Message from Anamal Rescue

This sign was taped to the cluster mailboxes at the corner of Linseed Road and Old Stage Road in our neighborhood. Just so you know, I did not take it down. It fell down.
In case you have trouble reading that it says:
Anamal Rescue would like you to know that turtles are dieing from cars hitting them plese be carful on linseed there may be turtles crossing. Thank you Hannah + Millie.

New Desk!

I got a new-to-me desk today. It was $50 and although the seller on craigslist said it was oak it's really oak veneer. It's pretty decent though and gives me more work space to spread out. As you can see, I've already made it all "cozy" with my stuff. It's an improvement on the old desk which had no drawers.

I spent more time than alotted cleaning out the metal filing cabinet and redistributed stuff and fiddling around with the position of the desk but in the end it was worth it.

Many thanks to Trevor for going with me to pick it up and helping me with setting it up and moving stuff around and redistributing plants! 

A Tree Grows in...

Trevor's made a couple of rock "trees" with the rocks he got from VT.  This one is my favorite. 

Dirty Job Party III

Trevor's been taking large flat rocks from.... VT.... a nice place where there's a stream.... and waterfall.... and making a nice looking wall of sorts! We've got Johnny Jump Ups and Myrtle growing amongst the rocks. If you have nice flat rocks you're not using, let us know. 

Dirty Job Part II

[I "upgraded" to the new Blogger editor and I'm not a fan...]

More dirt....

See those fork lifts? That's why I want a  fence. 'Nuf said.

A Dirty Job

Trevor's been trolling Craigslist and Freecycle for dirt and railroad ties for a few weeks now. He's building a retaining wall, to retain the dirt that he's acquiring, and then he'll put up a fence to enclose the backyard. At which point, I'll have a blog post titled "Fence me in", I can't wait!  He thought it would get all done this Fall and was disappointed yesterday when I asked him if we could put away the grill and the table and chairs... thinking that we'd have one more meal out there in a fenced-in backyard.

Chalkboard Message

Trevor & I went to VT for a few days (2 weeks ago...) and we come home to this nice message from our housemate, Joanne.

Ig Nobel Awards

In honor of the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine being announced today, I'd like to introduce you to a different type of Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Award. The 2009 Ig Nobel Awards were recently presented in Cambridge, MA at Harvard University's Sanders Theater. My personal favorite is the recipient of the PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, "for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander."
REFERENCE: U.S. patent # 7255627, granted August 14, 2007 for a “Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks.” That's right! It's patented!

Since the Nobel Prize in medicine was announced today I thought I should include the Ig Nobel award in medicine. MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years. (Ha! Moms everywhere were wrong about that!)
REFERENCE: "Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?", Donald L. Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism, vol. 41, no. 5, 1998, pp. 949-50.

I also really like this one:
LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means "Driving License".
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: [Karolina Lewestam, a Polish citizen and holder of a Polish driver's license, speaking on behalf of all her fellow Polish licensed drivers, expressed her good wishes to the Irish police service.]

Highlights from 2007:

File this one under "no way".

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
REFERENCES:
"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension," E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan, Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp. 579-80.
"Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling," E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp. 074302/1-4.
"Elements of Draping," E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 2004, pp. 1806-10.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca's sister Mariela.

I can tell you how my sheets get wrinkled...