Good Mourning!

Day 18: What's the appropriate salutation for Hallowe'en? Why, "Good mourning," of course! You might find this odd, but as much as I enjoy costuming, Hallowe'en is one of my least favourite holidays. I don't understand it. Perhaps I was oblivious to the way adults celebrated it when I was a kid, but I don't recall as much emphasis on ghoulishness, gore and horror as there is in current times. The costumes of my youth were deliciously scary, not gruesome: cute witches, ghosts haunting in sheets, the occasional vampire. Most were cleverly cobbled together from items around the home rather than store-bought, mass-produced garb you see today. I remember attending one junior-high dance as Huckleberry Finn in tattered jeans and painted freckles, straw hat on my head, fishing pole over my shoulder, and a dead fish (real, bound in plastic wrap) in my hip pocket. I accidentally sat on the fish and although I hadn't expected any of the boys to ask me to dance, social pariah that I was, my math teacher spun me through a ballroom waltz despite the fishy scent which must have surrounded me.

These days, I don't open my door to strangers. In rural Pierce County, you don't open your door for someone you don't know even in broad daylight, let alone at night. When I used to go to my fishing buddy's home for Hallowe'en, I was surprised to find that most of the trick-or-treaters were between 12 and 16, and only a few had bothered to dress up. Eleven was considered too old for trick-or-treating fifty years ago.

When the Nisqually Land Trust hosted their annual Hallowe'en tree-planting, the flyer said, "Costumes optional." In the past, this event has been billed as the "zombie planting," presumably because as a zombie, you can get absolutely filthy and it just improves the effect. That said, I now have a greater sympathy for zombies, especially those in the Pacific Northwest where the blackberry vines are in league to pull them back into their graves as they search for brains.

Grow A Depression Plant

Day  17: Here's a simple and fun science project for you to do! I think I was about five when my mother guided me through growing my first Depression Plant (so named because the recipe was printed on Mrs. Stewart's Laundry Bluing during that era). Young kids should have adult supervision when using these household chemicals.

Mix together in a glass cup
2 Tbsp. non-iodized salt
2 Tbsp. liquid bluing (Mrs. Stewart's is available through Amazon and some retail stores)
2 Tbsp. water
1 1/2 tsp. household ammonia (non-sudsy works best)

Set a piece of brick or lump of coal in a glass dish at least one inch deep. Pour the solution over the brick, and over the next 24 hours, you will be able to watch the crystals forming into puffy mounds. If your dish is too shallow, the crystals may crawl over the edge, so check it hourly to be sure they're not escaping. They're very fragile, so be careful when moving the dish, and if you want to look at them under your microscope, transfer them carefully to your slide with the point of a pocket knife. If you want to grow red ones, you can add a few drops of mercurochrome to the solution.

Yelm Shoreline Planting

Day 16: After roughly eight months of being on the injured list with a hip issue, I finally felt sufficiently recovered to join one of the Nisqually Land Trust's work parties. Oh, it felt good to be back on the end of a shovel again! We couldn't have asked for better soil in which to plant: friable, rockless, eminently easy to dig once you got through the sod of canary grass. Therein lies the problem. Canary grass is an invasive which takes hold in open areas and quickly proliferates. The best way to eliminate it is to shade it out. Admittedly, this solution takes years, but it is the most effective for the long term.

Forty-three volunteers (about half of them Cub Scouts) put 150 Douglas firs and shore pines in the ground in three hours. A few of us (the diehard core membership) stayed behind to install protective sleeves around each seedling. The white plastic tubes will prevent rodent damage, one of the major reasons for die-off among newly planted trees. They will be removed two or three years from now after the trees are fully established.

Darkfield Universe

Day 15: Anticipating the arrival of Christmas-present-to-self, I stopped at a murky local pond to collect water samples for examination. At home, I covered them with cloth to allow air circulation, and the following morning, I prepared concave slides from each jar and settled in at the microscope to look for protozoans and anything else of interest. I was hoping for hydrae or planaria among the vegetative matter, but found nothing but a pair of insect larvae and a few fast-swimming ciliates. Later in the day, I tried again with even poorer results, although one critter was a type I'd never seen. The only protozoans I know are those we covered in high-school biology! This feller was cute, shaped somewhat like a kiwi (the bird), busily using a long proboscis to feed itself algae. If it had had ears, it could have heard me muttering, "I bet I can't find another one like you when the darkfield gets here."

When the darkfield 'scope arrived on Friday, I assembled it and again prepared a couple of slides from each jar of pond water. In roughly two hours at the eyepiece, I may have observed as many as four individual ciliates during a diligent search, but not another "kiwi." I finally just gave up and took a photo of a galaxy of pond scum to celebrate the acquisition of a darkfield microscope. Darkfield microscopy allows for better viewing of detail by using diffracted (as opposed to incident) light. It is especially useful when looking at subjects such as fungus spores and lichen asci.

Strategy

Day 14: Sometimes the opportunity to say "I told you so" isn't as gratifying as it should be. When my husband purchased his first internet-capable computer, I said, "Um...this is Not A Good Idea. Humanity isn't sociologically evolved to the point where they can handle this. This is going to cause a lot more problems than it's going to solve." Bruce has been gone for many years now, so I don't get to say "I told you so," but I was right. As many ways as the compass of our troubles could possibly point, the needle stays steadily on North: internet.

The internet has made possible a new form of warfare, one which undermines the fabric of society and throws it into chaos. There is no need for a nuclear device to destroy thousands of lives, no need for bloodshed to effect conquest of a nation. We have become a weapon in the enemy's hands, a weapon which is being employed against ourselves. We have been engaged by masters in a game which we barely know how to play, and while we falter and fumble and try to make the immediate best of a bad situation, our opponent has each possible move and counter-move strategized decades beyond our power to see, given our limited skills. We have three choices: resign, continue playing in the hopes that our expert opponent will make a mistake leading at best to stalemate or, failing all else, we could just kick over the board.

Buttered Lichens

Day 13: Another wonderful present from far away arrived in my mail yesterday. A Parkie friend was visiting Michigan and had asked if I'd like some specimens of local lichen. I said yes, and asked her to look for species she had not observed in the Pacific Northwest. She replied, "I'm trying to get you some orange ones." Visions of Xanthorias and Candellarias danced in my head like so many sugarplums (Teloschistes being beyond my wildest dreams), and then she sent a photo. I burst out laughing. "Anne," I wrote back, "don't try to mail those. They'll go to goo in the post. Those are jelli fungi." "Too late," she replied. "I already mailed them."

Fortunately, she sent the parcel via priority mail. The fungi (Tremella mesenterica, commonly called "Witches' Butter") had only just begun to biodegrade, and were restored to health after spending the night outdoors. I spent yesterday evening examining samples of the lichen under the dissecting 'scope and determined from the sparsity of rhizines, absence of apothecia and granular soredia arising "from pustules" (per Brodo) that the specimen was one of Michigan's commoner species, Flavoparmelia caperata. Also known generically as "Greenshield," Flavoparmelia will grow on almost any bark substrate and may even attach to rock. Anne's specimens were taken from pine and maple. They are unlikely to survive in the Pacific Northwest, but I've given them the option to colonize on Acer.

Mysterious Island

Day 12: Lake Kapowsin is shallow. Its maximum depth is roughly 30', and it is a veritable minefield of subsurface stumps due to the geologic process which formed it. When the Electron Mudflow surged down the Puyallup Valley approximately 500 years ago, it blocked the outlet to Ohop Creek and caused the water to back up in the basin we now know as the lake. The stumps are the remains of the drowned forest, and are a significant hazard for boaters, even one moving slower than usual in her kayak. One high spot of terrain remains as a 30-acre island on the northeast side. Most of the island is very brushy with salal and other shrubs, but a few open areas are considered "party spots" and are used occasionally as illegal campsites. A few pockets are so densely canopied that little light reaches the forest floor, a factor which led me to explore there for lichens and fungi. I found no unusual species, although there was a notable abundance of Evernia on the few Doug firs growing among the cedars.