Reasons I was late to work
And other miscellaneous words that I have strung together into sentences or sentence like structures.
Down with Bypasses
I rode my e-bike to work today. I need to try to do that more. I need to do it even if things go awry. I also need to plan an extra 20 minutes into the ride because the thing about being on a bike is you are outside your bubble. Stuff happens that you can’t ignore. You need time to enjoy it all. You are so much more IN the world, not just getting from point A to point B. Getting from point A to point B without having to deal with point C, or D, or E is why people want bypasses and why Arthur Dent’s house gets knocked down and the Vogons destroy the earth1.
I need to budget an extra 20 minutes to stop and look at a flower or admire a newborn calf in a pasture or root for an escaped pig that is getting into the good stuff out in the middle of a field.
You always see things when you’re on a bike that you miss when you’re in a car. Maybe you get serenaded by someone practicing their bagpipes while you struggle up a hill, maybe you see teenagers making out on the grass at 6 am who clearly have been up all night and do not take the importance of getting consistent sleep seriously, or maybe they do. They can sleep past 7 a.m.
There are a lot of reasons I was late to work. The first was leisurly drinking my coffee and forgetting that time existed. The second was the seven times I changed my clothes and the inordinate amount of time I looked for my purple shirt that has clearly been swallowed by a pop-up worm hole in the washing machine.
Then I actually got on my bike and headed out, and after 3/4 of a mile realized I had forgotten both my keys to the office and the keys to take the battery off my bike to charge it. So I rode back to the house and almost talked myself into just driving in. But I biked anyway.
Point C, or D, or E
About 3 miles into my 13 mile commute I saw a woodchuck run across the road carrying a baby woodchuck and I think I scared it and it dropped the baby in the road.
I stopped. What else was I going to do?
I generally have a “let nature take it’s course” philosophy, after a childhood of “helping” things find the afterlife by “helping” them. I generally think all these creatures know what they’re doing and I don’t. But when I feel like I have violated the prime directive somehow by scaring a mom into dropping her baby in the middle of the road I feel like I need to do something to erase my misdeed.
Then when I stopped and this little buddy started walking toward me like I was a trustworthy organism… I really felt like I was messing up lives.
I will generally not handle mammal or bird wildlife without gloves or something. I forgot I had gloves in my bag, so I just scooted it gently to the side of the road with my foot in the direction it’s mom went and then continued my ride to work.
It wasn’t there when I rode back by 8ish hours later. So maybe things worked out. I did what I could do.
Woodchucks and groundhogs are the same thing. I have made flashcards for a friend who struggles with mammal differentiation. She recently tried to convince someone that groundhogs and woodchucks are the same but intervention by wikipedia was required to de-escalate the situation.
Forest fires are part of a naturally-occurring cycle
Sometimes I think burnout is part of my natural cycle. I do whatever I’m interested in with a passion that consumes all of my energy. And when there is nothing left and I move on to a new thing. And usually when the fire burns out and some time has passed I come back to the passion, sometimes with a new perspective.
I can’t imagine a world where I’m done with going out and observing nature and trying to understand it better but man, I overdid it the last couple of weekends.
I took so many photos for the City Nature Challenge that I still haven’t uploaded half of them and the event is over. I found another water beetle covered in fungus and took it in to the office on Saturday to try to get some pictures with a microscope. I was in the car for 2 hours on Sunday so I could attend a mycology hike (which was awesome) and hand off the beetles for possible dna sequencing of the fungus. And my laundry is in heaps and the clutter I leave in my wake would horrify most of the people I know.
The last few days I’ve just added one or two things to iNaturalist because I don’t want to burn out.
Tomorrow is my birthday and the only think I could think to do to celebrate was go for a hike at one of my favorite places nearby, which will definitely involve taking pictures and sorting pictures and uploading pictures. But maybe there will be some board games and some nice staring into space. Staring into space sounds so nice. Maybe I could lay in a hammok and read a book.
Sometimes I’m so intense about my interests that I need a break from myself.
Broody Chicken Pics
Unrelated to anything else. One of my chickens has gotten broody and my one elderdy chicken lays fragile eggs. I don’t really feel like I can blame the broody chicken but she was covered in egg yolk the other day and I fully know she has been eating those fragile eggs (more than one or two times).
In case you don’t know what broody means: For the most part, hens lay the eggs and go on their merry way. Sometimes their hormones get activated and they suddenly decide they want to sit on the eggs to hatch them. They stay in the nest box all day and try to collect the eggs of any chickens they can find under them. Also their pupils get big like they’re tripping and if you take them out of the box they lay on the floor like they can’t walk for a bit and then run around like maniacs…. with the big pupils.
If you don’t know what I’m going on about here, consider adding the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to your reading list. I kind of assume everyone has read it but I have had an abnormal amount of exposure to the whole series.
I love these Jody. And happy birthday today!!!
I do so enjoy your ruminations!