new bike

Not my favorite day, this day.

 A friend moved recently and gave me his mountain bike. I was glad, since I had recklessly lost my previous bike (actually, I left it too long with a friend in South Carolina and I believe he has since sold it). This new mountain bike was no beauty- heavy, old, plastic pedals- but it was a bike and I was glad to ride it. 

Being a former cyclist snob, I felt it necessary to get clipless pedals for this bike. These are the type of pedals that you lock into with fancy shoes. I think it's the only way to go. I bid on and won a smokin deal on ebay- 2 pairs of pedals for $10!! So Jesse could have one pair as well. I couldn't believe my luck. These pedals normally run between $45 and a million dollars, so I was pretty pleased. 

Well, I took my bike in to the bike shop so they could change my pedals this morning. Free of charge, which was nice. But when I got my bike outside and tried to step into the pedals with my old shoes, they did not agree. Which was not nice. I was disappointed, but not bummed, as I had spent a mere 10 bucks for the pedals and they came with a pair of cleats. I would just change the cleats on my shoes when I got home. Or tomorrow. Whatever.

Also, as I rode home from the bike shop, my bike started making crazy sounds. I think the guy banged into my rear wheel one too many times and set it off course, so it was rubbing all over the place. Which was not nice. But I was cranky about the cleats and just wanted to get home. 

Which I did.

That night, I headed out for field work. Which is a 30+ minute drive to the middle of nowhere. I got there just after sunset, so the park's gate was closed, which was not nice. So I tossed my equipment over the fence and hiked into my field (not far at all, maybe 100 feet, but I was cranky, so it was a cranky hundred feet). I started setting up to find that I had neglected to replace my batteries after charging them all. So my headlamps were completely without batteries. That's alright, I have a flashlight and light isn't really that necessary. It's too far to drive out there and back for nothing. I checked my cd player and speakers (the two critical elements for attracting my flies) and they had batteries. Phew. So I turned on my cd player. No go. Switched batteries from my little flashlight to the cd player- still no go. THAT SUCKS. I'm more than cranky now. Nothing can be done for field work tonight, so I pack up my stuff, toss it back over the fence, and drive home. Boo. That sucks. A waste of a night.

So I get home. You may be wondering why the 2 stories- bike and field work. Well, because when I got home, my bike was gone. Which was strange. Our apartment building has underground parking with secure gates. But apparently that's no problem for bike thieves. And most strangely, Jesse's bike was leaning against the wall immediately behind my bike, but his was still there. 

Ugh. So my new pedals that didn't work with my shoes are gone on the bike that was too heavy. Maybe I didn't appreciate it all enough. 

Oh, and here's the kicker. After I've been home a while and I'm just sitting on the couch wondering how my bike got stolen from our secure garage in a good neighborhood, it occurs to me that I didn't check the "hold" button on the cd player. You know how the little "walkman" style cd players have the "hold" button to prevent you from accidentally turning them on? Yeah, well I forgot about that. So I pull out my cd player, flip the hold button, and the thing turns on, happy as a clam. 

So I could have done my field work after all and not wasted tonight and tomorrow night (because I'll have to go out again now). 

And I don't have a bike, and one less pair of pedals.

I'm pretty cranky.

Frack and his boxes

Frack's love for boxes prompted me to start this blog. And here's a video depicting this love. Even when the box is too small to contain his love.

Frack Jump

Do all cats do this?

I think he is trying to look out the peephole, but when I lift him up to it, he's not interested. Maybe he's just training for the feline olympics.

more olympics

More:

Hi-fiving

Hand Shaking (you have to shake the judges' hands)

Artistic/rhythmic/synchronized Hand Shaking

Dungeons and Dragons

Taxi Hailing (the arena for this is fun)

Gardening

No Moore

So we're big fans of the Dave Matthews Band. We have tickets this summer to 2 shows- last night and tonight at the Staples Center in LA. We got to the show last night, and when the guy sitting next to us showed up, he told us that LeRoi Moore had died. This is pretty shocking. LeRoi was the saxophonist for the band, 46 years old, and had an accident on his ATV earlier this summer. He was recovering alright from that, but died suddenly yesterday (the guy next to us is friends with a driver for the band and had learned that it was a blood clot.). So that was a bummer. The show went on, it was sad. 

Anyway, I just thought I'd mention it. 

Other Olympic Games

Jesse and I were watching Olympic speedwalking last night. It's a funny looking sport and the athletes are very serious. No disrespect to speedwalkers. 

It prompted me to ask: How did speedwalking begin? who started it? And why has it lasted? I mean, seriously. 

Again, no disrespect to speedwalkers. It looks tough, but I just don't get how it stuck as a sport, let alone as an Olympic Sport.

So we began an Absurd Brainstorming Session. We have Absurd Brainstorming Sessions sometimes- like our "Worst Child Names Ever" brainstorm, the results include "Crappy", "Cavity", and "Toilet". These were just some of the names fit to post...

Anyway, following is our current ABS list of "Other Olympic Games". Humor is enhanced when you include images of the commentary, training regimes, athlete intensity, and medal ceremonies for each of these...

Here is our list thus far:

• Tag
  
• Hide-N-Seek (one of my top favorites- what would the arena look like? A house? Jesse says they would just play all around Beijing) (Commentary: "This is Jack Jones' second Olympic Games, he has been an outstanding hider for the Americans")
• Red Rover
  
• Dodge ball
  
• King of the Hill
  
• Go Fish (or even better, War)
  
• Swings
  
• H-O-R-S-E 
  
• Kick the Can
  
• Ping Pong (oops, already an Olympic Sport)
  
• Bingo
  
• Flying (everyone sucks at this one, good commentary potential here)
• Stairs (this should beat out spweedwalking)
• Easter Egg Hunt (Isreal says "Huh?")
  
• Tetherball
  
• Make Believe
  
• Grocery Shopping (remember Supermarket Sweep?)
• Badmitton (oopsy again, another silly sport gone Olympic)
  
• Four Square
  
• Water Balloon Toss
• Trampoline jumping (Holy Mackerel! Another one!?)
  
• Capture the Flag
  
• Rock, Paper, Scissors

Do you have any to add?

P.S.

Dan's comment to add synchronization to any current event warrants mention. It has added a new dimension to the absurdity and we are enjoying it tremendously. Synchronized boxing. We've come up with some good ones in late night brainstorms that I can't remember now. Thanks Dan.

Field work in SoCal

Here are some pictures of last night's field work. Keep in mind that I'm living in Southern California, so naturally, my field location is also the set for a tv show. My mother-in-law joined me to count crickets and she suggested that we go early and have a picnic. We drove around the grounds looking for a suitable picnic spot and discovered the Biggest Loser campus... 

This is where we picnicked. The pool was set up with cabanas for the show (lights and microphones too). Do I look like a field biologist or a tv star?

I peeked into this room from our parking spot. If you watch the show, you'll recognize it as the room the losing team goes to decide who they're kicking off. You can see the black glass-front refrigerators on the left.

Filming equipment.

Here I'm setting up my fly trap at the gravel turnout.
This is my cricket field. I'm taking the compass bearing so I can be sure to walk a straight line. 

Me trudging off to set my reflector poles.

Setting said reflector poles.

Can you see the cricket? It looks different from crickets most people are used to because it's a field cricket. They're bigger, darker and more fun.

Here's one of 4 black widow spiders I saw just last night. They sure make you nervous.

This concludes our tour of Jen's Fieldwork in Southern California. We hope you enjoyed your visit.

Flies!

2 flies came to my trap tonight! This is very exciting. It officially marks the beginning of my field season. I'm very pleased.

Charlene (my mother-in-law) and I set up the trap and then headed over to my field to count crickets. One hour and 70 crickets later, we drove back to the trap and found the flies! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

harvest time!

I decided that my cucumbers were ready to eat today. 

They were quite tasty, though not crazy delicious. I sort of expected them to be sweeter than normal, since I had just picked them. 

Here's a biology lesson for you: You probably know that plants perform photosynthesis to make their energy. sunlight + CO2 + water = sugar. Plants have an enzyme that chains sugars together to make starches, which are easier to store for future use. When you harvest a fruit (ie. remove it from its plant), it stops photosynthesizing, therefore stops making sugar, but the enzyme keeps working to turn sugars into starches. So if you eat a fruit that was picked a week ago, it will be more starchy and less sweet than a fruit you picked a minute ago (assuming they are both ripe). That's why fresh picked corn is so damned awesome. 

There is another lesson about how commercial farmers pick fruit long before it is ripe, transport it with a fungicide to prevent loss to fungus during travel, then spray the fruit with ethylene gas to ripen it. Which is why farmers market produce is tastier and better in so many ways than grocery store produce. 

And what you can take from all of this is that fruits naturally produce ethylene gas, which in turns stimulates them to ripen (positive feedback cycle), so if you keep fruits in a bag, they will ripen quickly. This is why you should hang your bananas and keep fruits in a basket instead of a bowl (unless you want them to ripen quickly).

I should turn this into a "lessons in biology" blog. It seems that I need an outlet for this trivia.

Anyway, I expected a little more greatness from my cukes, but they were certainly tasty, and it was much more rewarding to eat them than a store-bought cuke. I have more growing, so now I'll have to cheer them on. And my beans too, who are doing great.

Field work

I semi-started my field work last Friday night. Up until now, I've been waiting for permits and permissions to collect flies on state park property. While I was waiting for these, I've been setting up my fly trap once a week on a gravel turnout close to my future study site. The flies I'm studying (Ormia ochracea) don't come out until mid-august, but I need to establish that there are zero flies. So I go, set up the trap, and wait in my car for 2 hours. I usually bring a movie and watch on my computer. It's not the most fun I could imagine having, but at least it's not painful or difficult. Here's my trap setup: 

The computer has cricket songs that play through speakers that are sitting under the floor of the trap. So the flies are attracted to the song/speakers, find their way into the trap, and hang out over the speakers. I have since replaced the computer with a little CD player that plays a CD of cricket songs (which I recorded, in case you were wondering where to get such a thing). There are songs from 3 local cricket species on the CD, and each species has versions for temperatures ranging from 11 to 31 degrees celsius. Did you know that crickets chirp faster when it's warm and slower when it's cold? So I continuously take the air temperature and switch songs when necessary.

Here's a closeup of the fly trap with a fly in the trap on the dowel:

My field location is in Calabassas, CA. It's right off Mulholland drive (a very twisty scenic road made famous in various songs and movies) in the Malibu Creek State Park. Here's a picture of it from google maps (click right here King Gillette Ranch if you want to see it yourself):

On Las Virgenes Road (the vertical road in this picture) there is a gravel turnout just before it intersects with Mulholland Drive (the horizontal road). This is where I've been setting up my trap. It’s been a pretty reliable spot in previous seasons. But part of my new project is censusing crickets and flies, and since the turnout is overlooking a steep brushy incline and canyon that I can’t access, I can't really count the crickets that live there. So Dave (my advisor) and I decided that I would trap and census in the “King Gillette Ranch”, which is state park property. It was originally Mr. Gillette’s ranch (as in the razor), but it’s changed hands many times and recently became open to the public. It’s a fascinating story and really beautiful area- almost 600 acres, plus a crazy huge mansion, etc. 

Anyway, here is a closeup of the field that I’ll be doing my work in (it's the upside triangle field with a dark spot in it):

It’s just a big field, but crickets like it, which (hopefully) means that the flies like it. 

So last Friday, I walked this field after dark, counting chirping crickets. I will say right out front that I am afraid of the dark, and this field is dark. But I pushed through it (well, for the first 40 minutes, then a loud car raced by and scared the bejeesus out of me, so I called Jesse and had him on speakerphone for the rest of the census).

It was quite cool- early on, I walked under a tree that a large owl was roosting in, so it hooted and screeched as it flew on to another tree, which I walked under about 10 minutes later. 

Shortly after that, a coyote in the distant hills started howling and was answered by 2 coyotes in the near hills! They howled back and forth for a while, which was pretty cool. 

Another cool perk was that there were lots of insects, including one of my favorites-  green lacewings

And near then end of my hour-plus walk in the field, I spotted a black widow spider! wowee! When I was younger, they were THE scariest animal in the world. We didn't have any in the Pacific Northwest, but they were legendary for their scariness. Down here, especially around my field sites, they are common. And shy. And even polite. It is quite cool to see one, almost like seeing a movie-star. But it made me remember to watch my step. Because they aren't friendly.

So I ended up counting 79 crickets and no flies. I'll be going out a couple of times a week to count crickets, and hopefully the flies will be coming out in a week or two. Wish me luck!

Beans! Beans! Beans! Beans! Beans! Beans! Beans! and cukes.

My beans are growing!!! I'm so excited! They are teeny tiny, quite cute. The best news of all is that I didn't have to pollinate them myself! I don't know who did it, but I'm so pleased. They are welcome back anytime.

And not to be forgotten, my cucumbers are a-growin'. Just 2 of them though. They are a high maintenance crop. I've had to pollinate them myself, and that's only about 50% successful, and 75% of the fruits that start don't make it past 2 inches. I just don't get it. They'd better be tasty cukes. Here's one of them. 

I also have 2 tomatoes growing, but slowly. 

If I'm lucky, I'll get a salad out of all of this.

But that would be pretty great.