embarrasing, count without an o.
It seems like every time I come to Louisiana I get violated by fireants. But this time they got me in the morning before heading to Louisiana, while still in Texas. I got no fewer than 13 or 14 bites, and I am reminded that last time when I pinned my allergic reaction on poison ivy, it was likely a similar fireant violation instead. The last time I itched like that was when I went camping, and I'm pretty sure I didn't get any fireant bites then, so I don't know what I can put that down to. But I had a terrific allergic reaction once to fireants and I guess I still have reactions. My body seems to not react and not react until it reacts to something, and then it will either react easily to the same thing, or get used to it and seem to react less and less until it doesn't react any more. About these ants, they are all "new" ants, as opposed to getting bitten by the same local type of ants again and again, and maybe there's something in that, too.
We harvested our first cucumber, yum.
Bonnie and I had a good time watching videos last night about birds that can talk. Not just parrots and parakeets, but magpies, starlings, crows, and the like. Fascinating.
Today is my half year birthday, and I know you're probably wondering why you didn't hear about my 33 1/3 year celebration, but I think at that time I was probably counting candles on boys' birthday cakes, cutting out dinosaur hats, or something of the like. And I can tell you what I'd like to be doing on my 34 1/3 year celebration. That's the time (next year, actually on June 5 or 6, 2012, depending on your side of the international date line) when Venus will cross in front of the sun for the so called "transit of Venus" event. It happens twice, about eight years apart, every 105 or 121 years in a delightful planetary dance that repeats with a periodicity of 243 years. The last transit happened in 2004, so here's your last chance, living humans, unless you live so long as to see it happen again in 2117. I hope to be somewhere with my family, watching the sun without looking at it directly, ideally in Japan or Alaska or Hawaii or some other neat place, although just about anywhere will do, so long as we don't go to places like Brazil or the Azores or western Africa.
(The above times are for the 2004 transit which occurred on June 8th.)
Tomorrow is my last day on the job at my current school, where I have been working in the capacity of Academic Director after beginning teaching at this language school last summer. I am taking a position teaching Geometry in high school for the following school year, and I'm excited about that change. I liked the leadership role of working with teachers and helping to run a school from that angle, so this is step one in getting a principal certification down the road.
Orry got registered for kindergarten today as well, so we're both excited to start school in a couple of weeks.
Hey, thanks for stopping by and checking out my blog.
It came time to start a camping tradition with these TX Becker boys, so we headed out one hot Friday for Huntsville State Park, about an hour north of us.
One of the perks of the trip was while we were still in our air conditioned van, checking out an enormous statue of Sam Houston, which is the way Texas celebrates its heroes. You can tell that we are almost certainly distant cousins on my mother's father's side because of our brow and the overworking of our corrugator supercilii muscles.
Hunstville has a 67 foot Sam Houston, but the Dallas zoo has a 67 foot giraffe thanks in part to sculptor Bob Cassilly.
We got out and stood by the feet and then hustled back to our cool van Winnie.
Our high spirits continued while we arrived at the state park and drove to our camping site. We got out of the van and ate our dinner and then hit the trails for a hike. With our stroller. At first we took the time to take pictures of pretty red flowers.
But soon I think the hike turned more into a fun ride on the stroller across a bumpy trail of tree roots and some declines to try to get Daddy to run down.
We found some puffballs and lots of ant lion pits, which we investigated. After we went down the path for a while, we needed to turn around and get back to our campsite before dark. It was starting to get a little whiny.
What followed gave me the feeling that my Becker boys would be traumatized and ever fearful and reluctant of any similar future adventures. What started as a little whiny got to outright tears as we piled into the sleeping bag sleeping arrangement and endured the hot and sweaty all-natural Texas night. We were dressed fairly well in good natural bug repellents, which unfortunately gave me an allergic reaction so that I got a bad case of the itches when it was time for a case of the Zs. It was a fairly restless night of adjusting, readjusting, waking, and nearly waking. Finally, when it was too light to go back to sleep, it was over and our morning would begin.
The morning continued the theme of going from whining, to tears, and finally to something like sleep. We drove across the park and checked out another short trail. I left the stroller, but soon I was carrying Isaac, and after we turned around I was also carrying Orry. Luckily he was enough of a sport to walk intermittently, especially when Isaac started nodding off on my shoulders. Finally we made it back to the car where I decided that maybe the allergic reaction was perhaps somehow some exposure to poison ivy (I've been having some super sensitivity to that delightful herb lately). Luckily though, it was time to call it a day and we listed the animals we saw or heard before we got out on the open road and headed back to Houston, when Orry and Isaac got some good air conditioned sleep in their car seats.
The list and Orry's delight in listing the animals we saw and heard told me that maybe the delight of the trip wasn't lost in its misery. And sure enough, the very next night he was wanting to sleep in the sleeping bag again, although the night before I was sure he was crying about being sweaty and just asking to go home. But the parts I left out were watching the stars and bats emerge from the twilight, listening to the owls. Checking out an alligator in the morning, listening to an eagle screech. Watching the clouds move.
Our list of fauna:
owl (Orry said we can count it twice because we saw two.)
bat
deer
squirrel
rabbit
human
cicada
butterfly
ant
ant lion
firefly
blue heron
frog
anole
alligator
crow
heron
egret
ibis
eagle
We didn't count mosquitoes. And there might have been some water birds we didn't get. I also saw some non-water birds that aren't included above, and we heard a woodpecker or flicker on a hike.
All in all, the trip was a wonderful sort of miserable, with lots of highlights that will probably endure as long as any memory of misery. We'll slate another weekend in September and I hope we can get lots of family camping in this fall.
I have scheduled another blood donation for this upcoming weekend. Also on the agenda is a George Observatory night on Friday. Good for the stars!
Speaking of stars, Orry recognized The Starry Night from a print at the Bourgs's. So we looked at a Van Gogh book, but I think really he just wanted to continue with his computer games.
Our school garden continues to grow. Most impressive are all the cucurbits. At the school, our canteloupes are thriving the most. At our home, Annie's halloween pumpkin seed plants are most impressive. It has been nice to grow these plants.
Our kids are also growing like cucurbit vines in the summertime, and we keep doing our best to revel in their magical young years.
June 22. Happy Birthday, nephew Theo. In one year you will have been a prime half your life. It will happen again in three years, but after this the primes get more spread out. Why, I won’t be prime for 4 more years yet , and then I won’t be prime again until 4 years after that. In the next 8 years of my life, imagine what will happen. On the optimistic side: Sustainable economics? Peace in the middle east? Fungus Revolution? Grandpa Dan will likely be knocking on the door of 70. Great Granny, 90. On the other hand, what new pestilence and diseases will we face? What will climate change bring about? Which animal and plant species will be gone forever? Which genocide of your young lifetime will go down as the worst?
Back on the upside, it’s summer now, and our hemisphere is bathed in sunlight. My garden at the school—that is to say, our gardening club’s garden—includes corn and sunflowers, beans, a few whispers of life left in a bunch of strawberry starts, parsley, beets, radishes, pumpkins, cucumbers, zucchinis, cantaloupes, basil, tomatoes, parsley, carrots, and dill. I’m trying to sprout some potatoes to put in there, and we have some other plants waiting for some corn and sunflower shade.
The Reader, what a great book. Thanks for the window into Germany, Judge Schlink, and into the human experience.
Becoming Texan is easy. All you do is move to the state, and it's required by law to become Texan within 30 days. Becoming Texan means getting a Texas driver's license. Actually, who knows what the real law is? And what about people who don't need a driver's license? And maybe it's 90 days. The thing is, my information is from the dmv and not the lawbooks. Of course there is an ambiguity, as "Texan" could mean someone originally from Texas, like I am an Idahoan, or, on the other hand, someone who resides in Texas.
Aside from that law or faux-law, once you get here, there aren't that many laws. You can shoot people, or drive on the median if you want. And they voted recently to discount all the violations caught by traffic cameras in Harris County, because traffic cameras aren't cops, and we don't need laws to make good choices at intersections. But after living near the beltway for the duration of one year and ten days, I have seen with my eyes, while I am driving, more accidents happen here than I have in the rest of my life put together.
I would like to add some photos, but this blog isn't big enough for Texas-sized photos.
If you come to Louisiana for only a semester, it might be the fall semester and you'll get all you want of NCAA football, but you might miss out on crawfish. If you're in Louisiana for a year, it's pretty difficult to miss out on crawfish season. It coincides conveniently with Lent, because crawfish are God's manna for swamp people.
When you live in Louisiana, you learn by and by how to eat a boiled crawfish. And if you're lucky, you learn how to identify the good ones from the bad ones. The good ones, it turns out, are the ones that are boiled alive. Their tails curl. The bad ones are the ones that are dead before they're boiled, and their tails extend straight and uncurled. (By the way, that is a sort of myth, although it seems by my estimation to be a good test.).
Eating a crawfish entails breaking the arthropod's carapace apart from the tail (actually the abdomen, or in crustaceanese, the pleon). Learning what's best about eating crustaceans from their shell involves learning about the juicy yellow fat which is usually spooned out of the carapace with a finger and ingested with the tailmeat. It's what people are going for when they "suck the heads" of their boiled crawfish. And it's good. It is, as I learned on www.crawfish.com, hepatopancreatic tissue. There it is said that it is, in fact, not fat, but actually, as far as what I can understand from what a hepatopancreas does--metabolizing lipids, we might as well call it fat.
You might think that eating your share of a mountain of vermillion mudbugs in this manner might as well make you somehow Louisianan, but of course not. After you're in Louisiana for a while, you also get to learn how to execute the crawfish boil. You get your crawfish, you wash and purge the crawfish. You use a giant's pot and a Texas sized burner. You use Zatarain's. You boil potatoes and corn and onions and maybe sausage with the boil. You heat it up for so long. You boil for so long. You let soak for so long. And then so long, hepatopancreatic lipids and sumptuous tailmeat.
Purging crawfish means dousing them with saltwater, which makes them empty their digestive tracts. The digestive tract, which has the similitude of a small "vein" running through their tailmeat should be nice and clean. Black full digestive tracts are from negligent purging, and adds to the mud and detracts from the delicate tailmeat and sumptuous hepatopancreatic lipids.
You might think that cooking up a genuine crawfish boil makes you Louisianan. And it helps, but today I realized that after 10 years of a connection with the Pelican State, that I finally took the next step in being even more Louisianan. That was when I went down the bayou with the one-legged father-in-law and his .45. We drove back into a property that his brother has spent 10 years taming. There we harvested wild crawfish from crawfish traps. The .45 was for the alligators. What deserves note is the plentiful birdlife down there--something I had forgotten. But just in our little excursion we saw herons, cranes, egrets, stilts, ducks, ibises. There were some I didn't know. The excursion was actually quite brief. But it was real Louisiana.
And you might think that somehow I'm going to get to the point of calling myself Louisianan, but there a good deal of other labels I would rather attach to myself. Maybe after I buy some land down the bayou and build on it, knowing that it will flood. And I have to make the traps. And I have to get a .45 probably, and go half deaf, or maybe lose a leg or finger. To an alligator would be best, but cancer or a staph infection will do. But I did marry a good old Louisianan, and all three of my spawn have been delivered in this odd state of birds and Republicans.
The thing is, I have as much love for Louisiana as I do for, say, most of the midwestern states combined. And if you throw in the badlands and forests in the Dakotas, that's probably pretty accurate, because there's a lot in Louisiana that really moves me. Today, in Louisiana, was one of the best days of my life, actually. Not only did I have this wonderful adventure, but we had a birthday jamboree of family times and dinosaur delight.
