there's no use crying over spilled cornmeal

Hello young beansprouts.

We oldsters are enjoying our oldness in the great wildz of the state of Chaste As Smuts, where we play with anagram generators all day. Just a few days ago, this was us:

LMF Seniors 2011

But now we have grown spinach for hair and we look more like this:

LMF Seniors 2011 + Spinach

In the days following, a top secret mission was attempted involving the perusal and reassignment of classified materials in the possession of the French House. This mission was undertaken with great care and secrecy, though some unforeseen challenges did arise:

1. While venturing down the road commonly known as Amherst Alley, a large container of corn meal precariously balanced upon other precariously balanced boxes balanced on top of a rolling apparatus was overturned, creating a hazardous waste situation. We fled.

2. Secret agents later returned to clean up the mess and dispose of the evidence into a nearby wastebin. If you remember receiving emails of hazardous materials near New House a few days prior, you may have glimpsed a fleeting fraction of Claire's intense yet irrational terror that the two incidents were in any way related.

3. David Tennant came to our house and paid us five bucks to make out with us.

Each.

Moths, what ho!

So, I meant to write this post a week ago when I was at home. I am now in Duluth, but am not going to talk about Duluth a jot (except to remark that it is in the mid-60’s and generally sunny - you should all feel envious)…

Please instead now imagine yourself at my house, which is located 10 minutes (by car) outside the important city of Rupert, which contains 400 people. This is my front lawn:

There are no high-speed Internets wandering about The Forest, which is one reason I did not post until now. However, there are indeed many other things.

It may or may not grow up to be carniverous. It is cute. It plus mother were about my house for most of the week. Oh so little and frolicsome it was, still feeding from mother and getting periodically groomed by her. One day she left it alone on the lawn for a day – parked in the irises at the back of the “lawn,” where it sat perfectly still until she returned. (Editor's Note: this is a safety mechanism allowing the doe to gather food without exposing the fawn to danger – once told by mommy to “stay,” a fawn will NOT move even if you go right up to it, though of course we didn't try.)

So…I actually spent most of my week at home lying most languorously on my bed reading, getting sick, taking the GRE’s, getting well, discovering that my new computer didn’t have a sound card and therefore responded “What is sound?” when you tried to tell it about these things called speakers, then discovering that in fact it just needed to be restarted, and finally getting up at 3:00 (AM) to leave for Duluth, but I will pretend that all I was doing was looking at moths, because moths are cool and I don’t feel like writing about that other stuff.

My masterful moth-manipulating methods include leaving the lights on. And then going outside. To look. Here are some moths:

The weird blue thing visible through the window is an ultra-special UV mothing light. (Ordinary lights work too, but this is more chic.) There really are a lot of moths here, even if you can’t see them all. As in, several hundred flying around and crawling up the glass. I have a flashlight and a white shirt, so they also fly around and crawl up me. Inside my shirt, through my hair. This night, I actually inhaled a small moth - alas. And they are also all over the walls of the house and on the ground, so one must be most careful when one walks.

There are a lot of species of moths. Over 10,000 in the US. I’ve found 529 of those at my house - so far. Many are big. Many are brightly-colored. They are, of course, all beautiful! (I confess I do find some moths rather drab and non-beautiful, but I think that is mostly my failing.) Anyway, here are some of the moths from this night:

Luna Moth (think of Lunesta commercials) on my hand. There were two more as well flapping around the light. They are really VERY big.

Waved Sphinx settled on the wall. When it is flying, it is quite drastically fast and powerful, whizzing around and resembling a bat (that thick body is filled with flight muscles that also enable it to be endothermic…).

The Bad-wing (on the left) and Rosy Maple Moth (on the right). The Bad-wing is called that because its hindwings (the lower ones) are very small and some entomologist apparently didn’t think that was proper.

My masterful method for moth capture involves plastic sandwich bags. And refrigerators. Moth in bag in refrigerator. This works. Moth metabolism masterfully manipulated (i.e., the moth settles down). Then I can photo it. I caught one moth this night, since I hadn't seen it before. Then I identified it and released it. Here it is for posterity:

A moth I am really excited about, called Kent's Geometer (photographed the next day). It doesn't object to being on my finger because the fridge made it ever so sedate.

Thus is mothing conducted... The night ended with me going inside, finding a moth on my hat, depositing it outside, and going back to bed (it was 3:30 AM - getting up in the middle of the night is good from one standpoint because the moths have accumulated by then at the lighted window; normally I like sleep more than extra moths).

Please pretend that this is the story of the last few days of my life. It might have a moral.

Moral: Moths, what ho!

The Forest

Greetings my friends, gather close about the fire to hear the tale spun upon a thousand vicarious looms.

That's a little too close..

Ahhhhhkkh welcome to the forest, as teeming with life as Canada's largest prefecture, and yet as silent and

imposing as the stern edifice of the ancient monument to mimes would be if it were not named ironically. Our

tale takes the framing device of an aged learned one reciting hypnotic wisdom to a weary dustbitten traveler

such as yourself and will begin as soon as you have relinquished your daily cares, those insurmountable

burdens which you uniquely bear and have immersed yourself entirely in the strange land of which I am about

to speak metaphorically, as if you were placed in an immersion blender,  that is how immersed you will

become.

I returned to the ancestral hall replete with success of the days hunt.  Winter would be coming soon to the

northlands, seeking to catch our family unawares by preceding fall, the same gambit it had attempted the year

before.  Winter is uncreative.  However uncreative it may be, it is still a deadly force, transforming

unexpectedly the lush splendor of the forest into the barren frostscape of jotunheim, depriving us of food and

leaving us easy prey for the numerous frost giants which roamed with glacial impunity.

A flash of glowing slitted eyes greeted hungrily me as I rounded a corner. The ferocious snow cats, sigil of

my ancestral house, were supposedly kept well fed, but one could never be sure that they were aware of this.

Apprehensively, I rolled a ping pong ball to distract the fluffy killing machine, bred to withstand the

harshest winter, yet unable to resist a simple bouncing spheroid.  


Carefully restocking the trapped pantry took under an hour, and I mused how fortunate I had been to retrieve

such a bounty from the wild. Every week it seemed the forest encroached closer and closer to manor hall.

The trees whispered from that eldritch blackness, invisible individually admidst that collection which comprised the forest.

Make that THE FOREST, I thought, with all caps for emphasis and a double underscore besides.  Few

indeed could truthfully claim that they had survived the deep mysteries of that arboreal vault.  Perhaps as

many as a dozen, perhaps a few as one-fifth.  Cleaning the traps around the perimeter had been the task of

the youngest household member since antiquity and thus the duty fell to me.

Checking the traps was without incident, the forest was quiet, its silent malice pitting its will against my

own.  I was uncomfortably aware of the immensity of that power, the ancientness against which my mortal

existence seemed but a fleeting thing.  Uncountable numbers of eyes could have peered at me from the jade

blankness of the leaves, and I silently hoped that none of them were owned by the carniverous deer.

Offering the sacrificial oil to mechanical forest reductor, I glanced around once more, filled with nameless

apprehension as I finished the ritual and the steel golem roared to life.  Guiding the golem around the house,

it devoured the tops of the miniature trees beginning to spring up throughout the grassy moat which was our

only defense against the sleepless menace of the forest.  The completion of this task too passed without

incident and it was with relief that I was allowed to pass back through the wards of the manor and collapse in

cold sweat on the ancestral sofa. Law and order was on, incidentally.

I awoke some days later, greeted by the shining orbs of a snow cat's feral eyes and knew no more.  Until,

later when I woke up again and began the journey back to MIT.

Laura in California

I am now in the international terminal of Logan waiting for the Lufthansa people to show up so I can check my bag and go through security and wait some more. This strikes me as a good time to tell the internet what has been happening in my life.

I spent the last two weeks at home. Many of my friends were still in school, so much time was spent with the family. Some highlights follow.

My mom's birthday was right after I got home. To celebrate, we drove up to Point Reyes, the home, you may recall, of the tule elk. We saw no elk, as we did not visit the elk reserve. Instead we climbed a small hill in our car and picnicked on the top of it. There was a good deal of fog below us, and very little above us, which means there wasn't a nice view, but we still got sunburned. Nevertheless, it was a nice picnic. We had croissants from the Bovine Bakery, a favorite haunt of people on bikes. Once when we were small we saw Robin Williams there.

The next day we went to the San Francisco Ferry Building for the farmers' market. We bought some whole wheat flour from a man who had ground it himself! Fancy that. For all its locavore appeal, it didn't make very nice bread. Possibly because I winged it. Kids, it's a good idea to

follow the recipes. They are there to help you.

Fat Blackie Garfield lost another tooth. He had to go to the veterinarian to have it pulled. He is now down to one canine. This makes it difficult for him to groom himself properly. This is a picture of him. It looks like he only has one eye in the picture, but that is not the case. I chose this picture because he looks especially silly in it. The vet put Blackie on a special diet. The new food is supposed to help his dandruff problem.

On Monday we decided to be spontaneous. We went to Yosemite. This is a four hour drive. I drove us up New Priestly Grade, which is kind of like Rainbow Road in Mario Kart, only it's not in space. You will be happy to know that I did not drive off the edge. There is also an Old Priestly Grade, which is even more deathlike. I used to lean toward the uphill side whenever we went down it.

California got a lot of rain/snow last winter, so there was lots of water in the waterfalls. We

walked in to Bridalveil Fall, and got drenched in the mist from the falls. This is a picture of a different waterfall. I took it through the roof of our car. It represents the clash between civilization and nature. I took it with my phone.

On Tuesday, my last day before I left, my mother, my sister, and I went to a coffee tasting. Some coffee beans dry with the fruit on them and some are washed of their fruit before they are dried, and this makes the coffee taste fruity or not. Also, peaberry means the berry only made one bean inside, not two. I learned this. I also learned how to slurp coffee so that is sprays gently across the palate. You just kind of slurp.

Then last night I got on a red-eye and flew to Boston. Whee. I didn't talk to anyone, because I like to sleep and I don't like people. But the two people who were talking behind me were both MIT students. This reminds me that I had a brass rat moment while comparing butters at the Berkeley Bowl. Actually I think it was a MIT sweatshirt moment, but whatever. It was kind of fun.

This is a picture of dusk on the golden hills of Moraga. In this picture, the hills are golden with mustard plants. In a month they'll be golden with dead grass.