A new lj friend asked me what it was like to be a vet tech.  An understandable mistake, since I post about working in an animal hospital.  But I've been working alongside vet techs for almost a year now, and I've got some opinions on what it's like.

But I know that there are a few vet techs reading this, as well.  I'd love to hear from you:  What's it like being a vet tech?

Someone sent me a link to this site, which appears to be selling a variety of wheeled contraptions that you can attach dogs to. I'm all for making dogs earn their keep--if you're going to be feeding these things and picking up their feces, they ought to do something useful, too. I like the scooter (click the HOW IT WORKS link) but the person who sent me the link emphasized the 'trike,' which I don't actually see anywhere. But as far as the scooter/dog idea goes, the big variable is what if the dog decides to bolt after a squirrel/other dog/motorcycle/whatever triggers your dog to act like an idiot? Perhaps it's for people who don't have dogs that do such asinine things. What do you think?

One of the things I'd really like to see on my trip with my father is The Spiral Jetty. It was the first piece of environmental art I'd ever heard of, and while I don't think it's nearly as good as most of what Andy Goldsworthy does, I would love to see it.

The directions on the site make it sound not too easy. It looks like it involves about 10 miles of dirt roads, paying close attention to forks in the road so as not to inadvertently trespass on private ranchland. The directions remind me of the directions to Barking Sands in Kauai, where we nearly destroyed the rental car on the proverbial five miles of bad road.

I know this is a long shot, but have any of you actually taken the trek out to see the Jetty?

Here it is on googlemaps

1. I'm pleased to see that after the Atheist Apocalypse there are still pigeons. It wouldn't have killed the cartoonist to change it to an American robin, but hey, I haven't given up the room in my heart for pigeons.

2. On account of the exciting mortgage crisis (Low income people out on the street! Bailouts for Wall Street Usury firms!) our options for where to move have temporarily expanded. Here's a question I asked on thequestionclub with predictably binary results (considering the binary nature of the question): You have two choices about where to buy a house. You have a 300k budget. Do you a) Buy a tiny house with no yard in Oakland California or b) buy a nice house with a gigantic yard 30 miles outside of Austin Texas?

The Democrats' situation is depressing. Why is the Clinton camp doing all the Republicans' work for them? How is it that I have come to dislike people I used to have distant admiration for, like Bill Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro, and the nation's middle-aged white women? I'll be watching the nominating convention, not for the inspirational speeches, but just to see how they untangle this mess.

Just how much time should I devote to watching and reviewing movies other people would avoid? Don't answer that, sclerotic_rings.

I like the idea of this new meme that's going around: Ask me questions about things I don't usually blog about. But what don't I usually blog about? Once I got past sticking to the Urban Nature theme, I pretty much started blogging about anything I wanted. But if there is something I haven't blogged about, that you would like me to answer or address, go ahead. Comments will not be filtered or locked or whatever, just ask, you cowards.

Every work day feels like it should be Thursday, and then it turns out it's only Tuesday. Every weekend ends too soon. This and other unique observations will be in my new book: "Like Dave Barry, only not funny." This one is really Thursday, but I've got a feeling tomorrow will somehow be Tuesday.

I've been early-ish to work for the past several days. This post ought to finish that.

This is the kind of question that's best answered with careful research, but more fun to toss out on my blog. And considering that most of people I know who live or have lived in Texas are students of the life sciences in one way or another (including one conspicuously horticulturally minded individual), asking y'all isn't such a bad idear. (Whoops I mixed up my Texas and New England there.)

ANYWAY my question is: What types of fruit trees could one grow in one's small piece of Texas property, assuming that property is in that little Rhode Island sized segment region including Dallas/Ft. Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and surrounding space? And better: what fruit trees could one grow (or plant and have thrive) that make sense from an ecological point of view, that is, are not invasive and don't require input of too many alien elements such as water and fertilizer and such?

I asked this question of my Texas coworker, and she looked at me like I asked where I could store my flying saucer in Texas. (duh! Anywhere!) Eventually she remembered that there are trees that produce pecans and perhaps also plums, but couldn't answer my string of increasingly desperate and boring questions: "Avocados? Peaches? Oranges? Lemons?

It's one of the important side issues to the great "Where are we moving?" conundrum.

Alexis and I walked around the arboretum today, and I got an idea for the next Urban Nature Walk: get a guided tour of some place with the urban nature walkers. We did it a couple years ago when a participant had a friend who was a park ranger on Spectacle Island.

So I looked up some Boston Walking Tour groups and was kind of surprised at the price. It costs 13 to 15 dollars per group member for one of these tours, with a minimum of 130 dollars or so for the whole tour. This means that each tour has to be 10 people or more ideally, which in my opinion is kind of too many.

By the way, I don't charge anything for Urban Nature Walks. That's because I didn't intend to be the group leader--I really just wanted to encourage like-minded people to gather and walk and talk together. But it works better if I lead the group, at least at first.

I'd sort of like to be a paid tour guide, I think I'm pretty good at it, but I don't feel like I have the time for a regular gig. I try to do the UNW monthly, but in winter it's more like once every two months or so. Basically, like everyone, I'd like to work for fun, not money.

I'll probably skip February, as I skipped January. March, even though it is most definitely winter, has at least the promise of spring, what with the Equinox and all, with the beginnings of interesting bird behavior, the appearance of some new plant growth (buds and skunk cabbage mostly), and often light snow tracking possibilities--though just as often it's frozen mud.

If you were coming along on a March Urban Nature Walk in the Boston area with me, where would you want to go?

Does anyone know anything about Round Rock Texas? (Any personal experiences, I mean; I read the wikipedia page.) I was just looking at a map of Austin and saw it up there and wondered what it was like.

Why did I wake up in the middle of the night with the phrase "vituperative recriminations" in my head?

If I were to write a book, what should it be?

Has anyone here learned to drive on "the other" side of the street? I mean: you learned to drive on one side of the street and then went abroad and drove on the other? I'd like to hear first person accounts. Is it hard, confusing, dangerous, none of the above?

On this day in 365 urban species: Northern shoveler.

( extra credit )

Hey, you guys! A couple questions regarding the web, and your usage of:

Do you have an automatic news thingie that sends you news stories based on keywords or subjects? Which one?

Are you on any other social networking site(s) than livejournal? Why? What's good about the others?

Today I saw the first snowflake of the 2007-2008 season. Other people saw many more, but I just saw the one. Lots of coworkers were whining about the cold, but I just toughed it out wearing a sweatshirt (our work coats haven't come in yet, and I didn't want to wear my ratty jacket where the public could see me) on our way to the ICE CREAM PARTY that the cops threw us for some reason.

I had the wonderful experience of going in a cage with an animal I've never even seen close up before, not knowing how it moved or reacted to things until I watched it with my own eyes a few feet away. It was like having an encounter with an alien, which, I suppose, it was. (it was a red panda)

A couple days ago i dreamt that someone was eating a burrito that was stuffed mostly with uncooked BOP. The zookeepers reading this all gagged, imagining the smell of it so close to their faces. For the rest of you, imagine coarsely ground indeterminate meat product, complete with gristle and cartilage fragments. It smells like...well, I can't quite describe it. When I used to cut mice up with poultry shears, the smell of that was similar--sour, a little rotten.

A 12 ton minke whale was found swimming in a river, almost 1000 miles from the ocean.

Alexis posted a voice post meme, so if you want to know what her voice sounds like (sexy) go here.

Also she posted a video of me at Flann's explaining my opinion of mozzarella sticks, so if you want to see what I look and sound like talking you can go here.

(I guess the fact that I think she sounds sexy and she thinks I'm funny means that we're good for each other.)

I've been trying to decide if i should try out this mouse electocutor. It seems more humane than most mouse killing devices (apart from snap traps) but it's marketed for the squeamish--you 'never have to see the dead mouse.' I like the fact that you could conceivably get many mice in a short period of time with it. What do you think?

On this day in 365 Urban Species: Devil's coach horse, a rove beetle (a kind of beetle that likes to prey on the insects and other animals associated with death and decay) with a most excellent common name.

Imagine you are driving along a pretty busy highway and you see a badly injured animal in the road. Its innards are out a little, but it's alive and conscious. For the sake of the example, the animal is one that is common, but not invasive, like a possum in the eastern US or a red fox in the British Isles or Europe (can't think of an example for Australia, but you get the idea, right?)

What do you do? Do you move the animal off the road (with a shovel or something so you don't get bit)? Do you try to run the animal over and kill it more quickly? Do you try to kill it with something in your car (a shovel, some other tool)? Suppose it's a weekend or at night, and you can't get a hold of a rehabber, vet, or animal rescue org, what then?

Many of us have experienced something close to this, and I'd guess that most of us didn't feel any better after the experience.

Your thoughts?

Have any of you ever built a cob house, or been involved in any similar project?

The deer enclosure pond.( Read more... )

Most of the people who read this journal are expecting to read about, and see pictures of, urban nature (I assume). In the past several months couple things have changed so that this journal often isn't about that subject. In October of 2006 I started working one additional day at work. That doesn't sound like much, but since I work at a farm that means a big shift, percentage-wise, away from time spent in the city. I also commute by car now, meaning that I don't spend an hour on trains in and around the city (my old commute took me into the heart of Boston to switch to the outbound train to the countryside). I've also been doing this 3:00 snapshot project, which results in 5 pictures from work, minimum, every week.

What I want to know is, does this bother you? I know that since I work with animals, people dig seeing a lot of my pictures from work. I'm a little worried that I'm calling my journal one thing, and it's become another.

I've thought more about doing some kind of appendix to the 365 urban species project, but it is mid-March, and I have photographed exactly two additional species in 2007. Having only two days a week to find urban species (if I'm only looking on my days off) makes the process more difficult than it was in 2006, and it was hard work even then.

The reality is, you'll probably be seeing even more of my pictures from work, as long as I continue to work there. The good thing is that a change of season will be coming in about a month, and there will be more interesting things to look at. And since I work at a farm/wildlife sanctuary/zoo, all of the pictures of animals are really about the relationships between animals and the human-altered environment. I'll write about urban nature when I get excited about a topic, but in the meanwhile, here's some goats.


( You can't have just one goat )