Bad Luck?

To some it seems like I may have bad luck. Bad, good, exciting, dull, my life doesn't really seem that dramatic as it happens, yet I find that I have more stories to tell then time to tell them. So much has happened...yet I fail to write. Here's the latest craziness.
Last weekend Meg and I were en route to hike at Robert Norbit State Fish and Wildlife Area, cruising along Highway 106 in Pike County, Illinois when all of a sudden a turkey took off from the left hand shoulder and flew right into the side of my car, ripping off the side mirror and denting the car and front quarter panel. We went back to the scene, collected my mirror and looked for the turkey. It was still alive under some brush in the ditch, but was badly hurt. I looked for a stick because I knew what needed to be done. While I struggled to move the bird into a position where I could get a good whack at it, it flailed and fluttered and then it stopped. Its eyes closed and lay motionless, the poor bird's life ended by a flying bird of another kind...a 2 ton hunk of metal moving at 60 miles an hour. I wish I knew what to do with the turkey, but I had no choice but to leave it there, wanting to be mad at it, but yet feeling sorry for it and my car as well.
The bird ended up doing quite a bit of damage, $1500 damage to be exact. However, I had a previous fender-bender that I was thinking of fixing and the auto body shop said it would straighten it out no extra charge. The whole mess will only end of costing me $100 so that's the bright side I guess. I've never owned a car worth fixing before, and I suppose that's what insurance is for.

Ozark Winter Thunderstorm

Deep unplowed snow pellets. Bursts of thunder and lightning. Downpours of rain on snow. Ice crusted wipers. Yesterday was an exhilarating experience. I bought a new car, a 2005 AWD Subaru Outback Sport, and have been conducting an involuntary evaluation of the car's capabilities in adverse weather. It doesn't snow often this far south in Missouri but this was the second snowstorm in 11 days and I ended up driving through both.
The first time my car handled exceptionally well on the slick, curvy, hilly Ozark backroads. Progress was thwarted 10 minutes from home, the final hill after crossing the Eleven Point river a tanker truck had slid sideways and across both lanes. The Oregon County sheriff informed me that "gonna be 2-3 hawers 'fore we gets this mess cleaned up, got a rig comin' from damn near Cabool." We turned around, crossed the bridge and went to the next most viable road across the river. That cost us over an hour when we were so close to home!
Yesterday the roads were more intense. Another truck had troubles heading up a hill and I was asked to wait when the plow I was following stopped to help. Everything continued to be okay until it wasn't and then it's usually too late. Approaching the current river I saw a large sky to ground lightning bolt followed almost immediately by a thunderous ka-boom and then it started to downpour rain. Once I crossed the river a plow went by going the other way and my lane became increasingly covered by a thick layer of small ice crustlets. I straddled the center stripe, keeping two tires on cleared pavement and the other two plowing through the globulous snow. Highway 106 from Ellington to Eminence was not the best choice of roads considering the conditions. It is very hilly, curvy, with deep ditches, and no shoulders. My lane got so deep I had to move all tires to the plowed surface, which meant I had the whole car proceeding the wrong direction on the left side of the road. Pulling over anywhere was risky, I had to keep the inertia going to avoid getting stuck. Luckily, no one else was dumb enough to be out driving in the middle of nowhere in a snow/ice/rain storm and I managed my way to a friend's house where I waited an hour for the plow to go by the opposite direction and then gave it another shot. The roads were still ice covered but my car seemed to handle that well, it was the deep accumulations that sent my car sliding. It continued to rain and freeze, and lightning and thunder most of the night. I can't remember ever experiencing a winter thunderstorm like that before.

New Job

Down with Assistant positions! No longer am I the Assistant Natural History Biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation. I accepted a new job as a Regional Ecologist for the Illinois Natural Area Inventory (INAI) Update. In 1976 Illinois embarked on a task to identify, catalog, and map the remaining natural features present within the state. Since so much of the state's natural communities were heavily destroyed, they recognized the need to undergo this momentous task and as the first state to do this, they set a precedent and the framework for other states to follow. Now over 30 years later, they are updating the INAI by scanning the entire state looking for new natural areas. Some biologists expect that we will find even more than the original inventory although the remaining sites will probably be much smaller. The ecologists that were responsible for the original INAI are nothing less than superstars, and we have huge shoes to fill, a fact that has been emphasized by almost everyone involved in the project. They have hired 5 ecologists and I have region 5, the southernmost 15 counties in Illinois; Perry, Franklin, Hamilton, White, Jackson, Williamson, Saline, Gallatin, Union, Johnson, Pope, Hardin, Alexander, Pulaski, and Massac. I intend to relocate to the Carbondale area within the month. This may be the most diverse region in Illinois and definitely the region with the greatest potential for new natural areas. This is a full time salaried position with benefits that will last for 2 years. I will be in training for the next several weeks and then the work will begin, which will involve scouring topo maps, aerial photographs, and reconnaissance in low-flying aircraft, eventually culminating in a site survey of the biota. We will be supplied with digital cameras so wait for photos of the exciting work!

Christmas Day Crisis

I haven't attended a Catholic mass in some time. But my girlfriend Meg is a tremendous musician and has been playing gigs over the holidays as a classical percussionist. She lives in St. Louis where Catholic churches are on nearly every street corner. We both were raised in the Catholic faith, but being scientists and freethinkers, we haven't exactly ascribed to the ways of religion. Anyway, I found myself at mass, supporting her musical passion, and couldn't help but think of something I heard my favorite folk singer say the last time I saw him in concert. He said, "I have been thoroughly churched out as a child." But that is really here nor there.
We were looking forward to cuddling up with a movie before we had to attend the usual family Christmas dinner. I went to use the bathroom before laying down to relax when disaster struck. The toilet reservoir wasn't filling up with water after flushing so I removed the lid to manually depress the flapper. Instead of placing the lid on the floor, I rested it on the edge of the toilet reservoir and stuck my hand in to fix the flapper. That is when the porcelain lid fell behind the toilet and shattered into pieces. But that wasn't the disaster. The water input line to the toilet was poorly constructed and consisted of 3 inches of PVC pipe sticking out of the wall. The lid hit this pipe and broke it completely off. Immediately water began pouring out of the wall. Imagine a garden hose on full blast. This was the amount of water spilling out onto the bathroom floor. I reached behind the toilet to turn off the shutoff valve, but the valve was in between the toilet and the broken pipe and not in between the broken pipe and the wall. I called out for Meg and she ran into the basement to find and turn off the main water valve to the house. While she was doing this, a major amount of water was shooting out of the wall and running into the hallway, flowing down the basement stairs and into a floor vent nearby. While she acted fairly quickly, the 5-8 minutes to took to locate the main water pipe was long enough to release a substantial amount of water. I had tried to put some towels over the pipe and even grabbed a pot from the kitchen in a vain attempt to catch the water and dump it into the bathtub. The only pot that would fit behind the toilet was so small that it hardly mattered. We went into the basement and water was dripping from the ceiling and even through the light fixtures. Once the water was turned off, the crisis was over, but only after was several minutes of sheer panic. To wrap up the story, her dad came over and helped me locate the pipe to the toilet in the basement rafters. Being Christmas Day, we couldn't find any stores open so we cut the PVC pipe and stuffed it with a random lawnmower axle bolt and copious amounts of epoxy. This temporary fix held and we were able to restore water flow to the rest of the house and began mopping up the water in the basement. This fiasco took the rest of the afternoon. I went on to the party and had the best possible time I could have with lots relatives I wasn't related to. The bottle of Jack Daniels her brother-in-law received for Christmas helped me put the past behind me. Luckily, Meg's roommate and owner of the fairly old house was very understanding and mentioned she planned to remodel that bathroom for some time. Now that time has come.

Inspiration for poetry from unusual places

Peeing on the Fly

Although it may seem like
I’m talking about peeing on the move
I’m really speaking of a topic
Which you may not approve

There was a house fly in my bathroom
I swatted my towel at it in vain
I somehow managed to stun it
And it dropped to the floor

So I did what any sensible person would do
I picked it up, dropped it in the toilet, flushed, and closed the lid

Never did it occur to me, that the fly might not get flushed down
Yet when I returned to expel the warm nitrogenous waste that was causing considerable abdominal pressure,
I was surprised to see that darned fly,
Swimming helplessly in what one would presume is relatively clean, treated water

So I did what any sensible person would do
I peed on it like an interrogation technique,
simulated drowning on Musca domestica

But the fly, ever determined,
managed to fight its way to the edge of the treated-water/piss pool
Where it regained composure before I could redirect the firehose in its direction
Imagine my horrified expression,
when the piss-soaked fly,
flew out of the toilet,
and out of sight.

My latest song - Blessed Is

This is my latest poem, which I wrote on the guitar. I didn't include the chords, but the whole song is G, C, D, and Am.

Blessed is the man who goes without food without clothes
Blessed is the man no longer young not yet old
I don’t have the strength to walk that long and lonely road
Sometimes the world makes me want to crawl in a hole

Well a love once lost can still be found
I’m gonna sniff it out like a big ol’ red tick hound
Well I don’t mind dying buried in the ground
Under the earth, soft and still, without sound

And it chills me to the core
And it kills me to explore
And it wills me to be more

Blessed is a world without war without pain
Blessed is a world where every loss is a gain
All is not gone, fields planted with seeds of grain
Wonder will grow from sunlight from the rain

But we can all walk the vision we see the best
Cast out from our minds we can throw the rest
Build a place for peace not just speak in jest
Take the ones we love hold them tightly to our chest

And the gift is not boughten it’s homemade
It’s the kind of thing that does not fade
Everything I have everything I gave

I need a new car

I killed my first deer tonight, but it did not involve a firearm and it was not intentional. Driving through Ozark country on curvy, two-lane backroads is a hazardous endeavor. I had narrowly missed a deer the last time I made the same drive and this time I just missed the first deer but nailed the second one with my driver's side headlight. The deer was sent flying and flailing in the ditch. It was pouring rain and there are no shoulders on Ozark highways so I went to the next turnoff to access the damage. Door would barely open, headlight demolished, hood crinkled, steam rising from engine. Combine that with the fact that the speedometer didn't work, the tires were bald, and there was a severe oil leak, looks like it's totaled. I'm glad I only paid $200 for the car!