Randy’s Blog

CoCoRaHS

I decided to join CoCoRaHS after all. It's the community of amateur rain gauge readers that I wrote about recently. Since I have their rain gauge, and I'm taking daily measurements, I might as well submit my data to them. They have training material online that I read through. I was discouraged at first, because according to their guidelines I don't have a good place to put a rain gauge, but at the end they said in urban areas there often aren't any good spots, so just do your best. My rain gauge is attached to a post on our deck, which is about the only spot in our yard that isn't covered by trees.

They also recommend taking measurements every day at 7am. I'm not quite that dedicated, but fortunately they accept measurements any time between 4:30am and 9:30am. That I can handle. It's neat to see my data plotted on the county map each day, and see how much rain other observers in the county recorded. I've also been amazed at all the other observations you can submit besides rainfall. Things like:

• Hail (they have instructions on making a hail pad out of styrofoam to measure hail size)
• Snow depth and water content of snow (there are entire training sections devoted to these topics)
• Significant weather events, like extremely heavy rain or snow (these reports are sent immediately to the National Weather Service and have proved vital in helping the NWS decide when to issue flood warnings)
• Thunder frequency (there are instructions on how to count thunder claps)
• Even the shape of snowflakes! (They have pics of the predominant snowflake shapes, like stellar dendrites, sectored plates, and rimed crystals, among others.)

All of these are optional, of course. They point out that we are volunteers, and we should only do what we can handle.

One other neat thing is that once you've submitted 100 rainfall observations, your data is included in the Global Historical Climate Network, which is used by researchers around the world.

Bird's Nest

I noticed a while ago that a robin built a nest on top of the electric meter on the side of our house.

This does not seem like a good location! It looks precariously balanced, and is only about waist high, seemingly well within the reach of an animal like a raccoon. But apparently I know nothing about bird nests, because its been working out for them. Over the past few weeks eggs appeared in the nest, followed by four very ugly little baby birds which then quickly grew into more bird-like fledglings. Yesterday we took a peek in the nest, and there was 1 little bird left. Apparently we startled it, because it hopped/flapped onto the ground, and one of the parents flew over to protect it. I assume/hope that the other little birds had already done the same.

Turtle's Nest

Last week we went on a hike at a nearby park, and came across a turtle that seemed to be digging a nest to lay eggs. Once again, I thought it didn't seem like a good place, because it was right by the hiking trail. But what do I know about turtle nests?

Geocaching

Earlier this spring, Wendy and I started geocaching. The conservation district has a geocaching program that highlights the best hikes at parks around the county. You get a trivia question about the park, and GPS coordinates to a container along the hike that has the answer. Answer all the questions and you get a badge. It's a neat way to explore new areas.

So it's been surprising to me at how un-fun some of our geocaching hikes have been! We started in late March and were wholly unprepared for how soggy the trails were from melting snow. Our shoes would be soaked all the way through to our socks by the end. You would think we'd learn our lesson, but we kept thinking conditions would dry out by our next hike, only to discover that was not the case. Our most recent hike was a few weeks ago, and not only were the trails still wet, but the mosquitoes were out in force and we didn't think to bring bug spray!

I've also been annoyed with the geocaching app I've been using to navigate to the right coordinates. It tries really hard to make you upgrade to the premium version. On the most recent hike, we couldn't even find the container because the app refused to navigate us unless we paid up. Very frustrating.

Perhaps all of these troubles were foreshadowed on our very first geocache hike, when we came across a dead body!

Yes, it was the dead body of a fish. But a dead body nonetheless!

A new book by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke has just been published! It's been listed as "Coming Soon" on her publisher's website, anomalistbooks.com, for an ENTIRE YEAR! I know this because I kept checking periodically (obsessively?) to see if there was any news about a release date. Finally, this week, it was published! I ordered it immediately and UPS delivered it to me yesterday.

This is her fourth book of interviews she's done with Native Americans about their encounters with star people. It's called Space Age Indians:

It focuses on people who lived to see 2 indigenous astronauts launched into space: John Herrington in 2002 (a Chickasaw member), and José Hernández in 2009 (from the Purépecha tribe in Mexico).

The title is inspired by the song "Space Age Indian" from the band Tiger Tiger:

I like my computer,

I'm an Indian of the future,

Space Age Indian, I won't be left behind,

Space Age Indian, I'm changing with the times

Even the book cover seems to be slightly inspired by the song's album cover, which also has a rocket taking off in the background:

I looked around to see if I could find the song. It's posted on YouTube and is pretty good:

Getting back to the book, I've just started reading it. As is usual with Ardy's books, this is not one I can read straight through. Some of the interviews are so thought provoking I have to put the book down and let the ideas settle before continuing.

The book is off to a good start, though. The first several interviews are with Indians who are Vietnam veterans that live in Hawaii. They reported encountering, and in some cases, having their lives saved by tall, shimmering "Blue Men" during the war. One of the men later earned a degree in astronomy after the Blue Men took him aboard their ship and showed him Earth from space. He says he now searches the universe for life, in hopes of seeing them again.

I'm sure I'll have more to tell later. Right now I have to get back to reading.

Late last summer I wrote about getting a rain gauge and learning about CoCoRaHS, a network of amateur rain gauge readers, whose data is used by the NOAA. This spring, I kept noticing that whenever it rained there wasn't any water in my rain gauge. This was odd, I thought, but I didn't dwell on it any further. Until one day, when it dawned on me that the only explanation is that it must have a leak! So I went outside to investigate and found that yes, there was a big crack at the bottom. And that's when it dawned on me that I probably shouldn't have left the rain gauge outside all winter!

So I needed a new gauge. Wendy suggested I get the official CoCoRaHS rain gauge, which you need if you want to join the network. It's super fancy, allows you to measure to the hundredths of an inch, and can be used to measure the water content of snow. I got it and here it is:

There's a narrow inner tube that sits inside a large outer tube. A funnel at the top directs water to the inner tube, which holds up to an inch of water. When it fills up, it overflows into the outer tube.

Here's what it looked like last week, when we got 1.76 inches of rain in one night:

To measure that, I had to pour out the water in the inner tube, and then pour in the outer tube's water, using the funnel. It's more work than a normal rain gauge, but it's a lot more accurate.

I haven't joined CoCoRaHS yet. You have to go through training first and they highly recommend you measure the gauge at 7am each day. I'm not sure I have that level of dedication!

The heavy snow from the winter and the heavy rains this spring have left the pond near us at the highest levels I've ever seen it. This bench has been rendered fairly useless:

But the geese don't seem to mind. When I took that picture there were 2 geese and their 11 babies hanging out nearby:

Today we got 0.36 inches of rain, with more to come in the next few days. I look forward to measuring it!

A couple of years ago, I blogged about our day trip to view the Indian mounds in southern Wisconsin. I had completely forgotten, when I wrote that post, that we'd briefly seen an Indian mound in West Virginia earlier that year, when we visited Wendy's grandparents to celebrate her grandma's birthday. We didn't have a chance to investigate it at the time; we just happened to walk by it after dinner one evening. In hindsight, it was that mound that planted the idea of visiting the mounds near us.

This year we visited Wendy's grandparents again, this time to celebrate her grandpa's birthday. It rained for most of our trip, but on our last day there, the rain finally stopped, allowing us to fully investigate the mound.

So, here it is, the Criel Mound. Or, as I like to call it, "the mound that started it all":

The view from the top:

And here's the one picture I took of it two years ago:

The mound was created as a burial tomb. It contained an upper tomb, with 2 skeletons, and a lower, master tomb, with a central body and 10 other bodies arranged around it in a semi-circle. Before the archaeological significance of the mound was fully appreciated, the top was leveled off to build a judge's stand for horse racing!

The mound was just a short walk from our hotel. I'm glad the rain stopped so we could see it.

Bonus cruise post!

One evening, towards the end of our cruise, we arrived a bit too early for dinner. We had about 10 minutes to wait, so we sat down in the library, which was near the dining room. Glancing at the books on the shelves, an idea popped into my head: I told Wendy I would pick a book at random, open it to a random page, and read to her The Most Interesting Excerpt in the World!

I walked over to the shelves. The first book I noticed was a thick book called Birds of the World. I grabbed it, sat down, opened it up, and read what was apparently the most forgettable excerpt in the world. I don't remember what it was at all. Something about habitats, maybe. But the pictures of birds were neat! So we entertained ourselves for a while by flipping through and looking at pictures of birds from around the world. Not a bad way to spend 10 minutes.

When I put the book back on the shelf, the book right next to it caught my eye. It had a weird title: Cranioklepty. The subtitle was Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. On the back cover, the book was described as "An Untold History of Crime & Error" as well as "A Comedy of the Grotesque". That sounded really cool, I thought! So I borrowed the book and started reading it after dinner. It didn't take long before I realized that I loved the book.

It's written by Colin Dickey, and chronicles the rise of the now-debunked sciences of phrenology and craniometry, which proposed that you could discern things like character, personality, and intelligence either from bumps on the skull or from the size of the skull. These ideas became very popular and led to a big demand for skulls. The skulls of criminals were easy to obtain, but the skulls of great artists and philosophers were much more difficult to acquire, which led to a huge increase in grave-robbing.

The history of skulls belonging to composers Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are told in detail. I lost count of how many times their skeletons were buried, dug up, studied, and re-buried. And it was not uncommon for their skulls to disappear or get secretly replaced with someone else's skull each time!

The descriptions of grave-robbing and dealing with corpses were especially macabre. And funny! I couldn't stop laughing at the description of a budding phrenologist who robbed a grave and had his first encounter with the stench of a week-old corpse!

And then there was the story of Beethoven's autopsy, which discovered the composer's brain had deeper, more numerous folds than normal. Dickey writes that this was fitting for Beethoven, because one year Beethoven's brother sent Beethoven a holiday card and signed it "The Landowner". Beethoven sent a reply and signed it "The Brainowner". Ha!

This book was a wonderful discovery. Next up on my reading list is Dickey's latest book, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. From what I've gathered, there's nothing creepy or scary about the book, because it's not really about ghosts. It's about the stories behind the ghost stories in famous haunted houses, and what they reveal about the living. Sounds interesting! And he's currently writing a book about conspiracy theories, which is quite relevant to my interests!

As everyone who reads this blog already knows, Wendy and I went on a cruise recently! Here are some of the highlights:

Tampa and Cheesecake

Our cruise departed Tampa on Sunday, so we flew in on Saturday, arriving just in time for dinner. We went out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory, which was near our hotel. The weather was warm and pleasant as we waited for a table:

For dessert, I opted for the banana creme cheesecake; Wendy had the mango-key-lime cheesecake. Since we were texting with Wendy's family throughout the day, I sent out a picture:

Abby replied: "I like your cake's hat, Randy. It's confident." This made us laugh out loud and greatly amused us for the next several days.

Sunsets

A while back I posted about the movie The Green Ray, which referred to the flash of green you can occasionally see during a sunset. That movie provided us with a fun side quest throughout the cruise: whenever skies were clear, we watched the sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray. We never did, but it was fun nonetheless, and we got some neat pictures:

The day after we got home, earthsky.org published an article about the green ray, which has some pictures and explanations of the phenomenon:

https://earthsky.org/earth/can-i-see-a-green-flash

Adagio

My favorite way to pass the time on the cruise ship was to listen to Adagio, a string quartet of musicians from Hungary that played classical music at various times throughout the day. 

It was so relaxing to listen to them play while watching the ocean go by through the window.

Sudoku

Another of my favorite activities was to solve the daily sudoku. Each day the front desk had printouts of a crossword puzzle and a sudoku. Sometimes I would listen to Adagio while solving a sudoku, making my right brain and left brain happy.

Late Dinner

Dinner at the formal dining room was either at 5:45pm or 8pm. We were assigned to the 8pm group, and we quickly discovered that was just too late for dinner. Usually around 5pm I would start to get hungry, and there were still 3 hours to go! So at 5:30pm, when the buffet opened, we would go and get a fruit and cheese plate to tide us over. It helped a little, but by 8pm I was starving!

Key West

At our first stop, we got a trolley tour that included tickets to see the Ernest Hemingway house. We saw a bunch of cats that live there, and the room where Hemingway wrote almost all of his work:

I think my favorite part of Key West was just riding the trolley all around the island. Sitting in the sun, feeling the breeze, listening to the driver talk all about Key West's history. It was very relaxing.

Guatemala

This was, start to finish, my favorite stop. We took a bus deep into the jungle to visit the Quirigua ruins, where we saw incredible Mayan carvings. Our tour guide was fascinating, telling us all about the Mayans and the history of Guatemala. 

A quick aside: I was really looking forward to this excursion because Ardy Sixkiller Clarke visited Quirigua in her book, Sky People. She interviewed locals who talked about how the founders of Quirigua claimed to have come from the stars (our tour guide said the founder was obsessed with Orion's belt), and Ardy was told that balls of light can even be seen during the day (cool!) but never when tourists are around (darn!). She was told workers at the ruins say they've seen the balls of light transform into humanoid forms near the Acropolis and chant the old chants of elders in nearby villages.

After our tour guide finished his talk we had about 45 minutes of free time, so we climbed all over the Acropolis. I kept a sharp eye out for UFOs/balls of light, but I didn't see anything other than hawks flying high overhead. Regardless, I greatly enjoyed exploring the ruins. Here's a picture of the Acropolis:

I also want to mention that as our cruise ship was heading to Guatemala, I was reading a UFO book that quoted Carl Jung talking about his friend who saw a UFO in Guatemala! That was a neat coincidence.

Dolphin Encounter

Our next stop was Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. We took a short bus ride and then hopped on a boat which took us to yet another island, where we had a dolphin encounter. This was easily the best half hour of the entire cruise.

We waded into waist deep water and got to pet a dolphin (her name was Gracie) and watch her and other dolphins perform tricks. Then we got our picture taken with Gracie! A "hug" photo, with Wendy and I on each side, and a "kiss" photo where the dolphin "kissed" our cheek. The kiss was surprisingly firm! We were only allowed to pet the females; the males were too aggressive. At one point several males swam over to see what was going on. The trainers told us not to touch them! However, one of them sideswiped my leg, nearly knocking me over!

While we were at Roatan, we also rode the "magical flying beach chair" which was basically a ski lift (beach lift?) that took us from the dock down to the beach and back. It was neat to ride, but I think it was a bit too much time in the sun. We were both fairly pink afterwards.

One other noteworthy thing we did was drink coconut water straight from a coconut.

Chacchoben

Our final stop was in Mexico, where we took a bus to see the Chacchoben Mayan ruins. I was looking forward to this excursion, because we could climb to the top of a temple. The temple turned out to be more of a short platform, with two other temples on top of it, which we couldn't climb. So that was a little disappointing. Still, though, it was fun to see the ruins.

I was really pleased with a souvenir I purchased at the gift shop there. It really caught my attention when I walked by, in a way no other souvenirs did. The clerk mentioned that it's made of limestone.

That was our trip! It was a lot of fun. Thanks for reading!

A couple of times recently Wendy has accidentally referred to our bird feeder as the "squirrel feeder". Unfortunately, there's some truth to that phrase.

Last summer I posted this photo:

I said that I hoped the squirrel had just gotten lucky and that it was a one-time occurrence. Well, no such luck. The past couple of Saturdays we watched in dismay as a squirrel ran up the pole to the top of the bird feeder, and then deftly slid down until it reached the food holes at the bottom. I pounded on the window to scare it away, but a few minutes later it came back and the entire scene repeated.

They had made a mockery of my squirrel-proof bird feeder. It had indeed become... a squirrel feeder.

So something had to be done.

I recalled that when I first posted about the bird feeder, Otto mentioned he'd once attached a cone-shaped sheet of aluminum to his bird feeder to keep the squirrels away. That sounded like a promising idea. Then I remembered that at the gift shop of the Dillon Nature Center in Hutchinson, KS, which we visited last year, they were selling something along those lines. It was called a squirrel... something-or-other. I couldn't quite recall the name.

So I went to Amazon and after a bit of searching I found the right term: a squirrel baffle! It's basically a metal cone that easily attaches to a pole. I bought one and have now installed it:

Only time will tell how effective it is. So far we've seen squirrels on the ground underneath the feeder, but haven't seen any attempt to climb the pole. I am crossing my fingers!

I have two excerpts from two wildly different sources to share:

First, I just finished reading a collection of ghost stories written by M.R. James, aptly titled "Collected Ghost Stories".

Apparently James is considered to be a master of the ghost story genre. There's nothing ghostly about the opening paragraph of his short story called "A Neighbor's Landmark", though. In fact, it appealed greatly to my inner book lover:

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy.

How true!

Secondly, my Google News alert for bigfoot/sasquatch-related articles turned up an absolute gem last month. The article comes from the Atlas Obscura website, and is titled 17 Wonderful Reader Stories About Unique Holiday Heirlooms.

Here is the image and text of one of the stories:

Once, as my dad and I were driving from Columbus, Ohio, back to the D.C. area, we passed a big outdoor statue shop in the middle of rural Ohio. Finding a three-foot-or-so Sasquatch statue, we bought it and brought it home as a gag. The next Christmas, we put it in our family’s almost-life-sized glowing nativity scene, inside the manger and right behind Baby Jesus’s cradle, there to watch over Our Lord and Savior and protect him from the prying Romans just as Chewbacca protected Han Solo in a galaxy far, far away. There’s no particular reason we do this. Perhaps it is a mere testament to my family’s absurdist sense of humor surrounding issues of tradition and modernity. I like to think that while Balthasar, Melchoir, and Caspar traveled from Ethiopia and India and Persia to bring Jesus frankincense, myrrh, and gold, Sasquatch also saw the bright star and trekked from Cascadia, across continents and oceans, to bring Baby Jesus a gift of cedar-smoked salmon from the Pacific Northwest, and we merely do homage to that. In any case, though the statue itself does not look like a Christmas heirloom, we contextualize it into one every year.

I laughed out loud when I read that. I love it!

Wendy and I celebrated yesterday's winter solstice by going to Evanston, IL to watch the OU men's basketball team play at Northwestern. It's very rare for OU to play a game so close to us (about an hour from our house) so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see them play in person. I bought tickets from StubHub over a month in advance, and I've been looking forward to it ever since.

Work and Cookies

My winter solstice began by going to work in the morning. Wendy took the whole day off, while I took off the afternoon. When I came home at midday, I discovered Wendy had made chewy brown sugar cookies! They were delicious. We ate lunch and cookies and got ready to go. The game wasn't until 8pm, but we didn't want to deal with rush hour traffic, so we decided to go down early, visit a museum near the arena, and eat dinner at a restaurant.

Leaf Vacuuming

As we were getting ready to leave, we heard loud rumblings outside. I looked out the window and saw it was the leaf vacuuming vehicle! Recently our neighborhood got a new trash service which offers curbside leaf vacuuming. So this fall, instead of mulching the many leaves in our yard, I just raked them to the curb. Vacuuming was supposed to take place the week after Thanksgiving, but we got a bunch of snow that week, so it didn't happen. I'd started to wonder if the leaves would be there until spring. But I guess enough snow had melted for them to start vacuuming. Here's what it looked and sounded like:

Museum

With that excitement over, we drove down to Evanston to visit the Halim Time and Glass Museum. I discovered it via Google Maps; it opened last year and has all kinds of amazing clocks and some really neat stained glass art. 

Here's a small sample of the stained glass:

There were over 1,000 clocks on display, and they were incredible. Some were unbelievably intricate and ornate. Many of them were hundreds of years old. Here's a tiny sample:

The Game

After the museum we went out to eat, and then waited for the arena doors to open at 6:30. Once inside, we found our seats, which were 9 rows behind OU's bench. We got to see the team warming up, and OU players and head coach Lon Kruger signing autographs and getting pictures taken with kids. We also saw Toby Rowland, the radio voice of the Sooners, preparing for the game.

Here's the team during the national anthem:

And here's the view from our seats as the game began:

It turned out to be an evenly matched game. There were a few frustrating stretches, where OU just couldn't score a bucket, but for the most part it was close throughout the game. In fact, it was so close that it went to overtime! Thankfully, OU pulled away in the final minute of overtime to win the game, 76-69! OU had a deeper bench, which I think was the decisive factor. Northwestern's players were too tired at the end.

A few other thoughts:

• Watching the game up close made me realize how hard it is to play defense. It looked really intense and required a lot of focus and communication with teammates.
• There was a loud and somewhat obnoxious drunk guy in front of us. It was a good reminder of why I don't go to many live games.
• I have a new appreciation for how hard it must be to be a head coach. From managing the clock, to dealing with referees, to being in the center of a hostile crowd, all while coaching what are basically teenagers! I am amazed they remain as calm and level-headed as they do.

It was great to watch the Sooners win a difficult game in overtime on the road. We headed home after the game, getting back just before midnight. We both ate another cookie to "help settle the nerves" after such an exciting basketball game.

Thus ends the tale of our winter solstice.

Boomer Sooner!

The week before Thanksgiving I went to an astronomy lecture where the topic was "Space: A Year in Review". The speaker talked about what the space programs of the private sector, and of governments around the world, were up to in 2018. It was a great presentation. He mentioned NASA's Mars InSight lander, which at the time was 10 days away from its successful landing on Mars.

That lecture firmly planted Mars into the forefront of my mind. A few days later, as Wendy and I were packing for our trip to visit her family, I searched through our piles of books and pulled out all the ones on Mars I could find. I've been reading them ever since. Here's the list, in order:

The Empress of Mars by Kage Baker: It's the story of a Mars colony, and it focuses on the woman who owns the only bar on the planet. It was very entertaining and I enjoyed it.

In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling: After 70 pages I gave up. I did not like it. Too much tedious world building. So I moved on to the next book.

Life on Mars: a collection of young adult stories about Mars. The first short story was by Kage Baker, author of the first book on this list, and the short story referenced events from that book! So I just happened to read them in the right order. One thing I really liked about Life on Mars is that it included background notes from the author of each story. One story was inspired by a famous poem about an Arctic cremation: The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury: I think this is only the 2nd book by Ray Bradbury I've ever read. It was outstanding. More on it in a moment.

Mars Underground by William Hartmann: I actually checked this one out of the library system. I'd heard about it years ago and I decided now was the time to read it. The author is a famous planetary scientist who convinced the scientific community that Earth had been hit by a large body in the past, which resulted in the moon's formation. He also investigated UFO reports. I enjoyed his Mars book, which is based on hard science, and is about a scientist on a Mars colony who unearths a strange artifact. My only complaint is that the plot progressed at a glacial pace. The strange artifact was discovered about 80% of the way through the book.

The main reason I wrote this post is to share what I discovered while reading The Martian Chronicles. At one point some of the first humans to visit Mars are exploring the ruins of an ancient Martian city. One of them is so moved he quotes this poem by Lord Byron:

So we'll go no more a-roving

    So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

    And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

    And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

    And love itself must rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

    And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a-roving

    By the light of the moon

When I read those words it felt like my brain warped in confusion. I knew those words! But they didn't belong in a book. Where did they belong? I was confused for a few seconds, until I heard a voice in my head reciting those words: Leonard Cohen! Those words belong in a Leonard Cohen song! At least, that's what my brain initially thought. It turns out the Leonard Cohen song is really based on a Lord Byron poem.