man, i'm good

i baked a key-lime pie this afternoon, and i just ate a piece (after waiting the requisite 3-hour chill time). it's awesome. i should quit my day job and become a baker.
on the topic of good baking, i got a package from my biggest sister, with chocolate chip cookies. katy's good - they taste exactly like mom's! i'd say she fulfills the prerequisites for motherhood.

living the high life

well how-de-do. i am so covered in dog hair that my (black) pants look blonde.
i'm dogsitting for my boss's boss's boss ... which makes her sound way more high and mighty than she is. really, she's more of an equal with my boss, but somebody has to have the administrative title. anyway, she lives in Highland Park, very close to the Garden, in a cute little house with 2 dogs that I think are much too large for the house and yard. Song and Hadley are their names, and Hadley is a big baby (1 year 0ld) with obscene amounts of energy and a tendency to jump on you and chew you, and chew up any paper or food he comes across. really, he's kind of hellish. Song, on the other hand, is an old, laid back lady who is just ecstatic any time you tell her she's a good dog and is content to sit still and enjoy life. the house is adorable, with lots of dark-stained wood and floral art and botanical books. kind of the house i'd like to have in the future. this is my third day here. it's nice and quiet (except that the Metra tracks are about 100 meters behind her house - probably why it's affordable for someone working in the field of plant conservation - but the metra only passes once an hour) and there's nowhere i know to go up here, so i have time to read, watch tv, and relax.

i spent the past 2 days monitoring a plant called Cirsium hillii, Hill's Thistle, in a much more intense manner than I usually monitor a plant. Level 1 monitoring is what we usually do, where we count the plants, record the invasive plants and other threats to the population, and record the population's location and associated species. Level 2 monitoring, which is what I did yesterday and today, involves giving permanent metal tags to individual plants and then finding them again year after year so that we can measure their leaves and monitor their health to see if they die or succeed. This involves copious amounts of paperwork, so that we have exact coordinates along x and y axes (set up using rebar stakes as endpoints, so we can have the same axes every year) to use to relocate the tags and plants. Cirsium hillii does not flower very often, so the plants we were looking at were mostly rosettes, all less than 30 cm across, flat on the ground, many buried in other vegetation, so i spent two days on my hands and knees, getting poked by sharp thistle leaves in an effort to measure them. the ungrateful wretches.

so anyway, now my still-bum knee is very achy. actually, all of me is achy. two days of kneeling can do that. i tried to fix it last night by eating avocados and pineapple (not simultaneously - in sequence) and drinking half a bottle of chilled riesling. it didn't work. i'd better eat the other half of pineapple and drink the other half bottle of wine, to see if i have better results.

sunday: a day of no rest for the wicked

i left my house at 7:30 this morning, picked up an insane artist lady, and drove an hour north along the lake to the Illinois Beach State Park, where we spent the next 6 hours wandering around in a marshy, mosquito-infested field looking for some of the most beautiful pink flowers i have ever seen.Calopogon tuberosus, the grass-pink orchid. (taken by me, today)
Tough to spot when it's not in flower - its single leaf looks a hell of a lot like a blade of grass.
i've said it a thousand times already ... but again, i love my job.
we also saw many other ridiculously beautiful species of plants, and heard a couple dozen different species of birds sing, and i even saw a rotting beaver carcass simply crawling with maggots and bedecked with several beautiful butterflies.

then i drove home, showered (much needed! it was hot out!) and immediately left again to go to Tommy Nevin's irish pub, where i had heard there are irish seisuns every sunday. I was not disappointed! There were about 10 people playing when i got there. i walked in and sat down at the (not crowded - Sunday at 4 pm, after all) bar to get a pint. I sat there for about 5 minutes waiting, while the bartender helped people at the other end of the bar and generally ignored me. i was sitting next to an adorable old man drinking scotch on the rocks, and he started chatting to me, saying, i hope you weren't thirsty. finally, the bartender came over and i ordered my beer. when he brought it back, the old man insisted on paying for me, saying that i had to wait too long, so he'd pay for me.
then the bartender agreed with him, and bought my drink.
not too bad a way to start out the afternoon.
then the guy heading the seisun saw me at the bar with my bodhran and waved me over to the circle.
the music was great, and the people were great. many geriatrics, and a few 40-somethings. we played for an hour or so, and then this young (not even legal to drink) kid walks in with a bodhran. This is James, who has been playing with them for 3 years. He's a decent drummer, and has an angelic singing voice. he's also a good conversationalist, and a rock climber. we chat, and trade off on who gets to drum.
his drum is locally made, about 4 inches deep and with depth like a tympani. he also has a totally different style of drumming, so i personally think we could both play simultaneously without overpowering the other musicians. we'll see.
so then, during a break in the music, the guy running the seisun (who usually plays an accordion) stands up and announces to the room that it's tradition that when a guest or someone new joins them, he gets to play the tin whistle and the newbie has to accompany him. he then dives right into a fast (fast!)-paced reel, and plays for 5 minutes straight. he's a good whistle player! and i kept right up with him. we got a *big* round of applause afterward, and man, did it feel good.
this guy also played the "Star Wars" theme in traditional Irish style on the accordion (as a favor to the bartender) - it was remarkably good. and hilarious.

and now, after being home long enough to make dinner and upload my pictures from the day, i'm off to downtown to check out the post-day-pride-parade scene. pete wants to go, and is too afraid to go by himself - i guess he really doesn't want a boyfriend.

and all this while i'm in the middle of a really good book about cowboys, and all i want to do is read it - i keep grabbing time for a few pages here and there. it's called All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy. it's a good read.

so, more pretty pictures taken by yours truly will follow at a later time. too much to do, not enough time to do it.
i guess Nevins has sessions not only on Sundays, but Wednesdays as well! cool! i'm pretty psyched. i'll sleep well tonight - 5 hours bent over in the hot sun, followed by two hours drumming ...

saturday night at home?

so i went to the art fair. it was cool - there were a lot of pretty things there, although i felt guilty looking at all these artists' work with them sitting right there and then not buying anything. but then, my favorite piece had a price tag of $2000. it would be nice to have the kind of money that i could go to an art fair and actually buy the things i wanted.
then again i never want to be the kind of person who has an art collection.

anyway, now i'm at home watching Zoolander and reading a book about cowboys. it's 8 pm and i'm thinking about bed - i haven't been getting in bed early enough or sleeping well lately.

so pete has this theory, which apparently is true for him - if he is alone long enough, he'll get so lonely that he'll crack and make friends out of desperation.
i've realized that i'm not like that. if i'm alone long enough, i'll stop thinking i need to hang out with people. i've got so many books to read! and so many things i intended to do! so many craft projects, so much sleeping, so many cats to pet ...
maybe pete's other theory is right - that i'm going to end up as a crazy cat lady.

i guess that would be okay. as long as i had a garden too.

savanna restoration

I spent my Saturday morning at a place called Rollins Savanna, learning about how they restored the site from cornfields and cattle pasture to prairie and savanna - it's really a work in progress. I met the man of my dreams - the guy in charge of the restoration, who really understands about how ecosystems work and also knows an awful lot about the individual species that go into it. He's very honest about the mistakes they made at Rollins, and it's obvious that he works hard and is devoted to the site. He's also very deferential - by the end of the session, he was directing people's questions my way - i guess i can be sort of a loud mouth about ecology.

Now i'm off to the evanston art fair. I hope it doesn't rain on me!

Man vs. Wild!

My roommate just introduced me to a new tv show - Man vs Wild, wherein a 30-something former British Special Air Service guy gets dropped off in the middle of a different wilderness every week, with nothing but a knife and flint and steel, and the clothes on his back.
And a cameraman! they don't talk about the cameraman, or even acknowledge his existence, but he must be just as hardcore as 'Bear'!
That's right, Bear. Bear Grylls. (His real name is Edward or something).
Check him out: http://www.beargrylls.com/
and the page for his show: http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/manvswild/bio/bio.html
The episode i watched was Bear in Iceland. He snared a ptarmigan with a shoelace, tore its skin off, and roasted it over a fire. He slept in a moss shelter and found water in a volcanic cave.
All in all, it was pretty cool. And ridiculous.

believe it or not ...

oh yeah, and something that i just learned about last week ... who knew they existed?
this is a prairie crawfish. that's right - it lives in the middle of a prairie. i didn't see one until the day after it rained a lot, when the grass was still wet, and it's a mesic prairie, meaning it's not terribly dry. but still ... in my world, crawfish lived in streams.
i think he's kind of cute. pretty darn cool, at the very least.