Happy New Year! And Week in Review

May you all have a very happy, healthy, loving, and peaceful New Year!

Initially I photographed the watch face using a 4-second exposure (the longest one I've got) to show secondhand movement. Then I tweaked the heck out of it using MS Paint and MS Photo Editor.

This last week of 2006 has seen a device, a diagnosis, and a draft....

The Device



My "new computer" has arrived, courtesy of Asian Ideas. Now I can start to satisfy my curiosity about this thing and learn how it works, starting with Totton Heffelfinger's & Gary Flom's The Bead Unbaffled: An Abacus Manual. Events described in this entry had inspired the purchase.

For comparison, here is my "ancient computer":



This photo dates from 1983. When I moved from New York to Massachusetts I didn't have a desk, but I had bought a used woodworking book for five dollars and decided to make my own. What I spent on tools and wood probably added up to more than what I probably would have spent on a ready-made desk, but putting it together was a great experience. I also learned about the marvelous healing properties of A&D Ointment (usually found nowadays in the supermarket's baby products aisle) after a wee slip o' the backsaw.

The computer on the desk dates from 1981 and was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II. (I believe one of those is in the Smithsonian.) It had a word-processing program called Scripsit, which I had to boot up from an eight-inch floppy disk. I stored my writing on another eight-inch disk, which could hold a total of 256K.

That's kilobytes, not megabytes. The equivalent of 200 pages of plain, typed, double-spaced text. I sold stories typed on that machine. I held onto that computer until Mary and I moved to Florida in 2003, reluctant to part with it for purely sentimental reasons until space considerations in the rental van dictated otherwise.

The Diagnosis

On Wednesday morning I told Mary, "I always knew you were an MVP. I just didn't know you were this kind, too."

The good news is, she finally knows what's been causing a whole crapload of symptoms that have stymied those doctors who haven't dismissed them altogether as hypochondriasis. Thanks to some old hospital records that took her a long time to get (and that I mistakenly thought were unavailable altogether because it's been so long), she's discovered she has mitral valve prolapse. It's right there on her papers from 1982, when she'd been hospitalized for encephalitis and had been in a coma for almost a month.

Says Ronald Hoffman, M.D., writing for Conscious Choice, "It's a relatively benign condition, though it is linked to a confusing array of seemingly unrelated symptoms, from shortness of breath to panic attacks. Mitral valve prolapse is generally the most benign of the various types of heart murmurs, and is probably genetic in origin." Conscious Choice places the proportion of the US population affected at 5 percent.

"People with mitral valve prolapse seem somehow to be wired differently," Hoffman continues. "Their autonomic response can be much more volatile and unstable, as if set on hair-trigger, so that normal stresses and surprises set off an exaggerated response, flooding their systems with stress hormones called the catecholamines. In fact, there may not be a specific stressor—autonomic fluxes may occur unpredictably like internal weather changes....People with mitral valve prolapse are intermittently and unpredictably awash in their own catecholamines. This leaves them alternately innervated and exhausted—'wired but tired' is a common feeling."

Mary's experienced many of the symptoms and indicators that Hoffman lists in his article, and additional ones listed by Sandy Simmons of Pine Canyon Media and Dr. K.A. Scordo. These include but are not limited to vertigo, sleep disturbances, irregular heart beat, hypersensitive startle reflex, cold hands and feet, nearsightedness, scoliosis, gastrointestinal disturbances, unusual joint flexibility, and low body weight.

Mary also matches the body type most associated with this condition: female and slender, with long fingers. Her legs are relatively short, but her arms and torso are long: "arm span greater than height," according to Scordo. Simmons and Scordo both place MVP as occurring in approximately 4-18 percent of the population.

Exercise and dietary changes help to manage the condition. Surgery is recommended in cases of a severe mitral leak, and is successful in 95 percent of cases according to the Cleveland Clinic, which "has the nation's larget experience with surgery for mitral valve disease, including minimally invasive mitral valve surgery." So, a trip to Cleveland might be in our future.

But at least now Mary knows what she's up against, and I understand better the reasons for some of her behaviors that I've found upsetting in various ways over the years.

The Draft



Also on Wednesday -- oh, at about 3 AM -- I finally finished tweaking Book #4 to the point where I'm ready to inflict it on my critique group. It's still the biggest volume yet, at a shade over 151,000 words (more than half the size of the trilogy) and requiring two binders to hold it, but right now all the pieces look necessary to me. I might be able to break it into two volumes, but I'm not entirely sure about that, either. I'll see how the group takes to it. We meet twice a month and distribute fairly small pieces, so I expect the review will take at least a year.

This particular installment was a structural nightmare: an ensemble piece representing the transition from one generation and one way of life to the next. To get past writer's block I wrote my scenes in a non-linear fashion and then put my separate puzzle pieces together, a type of fiction writing I'd never done before and for whom I have Lary (one 'r') Crews to thank, in particular his line, "Tell yourself writer's block doesn't exist." More on that is in this entry.

Before I'd printed this out I had only scenes and fragments of scenes scattered all over the studio, bunched together or left separate, printed from independent files before I folded them all into the main document.

Surrounding the binders are some of my tools: style guides, dictionary, thesaurus, and the music into which I headphone myself when I write. Sometimes I set my CD player on auto-repeat for hours on end if a piece of music is a propos to the mood of a scene. Often I can point to the musical "theme" of a story or a character, because it serves as a cinematic backdrop to the movie playing in my head. Book #4 relied heavily on Rachmaninoff's Piano Concertos 2 and 4.

Over the past couple of months, following my workshopping of the trilogy, which had followed on the heels of a single novel draft, I at least showed my critique buddies that:

(a) Yes, I can give them short fiction; and
(b) Yes, I can give them nonfiction

-- both types of which are currently out to market. Before then, all they'd seen from me was novel-length work. Now that I've got that business taken care of, I'll sic #4 on 'em.

Clouds were whizzing across the face of the Moon late Friday night when I took this 4-second exposure at f/8.



I've finally gotten the hang of the timed-release function, so I can step back after I push the shutter button and not worry about inadvertently jostling my camera. Windy conditions are another matter, but Friday night was pretty calm.

Blessings to all of you and yours for 2007. Hang onto your dreams, keep on keepin' on, and carpe diem!

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Christmas Anniversary

On June 3, 2006, Mary joined our "Writers' Circle" at a gathering hosted by member Tom Ault, who took us on his pontoon boat for a great tour of a local lake. I'd fashioned the group after "Women Writing," where Mary and I had first met.

Today Mary and I celebrate our 11th anniversary.

Last year I did a lengthy write-up for our 10th anniversary here. This year I'll open with a few factoids:....

Among Mary's mottoes:
"Trash provides."
"Deethe breaply."

A few facts about Mary, in no particular order:

She's given gallons of blood.

She picks fallen wheel weights and discarded batteries off the street so that they don't pollute the aquifer.

She's escorted worms and other bugs off the road, out of squish range.

She's hastened to our shelves for nutrition and medical books when friends have asked for advice.

She gives awesome massages, including to folks on the street who need it.

She kills roaches with her bare hands, fearlessly.

Also fearlessly, when our cat Red was seriously ill she took his temperature with a rectal thermometer. For a month she nursed him round-the-clock, often when I was stuck in the office.

She has performed cloning.

She also once delivered 100 pizzas in a single night.

She's driven special needs children, teenagers, and adults.

She started building her first car at age 15 and finished when she was 16, using junkyard parts (they don't rust in California). It was a metallic-green Volkswagen Beetle that she named Uriah the Heap.

Not long after that, she became a Presidential Scholar.

More recently, she started carrying a leash in her fanny pack to help her guide wayward dogs home, and has used it.

She comes up with spontaneous one-liners when I least expect them and that make me howl with laughter.

She puts up with me something fierce.

And that's only the beginning.



Mary inspects the channel from the University of Tampa campus after we attended Necronomicon at the end of October 2006. Reflected at the top is the bridge we crossed.

Our celebrations are low-key. Sometimes they simply take the form of a walk. Often we call our "post office walks" mini-honeymoons. We had thunderstorms this Christmas, so we took our walk on the off-hours, leaving the house around 1:30 this morning while the rain held up. According to the Weather Channel when we got home, the temperature was 74 degrees F with a heat index of 82 and 100 percent humidity.

Something was talking in the post office pond. Mary thought it might be ducks. I thought I heard some amphibians. After some loud wind in the beginning the voices start to come through in this recording.

At around 3 AM we toasted the day with a little coffee liqueur. I'd taken my camera on the walk and got in a shot of a neighbor's lights display.



Mary will be 50 next year, so my mental cogwheels have been turning....

Mentor

You wait by the road; I walk to get the car.
We have fished for trash by the estuary,
pulled a Diehard battery from the grassy shore.
Nuke plant cooling towers steam beyond.
Behind us, tropic-colored bikinis
cavort on a manmade beach by a placid gulf.
Above us, vermilion flycatchers
flit like tiny fires amidst the palms.

The battery goes in the trunk
joining recyclables plucked from the sand.

Your sacred vision spies harm
invisible to those who are blind:
candy wrapper glint, metal stare of pop-tops,
styrofoam pieces forming a clutch of unnatural eggs.
Children notice, ask if you are a teacher,
not for the first time.
You think it is because of how you dress.

You tell them no,
but I know the answer is yes.

©2005, We'Moon '05, Gaia Rhythms for Womyn: Sacred Paths
©2005, Florida State Poets Association Anthology Twenty-Three

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Live at Vacuum Genesis

Part of the Bog Boardwalk at Ponkapoag Pond, Blue Hills Reservation in eastern Massachusetts. The photo dates from June 2001 when Mary and I spent two weeks in an Appalachian Mountain Club cabin at the pond's edge. No running water, no electricity. In other words, paradise. I've taped this picture to my studio door because it served as the inspiration for a secondary location introduced in Book #2.

Vacuum Genesis is the creation of speculative poet Scott A. Kelly. The title, which here refers to both his magazine and his blog, derives from his poem of the same name. That poem appeared in the May/June 1988 issue of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

I'd been Star*Line's editor at the time. Earlier this month Scott e-mailed me, asking to do an interview via e-mail. I was delighted, not to mention thankful for the attention and exposure.

The interview is now live here.

Update, 22 January 2007: The original link to the interview is now non-functional; I've replaced it with the new one. A .pdf file is also up on my website.

These past couple of days I've focused my attention on Book #4, before I embark on Round Two of tweaking Covenant. Mostly I've been moving puzzle pieces around, trying to get a better handle on structure. Time away from that draft has also given me a better idea of what to cut. I save old drafts in case I change my mind, or in case the outtakes might be useful somewhere else.

Originally I'd tried to "simplify" #4's structure, placing large swaths of story in one and then the other of the book's two main communities. It felt forced. In my judgment it was forced. In Book #3 I'd pretty much jumped from place to place, and part of my tweaking there will include inserting location headers, an easy fix. Book #4 will still have some large swaths set in one or the other community, but it will also do place-jumping where needed. I've been breaking up the chapters more and inserting location and time headers, so maybe the next round will be better-organized.

Time away has aided my perspective, letting me return to the draft with fresh eyes. At least that's what I tell myself.

Happy Holidays, all!

[end of entry]

Here Comes The Sun!

Some 1980s-vintage solar power buttons to celebrate the lengthening of days (in the northern hemisphere) -- coming on the heels of news that a second nuclear power plant will be built nearby....

When we moved down here I started looking into solar power alternatives to being on the grid. This is the Sunshine State, after all.

I was surprised to find relatively little here in the way of solar panels, before I realized we also get hurricanes and tropical storms. People have literally lost their roofs: the places where those panels are most often installed.



There's a nuclear power plant about 14 miles from where we live. Our local beach is nicknamed "Nuke Beach" because you can see the cooling towers from there. In fact, there's a siren alarm system in the county if anything goes seriously wrong with the facility. In addition to the nuke unit, the plant generates power from coal and is the county's largest employer. A second nuclear power plant has just been approved, to be built two counties over.



(I believe this translates to, "Nuclear power? No thanks." )

From Greg Hamilton's column, "New plant to provide pain without the gain," in the December 17 St. Petersburg Times:

"On Feb. 26, 1980, 43,000 gallons of radioactive water spilled into the unit's containment building. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because that is exactly what took place the year before at Three Mile Island. Both plants were designed by the same company, Babcock and Wilcox.

"Then, on Oct. 14, 1982, another leak occurred, this one with 1,700 gallons of radioactive water. Again, it was contained on site.

"Other than a handful of emergency shutdowns and other situations, the nuke plant has been a decent enough neighbor over the years. Sure, officials are storing a small mountain of highly radioactive spent fuel rods on site, but it is the high-tech equivalent of the guy down the street with the leaking Chevrolet in the side yard. Not much we can do about it.

"Then there are the coal plants, with their millions of tons of pollutants pouring out of the stacks and into our lungs and drinking water. It's best not to think about that.

"But, again, it is all part of a devil's bargain. We live with these health risks in exchange for the power company's huge contributions to our tax base."

Hamilton claims that the new plant will expose our county to the same risks without the rewards. My response is that the counties bordering us have shouldered that same risk over the years.

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Buttons Across Four Decades

Happy Winter Solstice, all! This button dates back to the 80s, but my collection includes those that I'd worn during the previous decade. What follows is a small part of my collection....



I wore this one in grade school during the Vietnam War. Its message and its art -- and its focus on Brooklyn, where I was born and raised -- makes it my sentimental favorite of the lot.



I was 20 years old and living on Staten Island, NY, when the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant outside Harrisburg, PA, suffered a partial core meltdown on March 28, 1979. Had any radioactive releases occurred, they would have reached me in three days given the prevailing winds. I'd been to a couple of demonstrations before then, but my activism began in earnest after TMI (long before that acronym started standing for, "Too Much Information").



From Miriam Goodman's 2004 article in the Long Island Press, "Three Mile Island: 25 Years Later":

"On June 3, 1979, 15,000 protestors demonstrated on a Shoreham beach in a day-long steady downpour, in which activists struggled to keep their pamphlets and persons dry. It was the beginning of the demise of the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station."

I was at the demonstration on Long Island against the Shoreham plant. It was also my first direct exposure to the way the media can manipulate facts. The demonstration was peaceful except for an unruly handful that tried to climb the chainlink fence around the property. On that evening's broadcast news almost all the attention was given to those disruptive few.



In 1981-1982 I was Administrative Assistant to the Director at Women Strike for Peace, which began in the early 1960s in response to nuclear testing. One of our regular activities was holding vigils across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral. I've written more about that in this entry.

In the 90s my attention turned elsewhere.



The Boston Living Center serves people in New England living with HIV/AIDS. Mary and I volunteered several times at the BLC's annual event, "A Celebration of Life." Literally thousands of diners and volunteers filled Boston's Hynes Convention Center for this Thanksgiving feast provided to people living with the disease. It really was a celebration, and we had a fabulous time.



The AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts organizes the AIDS Pledge Walk, which is now called the AIDS Walk and Run. The event began as "From All Walks of Life." I've done the walk, the run, and -- early on -- the AIDS Dance-A-Thon. Mary and I both did the 5K in 2002.



In the 90s I also turned toward working for equal rights, which included lobbying my employer for domestic partner benefits. Mary had no health insurance during the first two years of our relationship. But even securing DP benefits did not mean equality. Her coverage was considered part of my income, which meant I paid taxes on it. This would not have happened had we been a heterosexual couple.

Heterosexual married couples enjoy 1,138 rights that Mary and I do not. This U.S. General Accounting Office report gives the full breakdown.



Mary and I first met at the Cambridge Women's Center in its "Women Writing" group. Before we became a couple we'd spent about a year sitting across from each other in a room of women, all of us pouring our hearts out in the act of free-writing. (In July 2004 I began and facilitate a co-ed free-writing group patterned after "Women Writing" -- I've described that group here.)

The Women's Center was born when a large group of women seized an abandoned, Harvard University-owned building In 1971. Their organizing efforts and generous local support led to the purchase of a lovely house at 46 Pleasant Street, near Cambridge's Central Square.



Coming full-circle from my peace buttons during the Vietnam War, in 2004 I volunteered to read names aloud for Voices For the Wall, an audio version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I read more than a thousand names in all. Volunteers were generally asked to read a page of 30 names, but the organizers -- from a group called the Vietnam Veteran's Gathering, Inc. -- welcomed whatever I could do. They created a set of CDs with, ultimately, 58,245 names that included recent additions to the wall. The recordings were played at the 7th Annual Vietnam Veterans Gathering in November 2004. Also present was the Moving Wall, a traveling 4/5-scale replica of the Memorial in D.C.

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Dictionary Heaven

I maintain a Writing, Editing, and Research Resources page on my website and have just added the following gem:....

Webster's Online Dictionary with Multilingual Thesaurus Translation, compiled by Philip M. Parker of INSEAD. In addition to definitions of words (I looked up "molasses"), provides specialty definitions (e.g., dream interpretation), synonyms, crosswords (i.e., words defined by the word you're looking up), modern and commercial usage examples, photos, uses in literature and nonfiction, usage frequency, expressions, frequency of internet keywords, modern and ancient translations, derivations and misspellings, rhyming words, anagrams, and alternative orthography. This last category includes expressions of the word in Hexadecimal, Leonardo da Vinci (backwards), American Sign Language, Semaphore, Braille, Morse Code, Dancing Men, Binary Code, HTML Code, British Sign Language, and Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher). Also provides usage in art, proper noun and trade name usage, use in news and articles, and appearance in non-English dictionaries. Other words may have somewhat different categories.

Parker's site also offers some java-script code that lets one double-click on any word on a page to get that word's definition. That code doesn't seem to work in the permalink entry but it does work on the main page.

Not all the words have an Orthography section. I lucked out with "molasses" because I'd found Parker's site while researching blackstrap molasses. One brand we buy has drastically cut the amount of potassium in its product, and I'll be contacting the manufacturer before I go off on a tear about it here.

I've been having some fun over at Parker's site. For one thing, I used the Non-English option and typed in Deviations character names. I'd Googled some of the major ones early on, to be sure that if the word existed it wasn't limited to a single individual or meaning. The Websters is even more comprehensive.

For example, when I plugged in the words "Yata" and "Masari" -- the two different peoples of my story -- I found that "Yata" transliterated from the Sanskrit means "controlled", while "Masari" translated from Ivatan means "dark". I thought those were pretty apt. :)

(I then looked up Ivatan, which I learned is an Austronesian language spoken exclusively in the Batanes Islands in the most northern reaches of the Philippines.)

Parker's compendium almost makes up for the loss of Phrontistery.info, which I'd found thanks to Melinama's blog Pratie Place. Phrontistery.info was such a neat site. It included words fallen into disuse, rare words, 2- and 3-letter Scrabble words, and a plethora of dictionaries and language resources. I hope it turns up again somewhere. I've found other "phrontistery" sites but they don't come close.

My resources page is an outgrowth of something I'd put together at my last place of employment, since I'd been the resident grammar geek in my department. That initial page -- a place for colleagues to go when they couldn't reach me -- consisted mainly of the items in the grammar section. I'd found those sites on my own.

Once I got involved in the blogosphere I found references mentioned elsewhere. I added those to my list, with a link back to the person providing the information. Pretty soon the list went way beyond grammar and into the realm of general research, since I often consult whatever I can get my hands on. My students learn about this page during the "research" part of the creative writing course I teach. The page is a work in progress, open to suggested additions.

Up top is the Random House College Dictionary, Revised Edition, 1975. I took it with me to college that year. It's got an "Ex Libris" bookplate imprinted with a spiral galaxy and on which I'd typed my name in all caps at the bottom. It's stained and ratty and taped up in places in addition to what you see here. The silver duct tape is Mary's handiwork.

This old friend stays faithfully by my side in the studio along with its sidekick, the Roget's International Thesaurus, Third Edition, 1962 (Thomas Y. Crowell Company).

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Back in the USSR

I was inspired to dig out my buttons after seeing this photograph by Semyon Danilov for the Associated Press, taken on Friday, December 15, 2006. It was printed in Saturday's St. Petersburg Times. That's the St. Petersburg in Florida, not Russia.

The Times caption reads: "A statue of Vladimir Lenin casts a doubtful eye on a pair of workers as they struggle to place a star atop a large Christmas tree on Friday. Lenin was the architect and first leader of the Soviet Union, which was officially an atheistic state until its collapse in 1991." The location of the photo is given as Stavropol.

Even though the Soviet era has passed, that's a red star being placed on the Christmas tree -- which makes for an interesting juxtaposition....

According to Wikipedia, the red star "is a symbol of Communism and Socialism and represents the five fingers of the worker's hand, as well as the five continents (as traditionally counted). A lesser known suggestion is that the five points on the star were intended to represent the five social groups that would lead the nation to communism. In no particular order, they are: the youth (the future generations), the military (to protect and defend socialism), industrial workers (labourers), agricultural workers (peasantry), and the intelligentsia (to criticize and to improve the ideas and practices of life in order to attain communism). In general, it was the emblem, symbol, and signal that indicated the truth of the new order under the rule and guidance of the Communist Party."

Wikipedia goes on to say that Russia and former USSR member nations still use the red star on military uniforms and equipment. Given all that symbolism and its potential for various degrees of irony, I love the way Danilov framed his shot.

I'd acquired the buttons shown below during my trip in the summer of 1981 to the then-Soviet Union. (Click here for the photoset of individual button shots.) I visited what is again Russia (including Siberia) and Armenia. The prominence of the red star shows up particularly in the button shown above. That one commemorates the 26th Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), which was in session at the time of my visit.

Here's a shot of the entire collective:



Somewhere I have a printout of the diary I kept during that trip. I'll have to go look for it.

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Happy Chanukah!

Large view

Chanukah (or Hanukkah or however you want to transliterate it) begins at sundown tonight. The first day is December 16 -- the 25th day of Kislev in the lunar Jewish calendar -- with the previous sundown marking the beginning of the holiday: Erev Chanukah.

Two images went into this card, tweaked courtesy of MS Paint and MS Photo Editor....

I've posted both images here before. The first is a canna lily on the University of Tampa campus:


Large view

The second is the male Ceraunus Blue butterfly I found hanging out at the "post office pond."


Large view

On Monday I spotted the Wavy-lined Heterocampa below at the strip mall and recently got the ID, thanks to Tony Thomas, Bob Patterson, and Dennis Profant over at Bugguide.Net. Had I been looking at the right family -- Notodontidae instead of Noctuidae -- I would have found this images page for the species, which includes photos taken last year by thingfish23 (Taming of the Band-Aid) and by deadmike (Journal of the Plague Year).


Large view.

Heterocampa biundata, Family Notodontidae (Prominent moths). Larvae feed on beech, birch, cherry, hickory, maple, and willow. According to Auburn University, this species ranges from southern Canada to Florida westward to about the Great Plains area.


Large view

Other posted shots include: left side view, top head view, and stereoscopic.

I also recently discovered the deliciously funny Bugguide page on contributors (courtesy of Jim McClarin), which has been up since October.

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By the Numbers

I saw these in a neighbor's yard, catching the late afternoon sun as Mary and I walked home from the post office.

After reading an article in Monday morning's St. Petersburg Times I spent part of the evening multiplying large numbers together and memorizing a pretty cool and quite old technique....

The article, Tom Marshall's Tables turned on math lessons, gives step-by-step instructions on using a lattice introduced by Leonardo "Fibonacci" Pisano in the 13th century.

In other words, what we're now calling "new" math. Or, in Mary's and my case, new "new" math, since "new" math was what we'd learned as kids. Only, it was the old "new" math. Which was quite different from today's "new" math, which dates back to the 13th century.

Mary took one look at the technique and thought of the abacus. Which makes sense, considering that Fibonacci's first mathematics classic was entitled Liber Abaci, which dates from 1202.

I visited the then-Soviet Union in 1981 and saw abacuses in use just about everywhere. That in itself astounded me, but even more so was the lightning speed at which people manipulated the beads. According to Totton Heffelfinger's & Gary Flom's The Bead Unbaffled: An Abacus Manual, the Russian abacus, called a schoty, was invented in the 17th century and differs in design from the Chinese abacus. Then there was the 10th century Mayan abacus, the nepohualtzitzin, designed on a base-20 system.

"Abacus is a Latin word meaning sand tray," say the authors. "The word originates with the Arabic 'abq', which means dust or fine sand. In Greek this would become abax or abakon which means table or tablet....The oldest surviving counting board is the Salamis tablet, used by the Babylonians circa 300 B.C."

Ever since I saw them in use I've been fascinated by them. I think maybe it's time I got one. I had quite a bit of fun playing with Fibonacci's lattice multiplication technique, not least because it was prettier than what I'd learned. And I've always thought the abacus was rather pretty. The fact that it's also quite functional makes it, well, irresistible.



I don't know which bird these tracks belong to. They were by our "post office pond," where I heard several birds calling, including killdeer.



I caught this sunset from the top of a rise during the walk home.

I was hoping to get a look at Sunday morning's triple planetary conjunction of Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter, but I didn't have a clear view toward the east. All were within a degree of each other, an event that last occurred in 1925 and won't happen again until 2053, according to this article (Associated Press, published in the Hartford Courant).

I did catch the Moon/Saturn conjunction, short of the Moon occulting Saturn.



Top row, L-R:
4:48 AM, 1/40-second exposure at f/8
4:47 AM, 1/5-second exposure at f/8

Bottom row, L-R:
6:12 AM, 1/10-second exposure at f/8
6:10 AM, 3"2-second exposure at f/5.6

All times are Eastern Time on Sunday, December 10, 2006.
The elongation of Saturn in the lower right shot is blurriness, not rings. Saturn is barely visible in the lower left-hand corner of the upper right and lower left photos.

The Moon's angle has changed due to its apparent movement resulting from the Earth's rotation. From our viewpoint, the sky turns by one degree about every four minutes. In the time between the top and bottom rows of shots, the sky turned about 21 degrees.

In addition, the Moon moves in its own sidereal orbit about 13 degrees each day. In the time between the top and bottom rows of shots, it moved about 3/4 of a degree on its way toward occulting Saturn: hiding the planet from view.

According to Fact Monster, Saturn was 1 degree 2 minutes south of the Moon at 5 AM on the 10th. The Moon measures a half-degree across.

A great animated .gif of a past lunar occultation of Saturn is here.

Kevin Rosero (omkevin) has a terrific shot of Sunday's Moon-Saturn conjunction here (his elongation of Saturn is rings!), and of the triple planetary conjunction here.

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Tapir Challenge, Part 4

The Haile 7G fossil dig site is the location of the Florida Museum of Natural History's "Tapir Challenge." More information is on the museum's website.

I spent the day in close contact with this small screwdriver. By the time we finished up around 4:30 PM I was just about as covered as the handle....



Crumbled limestone is shown at lower right.

"You take the area down a little bit at a time, uniformly," our instructor told us. "If you start digging a hole and you find a bone, you can't get it out until you dig it all down. This way you can see the bones laid out if you have an articulated skeleton."

The weather was perfect for a dig. Still, our instructor warned, many people overdo it on their first day of work. Sitting in one position, prying clay, and carrying buckets of dirt around become fairly strenuous. "Take breaks," he advised.



From the supply area we each took a small screwdriver for digging, a trowel for cleaning up, a vial to hold any small fossils we might find, and a plastic bag. We also carried two buckets to our work area, which for each of us consisted of a square meter of mostly clay. Orange flags, like the one shown at upper right, delineated each workspace.

"For skeletons that are fairly complete they're taking a lot of data on the bones," our instructor said. "How far down, what part of the square. For isolated pieces they record the square and you get your name on the label as the collector. It's there forever and ever for someone to study" as part of the permanent museum collection list.

If anyone finds a new species, the new species is usually named after the person who discovered it.



This shot of my workspace includes a sandbag up top.

We worked for the most part in silence, listening to the loud sounds of dredging. Several times during the day the dredging fell silent and we listened to the birds, mostly crows.

We worked in the upper zone. I would move to the lower zone later in the day. "One day this will be the hot spot," our instructor said. "Nothing will be found down there; the next day it's found down there and nothing up here. There are fossils from where we're standing down to the quarry floor."

A "huge jacket" -- a large articulated skeleton, encased in plaster to keep it intact through transport -- had been removed from the upper zone about two weeks earlier. It explained the odd shape of the area where we worked. "Normally we try to keep the squares semi-straight but that's not always possible," our instructor added.

He demonstrated the digging technique, easing his screwdriver through a fine top layer before reaching the clay. We were to dig out the clay, break it up, and throw it into the bucket.

"The limestone will be confusing at first," he said. "Questions will probably be, 'Is this a fossil or a rock?' If it's white, chances are that it will be a rock, but that's not always the case. Teeth can be white." When in doubt, we were to ask. "Rule of thumb for bones is that they're orange-looking or brown. But they'll stand out from the clay because the clay is gray."



This is one of the flags that bordered my workspace in the upper zone. Next to it is my spoil bucket.

Every so often our instructor stopped by and quipped, "Anyone find any skeletons yet?" (At one point he joked he could see four from where he stood, corresponding to the number of volunteers crouched in our small gray alcove.)

One of the volunteers found some tiny fish bones and lizard vertebrae, which I'd have photographed had I been thinking. But my hands were covered in clay dust and grit. The digging itself created a kind of tunnel vision and a devotion to repeated activity: pry the clay, sift through the clay and rocks, dump the clay and rocks into the spoil bucket.

My muscles have recovered from the day, but one side-effect still lingers. The Sunday before the dig I'd watched Guys and Dolls on Turner Classic Movies -- and as I engaged in repetitive digging, sifting, and dumping its music kept playing in my head, particularly the jaunty title song. It lodged in my brain for hours at a stretch and it is still lodged there:

When you see a guy
reach for stars in the sky
You can bet that he's doing it for some doll....

Mary tried to "cure" my condition by singing Edelweiss to me, but it didn't work.



This is my spoil bucket. Spoil consists of clay and rocks that have not yielded fossils. We emptied filled buckets over the edge of the quarry, aiming them away from where the work crew was dredging. (The work crew didn't want to deal with spoil, either.)

Cleaning up our spoil was crucial. If we left the clay in place and anyone stepped on it, it looked as though it had never been dug and would subsequently be dug again.

Remembering how heavy a pile of glossy magazines can be (since a major component of glossies is clay), I lifted my bucket when it was about half-filled and was surprised at how light it was. I probably emptied a filled bucket about a half-dozen times during the day.

I set aside potential fossils that turned out to be rocks. I called the instructor over when I found a brown-black object that turned out to be wood: this was once a forested area. Bones can be "mushy" so I didn't want to take any chances. Another volunteer found an imprint.

Our instructor said, "That's from someone's tennis shoe."



Our instructor works with a couple of graduate students, who had uncovered some turtle, sloth, and other fossils. The fossils, which date from the Pliocene Epoch, are about two million years old.

Update: Writes Vertebrate Paleontology Collections Manager Richard Hulbert on December 8, 2006: "We now know that directly underneath the turtle that Alex was working on was the skull and mandible of a tapir--we collected it today in fact." Graduate students Alex Hastings (orange shirt) and Alejandro Cuellar (black shirt) are joined by Collections Scientist Art Poyer.

They were located behind and below my second work spot. I heard the students discuss teeth coming out of a turtle shell and the finding of a frog hip, interspersed with talk about their plans for winter break.



For the most part, work at the site involved uncovering places where fossils were not present. That in itself is a valuable part of the job. In this shot, my hand is still caked with dried bits of clay from a day's worth of digging. The only fossil I found (and one not relevant to this dig) was the sea urchin spine shown here.

I was holding a relic from the Eocene Epoch.

"The Early Eocene (Ypresian) is thought to have had the highest mean annual temperatures of the entire Cenozoic, with temperatures about 30° C; relatively low temperature gradients from pole to pole; and high precipitation in a world that was essentially ice free," according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley. "Land connections existed between Antarctica and Australia, between North America and Europe through Greenland, and probably between North America and Asia through the Bering Strait. It was an important time of plate boundary rearrangement, in which the patterns of spreading centers and transform faults were changed, causing significant effects on oceanic and atmospheric circulation and temperature."

"You can take that home with you," the instructor said.

I asked, "Is it from the same time period as the rest?"

"No."

"About when does it date from?"

Without blinking an eye he answered, "About 30 to 40 million years ago."

I balked. When I ventured that surely some researcher must want this thing, the instructor gestured toward the wide quarry wall and said, "This place is full of them."

I'm thrilled to have this. I told myself that, after all, my simple act of driving to and from the dig site used a fossil fuel processed from much older stuff.

Still.

I had initially come across the call for dig volunteers while researching trilobites, in an attempt to learn whether Mary had found a trilobite imprint in a rock (shown in this entry) that she'd picked up off the street. When I mentioned the rock to the instructor he said that it was probably not a trilobite imprint -- they're not generally found in our area -- but he suggested that we visit the museum and check with an expert in invertebrate fossils.

The dig is continuing through December 20. I hope to do another stint when it starts up again in the spring. And I think it's time Mary and I planned a trip to Gainesville.

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