While I continue to unspool my pictures of our recent road trip to Alabama life in the Keys goes on. For some of us it involves more work, for others more observation. In my own yard I am under constant surveillance. 
I had wanted to build a small patch of grass for my last Labrador who had enjoyed our California lawn, but I procrastinated so long that Emma Goldman died before I built her a patch of lawn. Cheyenne is benefiting from my guilty conscience. A week after I got her I went to the garden store on Rockland Key and bought four pieces of $2 turf (Augustine grass for those that care) and laid them in a surplus vegetable bed I built two years ago. Now she has a cool spot to stretch out on and observe my comings and goings. 
Yesterday I was working to fill some surplus trash cans with yard waste as the pick up is on Friday mornings. I was raking the huge dead dinner plates we call sea grape leaves. 
It's been very windy, typical for the spring around here, and these huge acidic leaves blow everywhere. It's a dog's life watching the Old Man rake and lift, as he doesn't much care for leaf blowers and the like. The crop of fallen palm fronds is much reduced as prudent pruning has cleared the dead and dying fronds from around the house.
I am not one to desire the impossible so I didn't look to create a perfectly organized space around my house. I just hope to keep things more or less under control. My wife is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz and she wears a UCSC Slugs license plate holder on the back of her Sebring Convertible. When she was in Santa Cruz a couple of years ago she went by the campus bookstore and brought back a few souvenirs of her under graduate days including this:
Banana slugs are prolific under the redwood trees of Santa Cruz County and when the campus Chancellor wanted to create a school mascot (the campus only participates in swimming and has no ball teams) his suggestion of the Sea lion as a mascot was voted down and to his chagrin he was forced to swallow hard and accept the Banana Slug as the campus mascot. Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer was a decent man, and very involved in the promotion of science on campus that led eventually to the mapping of the human genome in large part at UCSC, but he didn't understand the hippie rebels my wife grew up amongst. Sinsheimer left soon after and the mascot remains. As far as I know this is the only banana slug in the Florida Keys but I am ready to stand corrected. Herewith a picture from Wikipedia of the brute in question:
How we got there from sea grapes remains a mystery to me.
I had wanted to build a small patch of grass for my last Labrador who had enjoyed our California lawn, but I procrastinated so long that Emma Goldman died before I built her a patch of lawn. Cheyenne is benefiting from my guilty conscience. A week after I got her I went to the garden store on Rockland Key and bought four pieces of $2 turf (Augustine grass for those that care) and laid them in a surplus vegetable bed I built two years ago. Now she has a cool spot to stretch out on and observe my comings and goings. 
Yesterday I was working to fill some surplus trash cans with yard waste as the pick up is on Friday mornings. I was raking the huge dead dinner plates we call sea grape leaves. It's been very windy, typical for the spring around here, and these huge acidic leaves blow everywhere. It's a dog's life watching the Old Man rake and lift, as he doesn't much care for leaf blowers and the like. The crop of fallen palm fronds is much reduced as prudent pruning has cleared the dead and dying fronds from around the house.I am not one to desire the impossible so I didn't look to create a perfectly organized space around my house. I just hope to keep things more or less under control. My wife is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz and she wears a UCSC Slugs license plate holder on the back of her Sebring Convertible. When she was in Santa Cruz a couple of years ago she went by the campus bookstore and brought back a few souvenirs of her under graduate days including this:
Banana slugs are prolific under the redwood trees of Santa Cruz County and when the campus Chancellor wanted to create a school mascot (the campus only participates in swimming and has no ball teams) his suggestion of the Sea lion as a mascot was voted down and to his chagrin he was forced to swallow hard and accept the Banana Slug as the campus mascot. Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer was a decent man, and very involved in the promotion of science on campus that led eventually to the mapping of the human genome in large part at UCSC, but he didn't understand the hippie rebels my wife grew up amongst. Sinsheimer left soon after and the mascot remains. As far as I know this is the only banana slug in the Florida Keys but I am ready to stand corrected. Herewith a picture from Wikipedia of the brute in question:
How we got there from sea grapes remains a mystery to me.
4 comments:
Mr Conchscooter:
I think that if I were lying on your grass patch and watching you work around your yard, I would get tired too
bob
bobskoot: wet coast scootin
In that same vein, the sports teams (soccer, and something else) of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. are known as the Fighting Geoducks (pronounced 'gooey-duck')...
__Orin
Scootin' Old Skool
Dear Mr. Conchscooter:
The idyllic picture of your dog resting in her own patch of greenery will forever elevate you in my eyes.
I had to laugh when you mentioned the humam genome project. Below are the credentials of Leslie's dad, my defacto father-in-law, who claims I have no genomes.
Human Genome News, September-December 1995; 7(3-4):2
David Smith is a founder and current Director of the DOE Human Genome Program. In September, at the seventh annual Genome Sequencing and Analysis meeting in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Smith reflected on principles guiding the establishment and management of the genome project and proffered some insights into where it all may lead. Along the way, he answered one of the questions asked most frequently of DOE genome program staffers: Why is DOE involved in the genome project?
Smith became intrigued by DNA studies in the mid-1950s at a small college in Nebraska where, as he explains it, "An embryology teacher opened my eyes to the significance of DNA, and from there, my main scientific motivation was almost philosophical."
After doctoral studies in biochemistry at the University of Southern California, Smith began his DOE career with an appointment at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1977 he began managing the molecular biology programs at the Energy Research and Development Administration, a forerunner of DOE, in Germantown, Maryland. Here Smith's ideas about the importance of understanding DNA eventually took shape and became a rationale guiding DOE toward implementation of what has become the largest project to be carried out in biology.
The man is brilliant... He is also an elder of the Dunker Church. He is one of the biggest Dunkards I have ever met.
Regards,
Riepe
You lot are all weird.What a relief.
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