Interloper

      Part of my job, believe it or not, is to pick lichens off black spruce trees.   At least that is part of my job today and yesterday and during this trip.  We are collecting different types of vegetation in the bogs so we can grind them up, analyze them, and correlate concentrations of their nutrients with atmospheric N and S deposition.   It can be a tedious process, but generally it is really enjoyable to be out in the bogs picking plants and such.  My nemesis out there is the little cranberry that hugs the ground and has tiny leaves.   That one takes forever to get enough material for analysis and if my fingers are cold, even longer.   I find I need to slip into that zen spot and zone it out.   Thankfully, yesterday, early in the afternoon, I was picking lichens.    

That is a species we can collect from a standing position and so when I looked around for more on a different tree, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.  A small mammal was running toward me on the animal path I was using – like it owned the joint – and really it did and should have, as I am an interloper there.  I had to look the cutie up, and it turned out to be a short-tailed weasel - Mustela erminea – all white except for a small black end to its tail.  It was adorable loping toward me, until it got within a few feet and was still full-speed.  I squealed, it veered right, and off it went doing its own thing.  So freakin’ cute.   Wish I had had my camera at the ready.

       Surprising to me was the whiteness of the little ermine.  It seemed so out of place there in the greens and browns of the bog, but winter is coming here and I swear I saw flurries yesterday afternoon.   Wet flurries are called for tomorrow and so I am glad we are heading back to Meanook to do a little water chemistry instead of tromping around in the cold wet.  Fall is coming back east, but here, winter is fast approaching and it all reminds me that the seasons are changing everywhere.   I am ready for fall and winter to arrive and for this crazy hot summer to be a memory  – though I will miss my garden which is still throwing out gobs of peppers and hums with bees.   It still has a way to go even with fall here.  Perhaps the fall will bring new opportunities and fun adventures.  I hope so.    For now, that little weasel lightened my heart and reminded me of the crisp clearness of winter and a life lived from a different perspective.

Wetland Casualties

The days are short already in Alberta and the differences are marked from eastern Pennsylvania. The stars last night were beautiful.  They burned brightly from the deep darkness that surrounded Meanook Biological Research Station, and the Milky Way spilled across the sky to remind us how our galaxy earned its name.  Every tiny pin-point blazed with great clarity.  No Aurora Borealis yet, but maybe we will be lucky to see them later in the trip.  The aspen, birch, and larch have lost their leaves and fall is hanging on here by a thread with the looming long, cold, and dark of winter just around the corner.  We are driving now, to Fort McMurray, as I type.  Meanook was welcoming last night, but it was a short short stop-over.  Onward to the uglies of oil-town, Canada.  A few years ago, I was able to get above it all in a helicopter and was able to see the expanse from a bird's eye view.  Not exactly a pretty picture.

The road to Fort McMurray (63) is being twinned.   Which means for us, that as they truck up all the huge equipment they will need for their winter activities up here, we are stuck in long lines of machinery that take up the entire width of the road, while on both sides of us, massive earth movers are clearing and stripping football-field-widths of forest and wetlands.  We just passed a massive tube that took up an entire two full lanes of highway.  Don’t ask me what that tube will be used for, but I do know it represents the massiveness of the projects up here.  It is a sad sight and rather frustrating.  What should be a 4 hour drive through beautiful boreal systems has turned into an epic trek through a bit of a wasteland.   We just passed one of our old fen sites – a beautiful patterned fen -  and you could see some pvc water wells still out there only about 10 meters from the freshly piled dirt.  I am guessing we will abandon that site.  We have two more sites on this road and I worry for them and for our research and for the wetlands in general.  I suppose with all of this construction there is now ample opportunity to document short and long-term changes in these places, but it sure is depressing. 

We’ve been trying to put together a project looking at the effects of drought and flooding using roads as our dams and differences are already apparent here in this big mess.  This really isn’t surprising at all.  Changes in the hydrology make big differences when you are talking wetlands and there are huge changes going on here.  Google Earth is a great resource for checking out all the oil pads and roads and how all of this manipulation wreaks havoc on these systems.  Carbon cycling changes, vegetation changes, chemistry changes, pretty much everything changes on both sides of the road and these changes are translated deep into the systems often in ways we don’t understand.  Sometimes the most important thing to appreciate is that ultimately, we know very very little.  Guess that is what science is all about.   

 I understand a nor’easter is happening back home and as I move through space and time and dust and stench here, I hope all is well with my place and my neighbors and my loved ones.

Refinishing Floor Fun

I thought I understood refinishing floors.  I know enough to be dangerous, is closer to the truth.  Three bouts with rentals from Home Depot gave me a little too much courage.   I was all confident going into the dining room refinishing and feeling all sorts of good about it.    Sunday morning, I picked up the sander, muscled it into my trunk, bought all my extras, and drove it all home.   My first clue that it was going to be an interesting day was when I went through 4 changes of the coarsest grit and started sanding off nail heads before I got to all the nooks and crannies.   I paused to nail-punch a bunch of nails back down below surface and change the pads again and decided I might just need another trip to Home Depot.

My floor is parquet and so every square foot is comprised of 6 parallel 2” boards.  Each of these sets is rotated 90 degrees from each other and each little board has been sitting there for almost a hundred years finding its own angle of repose.  Depressions big and small dotted the landscape and thwarted the big grits of the sander.   Out came my little Ryobi Corner Cat for a couple of hours.    Finally got all the varnish off and down to bare wood everywhere at a nice fine grit… back complaining… knees complaining…wrists and ears and nose complaining…. Gabby, my cat, complaining.      I will definitely have a sanding party for my living room floor after going through that on my own in the dining room.    

Ultimately, it all ended up very well.  I uncovered a lovely inlay of what I think may be dark walnut/cherry? any ideas? And oak, I think, between living room and dining room.  Whoever put this floor together had a very artistic eye and I very much appreciate their woodworking skills and the beauty of the different wood juxtapositions is really amazing and well thought-out.   The floor looked/looks great.   I proceeded to get rid of the dust to prepare it for staining and polyurethane and this is where I went all wrong…    I have done this before, and this is why it is such a surprise.  I mopped the floor.  This is post vacuuming and wiping down with a sponge.  If I had to do it again, I would burn the mop, instead of use it on my floor, because once I got about 1/3 of the way into staining the floor, mop-marks – not sander marks – started showing up little by little.   It gave me pause, but in my head, I convinced myself that it was just a little moisture making it look a little different.   Four days later… those little mop marks are Still There.  How is this possible…..     Can I tell you how frustrating it is to go through all that and to have it sanded nearly perfectly (not a sander mark to be found) and then to have Mop Marks show up??     Crap.     

And so:   Word to the wise.   Even if you’ve done it before.   If you are sanding a floor, Do Not Use A Mop to aid in your clean up. 

 

All in all it came out pretty well, but when the living room floor gets done, the mop will be solidly hiding under some box somewhere in the basement.   And I will absolutely be sure to make more of a party of it.   I figure my house has character and character goes a long way and ultimately, I’m pretty ok with it, but there was a hint of almost perfect hanging in the air there for just a moment.  That hint still has potential whispering to me for my living room.  We shall see.  Will I ever learn? 

A Preponderance of Peppers

For those of you who may not be in the know about my idiosyncrasies, let me just expose one of them right here and right now.   I think vinegar sucks.  Acetic acid in any form – cider, balsamic, white, what have you   –    it is all anathema.   Yuck to the n^th degree.  I am guessing you haven't put much thought into this, but there are times when I feel that vinegar is in everything.  It isn't, I know, and other folks with much more serious aversions (read here actual allergies) have it much worse than I do, but let me say this:   vinegar is in pretty much every condiment out there and they all make me want to vomit.


      Happily for me, and before I lose you entirely with my talk of throwing up, I also am pleased to share that this year I have a GLUT of peppers from my garden.  I am not sure what exactly happened, but the peppers have run amok.  I suspect the incredibly high heat this summer (55 days of 90 degrees or above) may have had something to do with it.  My garden is a jungle of 15-20 types of peppers and most of them have done well.  Every year new peppers pop up as volunteers; and this year, I seem to have at least 5 volunteer new crosses between Thai peppers and several of my other last-year peppers growing in places where I did not expect peppers at all.   Perhaps I'll pull a Mendel and save some seeds from the most interesting ones and see what the next generation yields.   It is an odd thing to have what looks like a typical Thai chili pepper that is normally damn hot (50,000-100,000 on the Scoville scale:  Habenero is just above it) and to take a bite only to find it has no heat at all -- Zippo on the Scoville.  A boring bland thing all dressed to kill.     Inappropriate pepper friskiness has yielded some losers among the winners, but that could be an entirely different post.   Thankfully, most of my peppers are fabulously varied in excellent ways and most of them are hot hot hot.

      
I have digressed.   My point with all of this is that I made my first hot sauce today --  I am so excited!   In general, commercial hot sauces (read here condiment) are vinegar-laden and very Kim-unfriendly.  There are the occasional sauces that you can buy from websites or specialty stores, but in general, I'm out of luck.   And so, here I am with a fresh batch of incredibly hot hot sauce made from fresh chilis and I'm really not sure what to do with it, but I am sure I will find lots and lots of new and delicious opportunities.  Grilled chicken, for example, was awesome with a bit of the magic condiment drizzled about.  It also complimented the fresh garden green beans which were nestled on a bed of spinach on the side.  Doors have been unlocked and eyes have been opened today.  
          Bring on the sauce!    Bring on the Sauce!  Bring On The Sauce!