Numbness, lawnmowing

Through an accumulation of events, I've shied away from putting too much personal content out on teh internets, but there are certain points in one's life where things don't all happen in neat, tidy packages, and so here I am. From the sounds of things, Dad's surgery yesterday went as smoothly as it could, so now he's on the long, slow road towards healing for the time being (still without fully knowing about certain parts of this whole "cancer" puzzle, but hey, much of our lives is about the unknown, right?). It still weirds me out a bit, making the private, inner workings of someone else's body the focus of so much attention, but it's all part of the experience of life, I suppose, particularly as we get older and more fully realize our intimate dependence on others. Hardest when we return to a stage where we can no longer wipe our own asses. He shared a poem/prayer with friends and family that he said is giving him comfort through this process, which I'll put at the end of this post.

At certain points, our minds respond to difficult situations with emotional numbness. I have a partial sensation of speaking and thinking through a sort of thick styrofoam, tinged by the sadness of loved ones all being very far away. I had one of those moments yesterday where I was a bit shocked by the notion and remembrance that life has continued to advance without me in Phoenix, just as over the years I've come to watch the city of Seattle move on.

But in the meantime, things continue to move and grow here, as well. The thunderstorms and heavy rains which drenched me last Thursday on an aborted bike ride out to Lake Bryan meant that the boatyard grass has grown again. Yesterday I was ever so grateful to be bicycling out to the lake, if only because it would be a welcome distraction through the wait while Dad was in surgery. Practice consisted of a continuation of equipment maintenance, so while others worked on cleaning out the boats and painting the oars, I fired up the lawnmower and shoved it around the boatyard. The mower was such a beast that it made me miss Mr. Pushy, although I don't know if Mr. Pushy could have handled the grass out there. At least it wasn't as crazy as two summers ago, when we had to tackle it with weed whackers because it had gotten so overgrown. It's always amusing to go out to the lake and work hard, because for most of the other people in this region the lake represents a destination for idle recreation. Rowers, however, are all people who relish the hard work itself on some level.



PSALM OF A WAKE FOR A CHANGING BODY, by Edward Hays

Wakes are for the dead;
even the term leaves me cold.
I usually prefer to deny my death,
which comes by inches,
but comes relentlessly all the same.

Another signal from my body,
another sign of age,
has visited me, with its foreboding forecast
that l’m growing older.

I look with envy at the young
and am often tempted to try
a wizard’s wonder herb
to restore my aging body
to its former age of agility
that was free of aches and pains.

Today I must mourn,
aware that those who hold enough wakes
die with dignity
and even dance with death
in a Chronos childhood play.

To wake with great love each small death and loss
and then move on to what life offers next:
it is thus that i can honestly rejoice
at another’s youthful beauty.

I sense that by observing enough wakes
I'll awaken, to my surprise,
to a new, mature magnetic beauty
that radiates from those
whom time has tanned into a handsome hybrid
of the eternal youth.

Wasp season

This has been a great year for wasps in my area, to judge by all of the cute little wasp nests I've been seeing everywhere. One of the undergraduates recently posted a question about how to deal with a wasp nest near her house, which is a topic that seems to come up frequently, and I'm coming to agree with my wasp-studying colleagues that wasps are greatly misunderstood, but super-cool critters. So it's time to step up and talk about wasps for a bit.

The first thing to realize is that wasps do a lot of important jobs in the natural world. Many, many species are predatory, killing and laying eggs in all kinds of other insects - according to Wikipedia, just about every other kind of pest insect is preyed upon by at least one wasp species. At one extreme, there are wasps like tarantula hawks, who, as the name implies, paralyze tarantulas with their stings and lay their eggs in them (see here for one of the many overly dramatized YouTube videos of a tarantula hawk battling a tarantula). Interestingly, the size of tarantula hawks is correlated with the size of the tarantulas where they are found.

On the other end of the spectrum, a species of fairy wasp is the smallest known insect. For a sense of scale, here's an article with a photo of a fairy wasp next to an amoeba. Incredible.

Many species also work as pollinators, which means that as you're running around shouting, "Save the Bees!" you should probably be adding, "and the wasps!"

At the same time, much like bees, wasps are quite good at defending themselves with venomous stingers. I have a vivid memory from a childhood road trip, when our family stopped at a Washington State rest stop where some yellow jackets had discovered that the trash can and surrounding areas were an excellent place to forage (protip: manage all food waste and water with care if you want to prevent unwanted insects). I'd gotten a cup of sugar water (juice) from the coffee stand, and the yellow jackets could clearly smell it, so they came over and started landing on my hand, wrist, and the edge of the cup. I had been stung multiple times over the preceding year, mostly by bees, so I'd learned to move slowly and carefully, and all was well and good until one of the wasps decided she wanted to taste my wrist and gave me a light nip. I started, and all the wasps flew up, and then I got the heck out of there, but without a single sting. Unlike bees, wasps don't lose their stinger when they sting, so they're capable of stinging multiple times. However, stinging is still a costly activity, so most animals generally have to be provoked before they'll start issuing painful reminders that they're best left alone.

Now, what if a wasp has set up camp in an undesirable location - say, right above the crib of a wee bouncing babe. Why is the default reaction one of KILL IT WITH FIRE!! ? Just remember what happened when a Seattle-area man tried this method, and start from the standpoint of a calm, measured response. Something I'd consider only a tiny step below KILL IT WITH FIRE is the use of insecticides. Fast-acting insecticides are typically neurotoxins, which is why labels may warn you to remove small children and pets before use (do I need to add, ALWAYS READ AND FOLLOW LABEL INSTRUCTIONS!!). But think about it for just a minute, preferably before you incapacitate all of your own neurons while accidentally huffing the stuff: if it is a fast-acting neurotoxin, do you really want to be spraying it about all willy-nilly? Even if it's targeting a type of neuroreceptor that occurs at a very low density in humans, it will still be targeting a whole host of other, innocent bystander animals, too. So, get in the habit of walking swiftly past that section of the hardware store, and dispose of existing insecticides as the hazardous waste that they are. If you have reached a point of last resort, research all of your options very carefully and choose something that is as target-specific as possible, and that will break down quickly.

Now what? Use more knowledge about wasps to figure out a better course of action. The WikiHow page on getting rid of wasps nests presents some good alternatives, actually. I personally like to freeze the most interesting insects I find, because once they are frozen and dead I'll have a chance to inspect them up close, and it's a great way to come to appreciate the many incredible forms of life that can be found all around us.

Also, chances are very good that, somewhere within your extended family or network of friends, there's someone who would be thrilled and enthralled to learn about the critter.

Further Reading
National Geographic info on wasps
Bees versus wasps, from the A&M Extension Services
Details on different kinds of wasps, from the A&M Extension Services