TheSwirl.org

I just finished reading an excellent book by Edward Kanze- Over the Mountain and Home Again: Journeys of an Adirondack Naturalist. It is a collection of his essays and they are extemely well written. In one of the articles he cites interesting research on the thermodynamics of changing color coats in winter animals. The fact that snowshoe rabbits, ermines, long tail weasels, ptarmigans change from brown to white may not be so much due to camouflage, but that white hair/feathers don’t contain the pigment melanin. Removing melamin creates empty space within the hair or barbule - thus creating insulating air space.

Some years ago Kathryn & I had been talking with my Mom about the upcoming winter and she pulled out one of those folklore statements about squirrels and nuts or the number of stripes on the caterpillars and it’s relationship to the upcoming winter season. Kathryn & I decided we needed to start our own folklore statement and came up with “The lighter the deer, the harder the year” or “The lighter the doe, the deeper the snow” - I forget which rendition we were promoting at the time. While white tail deer don’t change coat color they do transition to a coarse grey winter coat, with less pigmentation than their summer coats. Our supposed urban myth statement had a basis in fact! So spread our myth along and BTW read Kanze’s book. It is excellent.

I took my $50k-all-metallic hips in for their annual checkup which consisted of x-rays and flexion tests. All the x-rays came back fine; no movement and no separation. We checked out the ‘ratcheting’ feeling I occasionally experience in my right hip and concluded it might be scar tissue or other soft tissue – uncomfortable but not “the edge of a dislocation” as I feared. I told of my current activities of swimming, riding the exercise bike, snow shoeing, hiking and occasional volleyball (with minimal jumping) and got approval for all. Good for another 24 months!

Today Eric got invited over to his buddy Trevor’s for an afternoon of snow sledding and playing. A great opportunity for him to burn off some of his cabin fever from being house bound for two days due to a cold and severely cold weather. Kathryn and I took advantage of the free time and took a snow shoe trip around our property. We tramped down a trail for Kathryn to use for cross country sking later in the week. Only a short ways into our hike we found a perfect snow print of what we assume was a small hawk. We didn’t see any mouse trails or what he/she might have been after, but the print showed every wing and tail feather.

Kathryn’s hand is shown alongside for purposes of scale.

Ed/Kelly/Izzabella and Billie Jo/Billy/Dakota came to our house on Sunday to celebrate a belated birthday party. Izzabella and Dakato enjoyed playing with Eric’s toys. After lunch we all went outside for a little sledding. In the pictures below Kathryn gets all the kids to take turns hammering.

I have been taking advantage of two great sources of free software:

The OpenCD Project and Software for Starving Students.  There is overlap in the tools offered, but you can’t beat the price and the functionality is remarkable.  In both cases it helps to be on a broadband connection.  I downloaded the CD image (ISO), burned a CD using the free IMGBURN program and installed from the CD.  Check them out!