Northern Neck II (12/27/2015)

I want to end 2015 with a post that is somewhat of a throwback to the original intent of this blog.  My initial idea behind this blog was to share some of the pictures, sites, and experiences that I have during my travels as instructor in the state of Virginia.  I get to a few far flung places and if I can help it, I do try to get off the darn interstate highways where everyone tries to drive in the left lane whether they belong there or not.

I realize that I have gotten off on tangents so now and then, on soap boxes and talked about global warming, training, course development, environmental issues, ecology, stormwater, and even sailing.  I should pare down my labels (or subject list), but I guess that's must be my way of showing off.  I have made an effort of hiding all the key words (labels) that I've only used once.

Oh well, back the the subject of today's blog: The Northern Neck!  (Yes, I wrote about it before in this blog post).  The Northern Neck is the northern most peninsula that jots out of the mainland of Virginia.  Going from south to north we have: "the Peninsula, where we live; the Middle Peninsula; and the Northern Neck.  The Northern Neck has the Potomac River to the north, the Rappahannock River to the south and the Chesapeake Bay to the east.

View of the Rappahannock River from Belle Isle State Park.

The Northern Neck is a nice place to visit.  It is an hour drive from us on the Peninsula, it is an hour from Richmond, even closer to Fredericksburg and probably an hour to an hour and a half from the greater DC area.  It has one of the oldest wineries in Virginia (Ingleside Vineyards) and what I consider one of the best (The Hague Winery, at least three years ago I thought it was one of the best).  I reviewed some of the Northern Neck Wineries in this blog post and in a later post (here).  It is somewhat out of date.  New wineries pop up and I have to visit some of them and revisit some of the old ones; but there are so many in Virginia.  

During our visit this past Sunday we saw a sign for the "Good Luck Vineyards", we have not visited it yet, so no review, but we need to go.  The name takes me back to the time we spent in Nepal (I worked there in 1981, 82 and 83), and we often stayed in the Good Luck Hotel, so if only for some weird sentimental reason, we should visit this vineyard.  If the wineries read this post, they desperately need to invite me to come back to review their wines (hint, hint)!  But there is so much more to see.  I have not yet visited Reedville, the place made famous by the menhaden, fish oil and the ferry to Tangier Island.

This time it was State Park time.  The Northern Neck is host to two State Parks: Westmoreland State Park and Belle Isle State Park.  Westmoreland is located on the Potomac and we have stayed in cabins at that park a few years ago.  It's a great place.  So this time we decided to go hiking at Belle Isle State Park.

Hiking along the shoreline of the park looking over the Rappahannock

Belle Isle is on the Rappahannock River.  It is relatively new and it is very nice.  All the photos in this post were taken at the park.  It is worth a day visit.  The park also has two cabins that can be rented for overnight stays and a camp ground.  I am wondering about sailing there and anchoring out while the rest of the family goes out there and camps or stays in one of the cabins.  That would be a riot.  However, as you can see from the photos above there is no nice secluded inlet to anchor (my boat draws 4 ft) and you are very exposed there in the middle of the Rappahannock.  Yes there is a boat launch, but from what I can see on the charts, the water is only 2 to 3 feet deep and that's not enough for me and my boat.  Oh well, so be it, we'll just have to bring the kayaks.  There are a lot of kayak opportunities at the park and even canoes for rent.

This Sunday we spent an afternoon hiking some of the trails with the dogs, and just exploring.  Belle Isle is relatively new in the state park system and yet has to mature.  Never the less it is a nice place to hang out.  A great place to walk (it is flat), to kayak/canoe, it has a boat launch, it has a pick-nick area and even a sandy beach.  Note that the water is salty.  Hopefully the captions on the photos explain things a bit more.  Go visit and enjoy.

A creek that you cross going from the mainland on to the island

Another creek crossing going on to the island

A view of the Rappahannock from the Island

There is a pick-nick area in the park with access to a sandy beach.  Our dogs just loved playing in the surf.  It was a rough warm-ish day (77 but the wind over the cold water made it feel colder right on the shore).  Note that the water is salty.  In our area, the Rappahannock is famous for its oysters.

Coastal living and sea level rise (12/16/2015)

While scenes like the pictures that I took below are idyllic, being on the hook (anchor for you non-boat people) in the York River in the middle of December, or me scrubbing my sail boat bare chested on Sunday morning in the middle of December in coastal Virginia is somewhat unheard of.  I guess it does happen, because Sunday evening my 88 year old father-in-law told us that he remembered that it happened once before some December day approximately 50 years ago (and I am too lazy to research what year that was).  I did hear on the Weather Channel and on the CBS news last night that this is the longest that Buffalo New York has ever gone without any snow in any winter since the start of record keeping in the late 1800s.

December 14, 2015, an early morning scene on the York River in Yorktown.
A ship on the hook and the sun is just coming up over the horizon.
The temperature was 61 degrees that morning, probably 20 to 30 or so degrees above normal for this time of the year.

Sunday December 13, 2015.  Scrubbing the Beagle.
I got so warm doing it, so I took my shirt off and I did it bare chested.
The temperature was 72 degrees.

But hopefully you get the message.  I was so happy when I heard about the climate accord in Paris this weekend.  I did not listen to the conservative pundits (no teaching up state so no travel in a car without satellite radio), but I can just imagine their discussions about a climate’s cyclical nature, the takeover by the United Nations etc., etc.  I did see a small article on how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell already promised that as soon as President Obama leaves office they are going to throw the deal out.  Here is another example of some criticism.

I know I should not get into the debate, I’m just a minor blogger who tries to show pretty pictures and talk about his teaching, stormwater, his sailing, coastal living, and his travels throughout Virginia; however, my teaching, stormwater, my sailing and my coastal living are all impacted by global warming, isn’t that the truth?  Take a look at the article about Tangier Island (or click on the next one as well).  I honestly hope to write a blog post from my sailboat when I visit Tangier Island next year (at least that is a cruise I would like to make), and yes, it will not disappear in the next few years.  But it still is serious, for the people living there, for our culture, as a colonial heritage site and as part of our history.  As both articles discuss, we really do not need to go to those poor Pacific Island Nations to watch them disappear with sea level rise, we can do that right here, in Virginia.

But then even closer to home, just two minor storm this September and October and we could not even get to our sailboat.  The marina was flooded.  Members of the club were forced out of their home and friends of ours who live in Poquoson on the water could not get in or out of their home, there was one to two feet of water in their yard and streets.  I can just imagine if the water levels rises a bit more over the years combined with the subsidence we will have in our area, particularly during storms.

October 2, 2015.  Flooding at the marina.  The Beagle is in the first slip on the left.  You had to go through almost knee deep water to get to the dock, and then you had to watch out for missing boards that had been pushed up by the rising water.

Oh of course, why should I care?  I’ll be long dead and gone before it would even affect me.  Very optimistically I may have 40 to 45 more years to live.  What can happen in those 40 or so more years?  Climate change is slow, so who cares?

I think that’s the problem we are facing.  Too many people are too cavalier about environmental issues.  We worry about the economy and saddling future generations up with our financial debts.  However, this environmental stuff is too touchy feely and more difficult to define; it does not touch our pockets or directly effects our livelihood, so we don’t worry about saddling future generations up with environmental debts, a.k.a. disasters, such a climate change, sea level rise, famines, desertification, you name it. But environmental debt may also translate into financial debt in the not so distant future, but that is so difficult to define.

I am still simply amazed how misinformed some people are, not informed at all, don’t care, don’t want to know, and of course some people are just plain partisan.  I am not sure if I captured them all here, but yes, even in this country you still run into people who have never heard or considered things like global warming or climate change.  Even if you believe it is cyclical, this is not a time to take things laying down.  How can you be so sure that humans are not aggravating, speeding up, or worsening this natural process?  Even over geological time it has never happened this fast except when there were meteor impacts or massive volcanic eruptions.  So can you be that sure that we humans are currently not "helping."  I strongly believe that we can try to minimize our impact and that we can try to anticipate what will happen and to preempt at least some of it or try to slow it down, instead of just rolling over and saying "so be it, it's natural." 

On cyber communities (12/7/2015)

On the road again, for the last trip of the year.  It started pretty darn shitty, but finally made it to my destination as of this writing.  Wytheville is a sleepy town in "them hills" of Virginia. I have this reputation with my colleagues of being in love with this town, and for one reason or another I used to go here very often; at least until they discovered it.

When on the road I rely a lot on my (artificial) cyber communities that we all seem to have amassed around us.  I was reminded about that today during my drive over here listening to National Public Radio's Fresh Air by Terry Gross.  She was interviewing Rick Moody about his new book "Hotels of North America".  The book is written as a set of hotel reviews.

It made me think of how I live and depend on my cyber community when on the road:

• Yelp (for restaurant reviews)
• LinkedIn (for support form like-minded professionals, kind of like a support groups)
• Facebook (mostly friends)
• Google+ (my blog, more artsy community and bonsai enthusiasts)
• Google Maps (for traffic updates and restaurant recommendations)
• Weather Underground (all about weather)

Within these communities there are also special groups that I'm a member of.  For example in Facebook I'm a member of our church group, our neighborhood group, the Virginia birders group, and a bread bakers group.  In LinkedIn I'm a member of 20+ groups.  Driving over, I started realizing that I have a lot of fake or maybe artificial friends. The interesting thing is too that all these sites keep suggesting more groups that you might be interested in joining, like trying to suck you in deeper and deeper.

I'm always amused by my 88 year old father-in-law  (who reads these posts and will probably give me grief for mentioning him), because he seems so bemused by the fact that Facebook knows so (too) much about him and it keeps suggesting potential new friends to him or trying to invite him to join LinkedIn.  He is correct it is somewhat intrusive, just look at that list of communities that know my preferences etc. and keeps tabs on me.

But yes, without Yelp, I would never have found those great restaurants, or avoided those supposedly lousy ones.  I also write reviews, usually only of good experiences and only once or twice of really horrible dining experiences (I hated those professors that graded you on your mistakes and did not look at the things you did correct).  I never review a place to settle a score or to make someone look bad; I try to be a responsible partner in my community.  Some don't; this morning there was a thing on morning edition about women being taken advantage off through on-line dating, another one of those communities.

Internet communities are great things for a lot of people including me.  They put all your friends together: it allowed me to rediscover old long lost friends; it gave me support groups; it gave me traffic information; and I had some absolutely great inexpensive food.  So yes, I like my friends on my cyber groups, my real friends or virtual friends.  Moreover, traveling is lonely and it is better than getting silly in a bar.  But I realize as well, nothing is better than real life friends in real flesh that you can talk to, have a drink with and just be with.

Nature-deficit disorder (Yorktown, 11/25 and 11/27/2015)

A real term or not?  I strongly believe it is.   Just like attention deficit disorder (ADD) is, there is something to being too long away from the natural world.   While people with ADD can not focus on one thing for an extended period , I believe if you have nature-deficit disorder you need a regular nature fix or you can no longer fully focus on life or the task ahead or other things like depression set in.

I did not invent the term, or the concept.  I was introduced to it by Richard Louv in his books "Last Child in the Woods ..." and "The Nature Principle."  While maybe no literary masterpieces  (says this non-native English speaker and amateur blogger), the books introduced me to some great concepts and ideas that I intuitively knew, but never articulated.  They really are great books.  Being in nature recharges me and brings me inner peace.  Mr. Louv even has examples of bringing peace to inner city gang members by bringing them to nature. (See also this webpage on the movement he started).

Readers know I am a biologist, a naturalist and an educator who loves the outside, both the blue and the green.  I suffer terribly from nature-deficit disorder, I need to get out there after a few days (just to recharge and get my sanity back).  If you are a regular reader you should know, and just look at the labels, there are at least 21 posts where I used the term.  So on my first day off on the long Thanksgiving weekend I took off for a walk in the woods with the dogs.  It was just above freezing and sunny; perfect.

To me walks like this are like meditation, the mind goes where it wants to and you observe it.  If it goes too far you call it gently call it back.  You don't speed walk, but just observe.  But still, I actively look around, observe and take photos.  Here are a few photos I took during my walk:

Teaching my wetland class, I always walk around with my teacher hat on and had to take this photograph of three multi-stemmed red maples in a row.  A clear sign that this site may be wet, or at least as I say in my class, "a red flag."

I was somewhat surprised to find this turtle on my path.  It was a cold morning and I was expecting that they were in hibernation by now.  The dogs sniffed it and you could hear it clicking in the shell making sure it stayed closed. 

Right after seeing the turtle I was struck by the way the sun was shining through the trees and striking the ground, the trees, and my face.  I just had to take this picture.   At home I converted it to black and white.   

I found it so encouraging that the outdoors store REI started the #OptOutside movement for Black Friday.  They did not open their stores on Black Friday  and encouraged their employees to enjoy the great outdoors.   We did the same, we took the sail boat out and enjoyed blue nature. It all fits in with fighting Nature-deficit disorders.

Enjoying Blue Nature on Black Friday.

Being out there is so important to me.  Try it, it is good for the soul, the mind and for those creative juices.

On trainers and teaching, Part VI, what walls? (11/25/2015)

It is always interesting to see that when you start something it has unforeseen consequences, in particular when they are positive.  Call it serendipity or coincidence, but it is often not the intent.  In my case, it brought down a few walls, or boundaries.

So what am I talking about?  As I recently mentioned in a post I was developing a course on wetlands and how it relates to stormwater and erosion and sediment control.  We felt there was a tremendous need for a class like this, since we always talk about wetlands in our classes and the need to avoid impacting them.  We felt that I was the person to do this because I have worked as a wetland scientist throughout the U.S.A. since the early 1990-s.  Well, we have rolled out the class and given it at two locations.  The class has been well received and the evaluations are great.  Both the materials and the teacher (me) are well liked.  So there is something to say for being multifarious, a jack of all trades, it helps in thinking things through in developing a class and standing in front of a room and talking about a subject.  I discussed that in this post as well.

A tidal salt marsh in a creek that is a tributary to the York River.  Tidal marshes are really interesting, to the eye they may seem fairly uniform and only occupied by a single species.  But this is far from the truth.  During high tide they are teaming with small (young fish) and at low tide they have fiddler crabs and other critters.  The plant species in them have a very narrow tollerance range of water (tidal) depth.  It is a really neat system.

Why then the unforeseen consequences?  That for a big part may have to do with my personality.  While I love to teach and be in front of a class; I hate to practice, do dry runs of my classes, tell people how it goes, what I am doing, you know it.  I find it difficult to develop outlines of what I am doing or how the class will go (a waste of time almost, I rather be developing the class or think about it).  For me developing a class is an organic I start out with a few ideas and things go from there I put things before it and behind it, wherever it makes sense in my eyes; I brood.  This can be infuriating to my supervisor, although he has learned to live with it and understands it.  However, you can imagine that people who do not know my style and more vested in the subject matter can get concerned when they experience my style first hand.  I do not like to rehearse my classes, and when I do, I find it difficult to treat a group of my colleagues, who I assume know as much as I do of the subject, as the students I am supposed to teach and know very little.  It feels like I am talking down to them and that is something I cannot do.  I like to talk to people at their level, which is probably why people rate me so high as a teacher (am I too arrogant here? I really don't like talking down to people, unless I don't like them, then I talk down to them like the best of them!).  Moreover, I do not rehearse my classes.  As I tell my students in the first class: “You guys are the dress rehearsal and the main event all at the same time!” 

During the development of the class I’ve felt two or three times that the class would be cancelled because of the sensitive issues that wetlands raise in this country.  We understand more and more about their importance as an ecosystem and habitat that needs to be protected, and for that matter the push back that conservationists have had in the past from the development and home building community.  So it is logical that this class was under somewhat of a microscope to start with.  Moreover, people are protective of their own turf, so it is difficult to have an outsider like me teach a subject that another group in our department is responsible for; they are the experts and they had no idea what my level of expertise was or what my teaching style was.  On top of that was my style of course design and development (in other words don't do as I do when you do course design) and my marginal ability to articulate it.

However, I can report all is well and I have received compliments from the group that considered asking us to cancel the classes and we received an offer from them to co-teach the class with me, the greatest compliment I can get.  I consider it a breaking down of a virtual wall between groups that is there whether you want to admit there is a wall or not.

But one thing is for sure you never get to tear down walls or get these neat unforeseen consequences if you don't try!

And yes, I need to really try to be more transparent in my course design, I guess.

Yorktown (11/11/2015)

The leaves are falling!

The leaf of a sassafras tree/shrub; one of my favorite species.  I just love the trident shaped leaves and while I do not like the taste of root beer, I love the smell of the crushed leaves which smell like root beer.  Old folklore tells me that in the south people would crush the roots and make tea from the roots claiming that the tea would make them better able to deal with the heat and the humidity of the summers.

Fall is definitively here.  It always seems to hit hard in November (see my post from around this time last year).  It is around Thanksgiving that I rake, blow or mulch for the last time.  The roads in our neighborhood are beginning to be lined with clear bags with leaves that are going to be carted off to the county's composting facilities (I hope), and maybe next spring these same people will bring some of the leaves back in a different form to fertilize and mulch their yard; although I would not bet on it.

Many of these people mine their yards for nutrients.  In one of the classes that I teach I surprise my student with the little factoid that fall leaves contain a lot of phosphorus and by us carting leaves of to the dump or to the composting facility we are really mining phosphorus and depleting our soil.  This forces us to go buy fertilizer at our landscaping stores and put artificial fertilizer on our lawns and gardens which we basically cart off again next fall.  The fertilizer companies  (and the garden stores) love us, don't they?

Our neighborhood has them all, there is this one guy, I swear, he gets the blower out when he sees one leaf on his lawn or driveway (he's obviously OCD).  My wife and I call him "Jack the Blower".  He has the leaf blower going for at least two hours every Friday, Saturday and Sunday (we are not home the other days so we don't know if he blows those days as well); one wonders what else he does in life, or if he has a life.  I feel sorry for his neighbors; who have told me that they actually caught him blowing leaves into their yard.  When we lived in Cincinnati 20 years ago, we knew an equally OCD guy (an ex FBI agent) and when we walked by his property we made sure to bring a leaf and  place one leaf on his lawn, just to tease him.  Boy, we were mean in our younger years.

But leaves are important, as I mentioned, they recycle nutrients and organic matter, but they also are the home to a lot of insects and other critters.  It is a lot of fun to see towhees and brown thrashers going after bugs in the leaves in my yard.  They do it just like chickens scratching away in the leaves, throwing them all over.

I took this photo a couple of days ago behind our home and titled it: "Fall massacre in full swing" 

But there is more, all the mushrooms that are out there are fed by the decaying leaves and rotting plant materials, salamanders lizards, frogs and a lot of other critters need them.  The fallen leaves serve as natural litter that keep  the weeds from growing; although, in some cases to much litter may be a bad thing as I complained about in an earlier post.  There is too much litter in the woods behind our home, which in my eyes has suppressed the native weeds and forbs.  The only way to remedy that would be with a controlled burn and good luck in getting that approved.

But again, it is important to mulch the leaves back into the lawn and back into the flower beds.  The organic matter, nutrients, weed control, and habitat for our wildlife provided by those leaves is so valuable!

Stormwater (11/1/2015)

I have been doing some literature research on the history of stormwater management.  OK, call me a stormwater geek or a stormwater nerd, but I just realized that I have been actually fascinated about it for probably more more than forty years and I never noticed it until this weekend.

It all started in 1972 when I read an article somewhere about an agriculture and reforestation project in the arid mountains of Algeria.  This fascinated me and prompted me to do a literature search on the subject of desert revegetation at my college library in Holland where I found a reference to a new (scientific) book by Michael Evenari and co-authors called: The Negev, The Challenge of a Desert.  It was published in 1971 and I borrowed it through inter-library loan.  It came from the Dutch Library of Congress, it appeared that I was the first one to read it.  I devoured the book.

In this book Evenari and his colleagues describe how the old Bedouin tribes were able not only to survive in the desert but actually to thrive by practicing agriculture in the Negev Desert of what is now Israel.  They built extensive drainage canal systems on hillsides that captured runoff from the sparse winter rainstorms and brought the water down to the agriculture fields.  Very different from what we did with stormwater until the early 2000s; which is, getting rid of it.  At least now we are back to teaching people to conserve stormwater; to conserve it and infiltrate it.

Walking to work in Richmond this morning (11/3/2015), ready to go back out on the road and teach about stormwater management and conservation, and erosion and sediment control. 

I have always credited Evenari for steering me into the field of desert ecology; his book has a chapter on plant survival in the desert environment and it was my first encounter with that subject as well.  Ever since reading that chapter I have been fascinated with plant physiological ecology, in particular the adaptation of plants to stressful environments such as deserts, the subject I specialized in for my PhD.

Events in real life kept reminding me of Evenari's book.  In Yemen I saw some of the same water harvesting practices that he described seeing in the Negev Desert.  I also saw the same plant adaptations in Yemen and in New Mexico as he saw, and it always brought me back to his book.  So much so, that  Evenari's book was one of the first purchases I made on the fledgling Amazon.com years ago, it was a book that always stayed with me.  So yes, it was fun to open it again this weekend and to leaf through it again.

Now 40 year or more later I can credit Evenari for even more than just turning me into an physiological ecologist.  Truth be known, I am more a stormwater geek or nerd now; maybe also thanks to that book, a realization I all the sudden have all out of the blue.  It is fun to see how your life comes full circle, all the way back to stormwater management, the most important subject in the book.  It is amazing how one event, or one book can have such a (subconscious) influence even if you don't realize it then, but only now 40+ years later.  I am sure that many of you have events, books or even radio or television shows that are somehow pivotal to your career or even your life, that you do not realize until many years later.  Cherish those moments, I cherish mine right now.

On blogging, course design, photography and training (Fairfax, 10/20/2015)

I am having a comfortable landing (I hope) just good, there were a lot of loose ends are being tied down, like in the closing of the year.  I have therefore not written much these past two months; I am way to busy for that.  Yes, consider this a good thing.  I just have too darn much to do or to look forward to.  Here are some of the things:

1. It is the end of the sailing season; if we are lucky we'll get a few more nice days in.  As a rule of thumb, we try to sail on black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving for you non-U.S.A. residents, when most of the people seem to go Christmas shopping) and that generally is my last one for the year, at least on our boat.
2. I am done with my class designs for this years' classes and now I have one and a half month of heavy teaching (and travel) to look forward to (the photo below was taken at 8 pm in a Starbucks in Fairfax while I was writing this blog).
3. I am starting to think about new classes: a photography class, a hydrology class and a class on soil amendments.  How is that for diversity?
4. I have got some other irons in the fire that I cannot write about (yet).
5. In addition the days are getting shorter (bring on Seasonal Affected Disorder or SAD, at least for some, but I think we all slow down when fall and winter rolls around)
6. Finally, one of my co-workers is pregnant, which is great, but it will probably mean a more intensive travel schedule for us next year.  If I was a mother of a new born I would not want to go on overnight trips without the kiddo, especially if I was breast feeding.

On the road again.  My evening coffee at Starbucks, waiting for my computer to start up.

So yes this blog may suffer somewhat.  But I will really try to keep it up with a few interesting items, maybe not about my travels throughout the state, but more about my job and research.  I do not want to make this a "dear diary," so don't worry.

If you write a blog your self you know that there are many pages behind a blog.  I can check how many people read my posts, broken down by post, by day, by week, month or even year.  I know how readers got to my blog: by accident, via another website, what search engine they used, even what browser they used, you name it.  I even know what country they come from (surprise, most of my readers come from the U.S.A., but Russians are running second, followed by Germans and the French).

A lot of bloggers are in it to make money.  Yes, I could allow Google or Amazon to put advertisement on my blog and every time you would click on an add, I would get maybe 5 cents or something like it.  There are even blog posts about boosting traffic to your site like this one: <click here>.  This is how some bloggers are hoping to strike it rich and this is why they create these outrageous blogs.  Who knows, I may eventually break down and allow adds on my site, in the hope that you the readers will make me rich!  We'll see.

As I mentioned before, I started this blog for myself; I wanted to get back to photography and get into writing.  My wife and I had so much experience working all over the world, we felt that those experiences needed to be documented, if not only for our daughter, for future generations.  Moreover, I feel I have so much more to give.

So yes! I am going to teach a photography course again.  The last one I taught was in 1977 while serving in the Dutch Army as the Installation's photographer.  It is fun doing research on photography, or at least slowly trying to get slides together on items such as ISO setting and photographic noise (yes there is such a thing; we used to call it grain when we worked in film).

I took a photograph with my cell phone of a book case in my office from a distance of 12 feet at three different ISO settings (Auto, 100 and 800).  As you can see the ISO 100 setting produced the least noise, the problem is the shutter speed (your lens has to stay open longer), and at low light the camera set at ISO 100 might be subject to movement/shaking of the camera/phone.

I know most of it, but now try to put it in a three hour class that is useful for stormwater inspectors.  Who knows, I may need to make it a six hour class.  We could do so much, even a practicum and have them go out and take pictures; although then I would need to limit the class size (we usually limit our class size to 40 but as a solo teacher I could not manage 40 in the field).  There are really so many photo tips and tricks I could teach them (and you on my blog; if you want to learn more, let me know and leave me a comment).

As I mentioned, I will also be teaching a class on hydrology and in a future post I will be writing a little bit about that.  I found some really neat stuff on some of the history of stormwater management, some of which has fascinated me since I was 18 and enjoyed observing in Yemen when I worked there in the mid 1980s.  Yet another subject dear to my heart.  Stay tuned!

Richmond (10/5/2015)

It's been an interesting weekend, and we in Virginia had it easy compared to the Carolina's.  Let me explain:

When I took the first picture on Wednesday September 30, the clouds were building and the weather outlook was for a lot of rain and a possible hurricane over the weekend.  Predictions were at the time that hurricane Joaquin was going to come right up (what we call) the main stem of the Chesapeake Bay as a category 1 or maybe even a 2 storm, and for us who lived through hurricane Isabel, we feared the worst.  I took this photo, in anticipation that it would look very different a week later.

A picture of the James River in Downtown Richmond from Brown's Island Park taken on 9/30/2015.

There was this European model out there that was sowing doubt in our mind.  In the past the European hurricane model had been the most reliable, so were were all somewhat skeptical about the initial dire predictions of the other models, and we did not really make many hurricane preparations.  From the look of it some people did, because when the I visited our local Lowe's on Friday after we were sure that the storm was going to pass us by, the return line with people returning unused generators (still in the box) was very long!

The next photograph I took on the 5th of October after the mountain region of Virginia received a lot of rain and you can see that the water is much muddier and that it has risen a lot.  There was a sandbar in front of one of the bridge pilings and that is now underwater; moreover the first section of the piling is almost completely submerged.  What a little rain in the watershed will do!  Actually the week before September 30, the mountainous region of Virginia received close to 8 inches of rain in 2 days (for my non-American readers that is 200 mm) and during the "hurricane weekend" or the weekend before the 5th we got another 2 to 3 inches (50 to 75 mm).  After a little lag time as they call it in hydrology (it takes a few days for all that water to flow down hill), we saw the water levels rise.

The James River on October 5, 2015.

As of the writing of this blog (10/8/2015) the water level in the river is back to the level of the first picture.  Again, this is nothing compared to what the people in South Carolina are going through.  My hearth goes out to them.  The climatological extremes seem to be getting more frequent, fires out west, floods in the east.  As predicted, global warming is slowly expressing itself isn't it?

Yorktown ((9/27/2015)

The concept of global warming has been in the news the past week.  It started with the Papal visit to the east coast and when I posted a few pictures of the yacht club on my Facebook account, one of the first questions from one of my friends on the west coast was: "Global warming? "  At the same time a very conservative Facebook acquaintance posted something about the Pope being the Antichrist because of his opinion on the environment, evolution and homosexuality.  Boy it sure has been an amazing couple of days.  It is nothing I am going to solve in this blog, but it is also not something I wish to ignore.

Arriving at the yacht club around high tide Sunday morning it was evident that there was a coastal flooding issue. 

The water had retreated a little, but not enough for me to get on the finger pier and on the boat.

Blame a high pressure system over Maine and a coastal low off North Carolina, and there we had a stiff (20 to 30 mile per hour) easterly wind for the past couple of days.  Wind like that will pile the water up into the Chesapeake Bay.  With high tide it will push it in and even with low tide it will really not let the water out.  (This is a great website that shows you a comparison between the expected astronomic tide and the observed tide in the Chesapeake Bay, I assume there are other websites that do this for other places as well).  Thus with each successive tide water gets higher and higher.  Resulting in coastal flooding.  Yes, sea level rise increases the effect and we all know what causes sea level rise.  Or do we really?

High tide in the York River on Saturday

While you can't see it on this picture, the tide was still rushing in under the Coleman bridge at Yorktown.

We here on the east coast in particular in the Chesapeake Bay area are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to sea level rise, at least I am told.  We live in a subsidence area.  During the last ice age, our area was pushed up.  We were not covered by ice, but the oceans had retreated.  This made the land lighter, and with the ice pushing on the land further to the north, our land was pushed up.  Our countryside is currently sinking, making any sea level rise more pronounced.  On top of that we were pushed up by a meteor impact that fell in the lower part of the Bay and we live on the rim of the crater.  This rim is sinking as well.  Finally, out in the ocean, the Gulf Stream makes a bend towards Europe right near us, and that bend will push water our way as well.  So this is why they predict a larger sea level rise in our area while elsewhere on the east coast it likely to be less.

Seaside goldenrod swaying in the 20+ mph breeze at the beach

On trainers and teaching, Part V on new courses and old experiences (9/15/2015)

These past two months I have been working on the development of two new courses that I am supposed to be rolling out this fall.  They are both on subjects that I am very familiar with,  so it should be a breeze,  shouldn't it?  Well, not so fast.  I think familiarity makes it often more difficult to explain a subject to a novice in such a way not to blow him or her out of the water.  Making things understandable and a learning experience without being condescending or dumbing it down too much as in being offensive is a challenge.  Up to now I have been relatively successful with it, but I don't want to fail now.

The courses I am working on is a course on wetlands and a course on soils.  Both are geared towards practitioners in erosion and sediment control and stormwater management.  These are people who need to know the basics but definitively do not need to become experts.  In a way they need to be able to interpret reports that they get to review or understand that they need a report when they did not get one.  Having worked intensively as a wetland scientist since 1994 and been involved in soils all the way back since the early 1970s, it is fun developing classes that interesting and applicable.  Thanks goodness, I have a friend, a fellow teacher and a soil scientist (all wrapped up in one person) who is partnering me on the soils class.  David will also be helping me teach it; we make a great team when we are on the road.

For my wetland course I am teaching my students how to recognize a wetland in the field.  So I went out back, behind my home to take pictures, braving ticks, mosquitoes and chiggers.  These trees show clear signs of flooding.  So nice to be out in the field tromping in the woods.  These trees show clear signs of seasonal flooding, the dark wood is how far up (3-4 ft.) the water gets in the winter.

In my class design and delivery I rely on my life experience, dating all the way back to my college years in the mid 1970s.  Yes, I have that advantage, I have all this experience.  However, I feel that in the past six years I have somewhat stagnated in my professional field.  I can't believe that I've been away from field work and into the class room (and class design room) for that long, having to rely on my past experience and on stories that I now hear from colleagues.

This realization that I have such a multifarious experience came rushing back to me these past few weeks or so since I received a surprise email from an old high school friend of mine who lives in a foreign country.  It was fun to hear from her, and in writing back made me relive a lot of my life back then, but also between the time that we parted our ways and now.  I wrote her a very brief email where I described what happened to my wife and I during the passed 38 years and our world travels.  Just thinking about that email makes my head spin, which is why we typically don't mention it to people, because when we do, we mostly get blank stares.  But yes, I (we, my wife and I) need to write (a book?) about our experiences in particular about the time we lived in Uganda in the late 1970s under Idi Amin.

Idi Amin

But come to think of it, all these 38 years worth of experiences are what I bring to class development and teaching, and I hope many teachers do the same.  When I teach, I tend to tell stories, anecdotes, and give examples of what I have seen (no I don't teach about Idi).  It is relatively easy, having worked for almost 40 years.  However, I sparingly use my international experience in my classes.  When I teach the stormwater classes I will mention my experience in Nepal where deforestation resulted in the disappearance of streams, of firewood and fodder for livestock, or worst, landslides.  I sometimes see students look at each other and smile (kind of in disbelieve that I also worked in that field) when I start a story with: "When I worked in the mining industry in New Mexico ..."  But I really did work in the mining industry.  I hope that these stories makes the classroom experience more fun for my students, and of course more interesting and a better learning experience.    For myself, I do think it is so invaluable to be able to bring real life work experience with me in the class room and I even  gladly borrow examples from other people's experience to illustrate points (I will give credit and will not claim them as my own).

I kind of miss being out there in the field and making new experiences.  I am starting to notice that I am getting rusty.  Thanks goodness I still learn and gain other experiences and expertise by fixing my sail boat, sailing and traveling through Virginia; I will never stop learning.  Hopefully I can apply my boat stories to my teaching one of these days.  If you are a teacher I hope you too reach in that big bag of experience you are carrying on your back.

On a work trek with my wife (and one of our two dogs) in the mountains of Nepal in 1982 or 83.  I sometimes had to walk 7 days for a an one hour meeting and walk back seven days.  Thanks goodness it was through the project area and I always had my eyes and ears open to do project (extension) type work and talk natural resources conservation.  This is probably close to the hill (looking at it) that dammed the Kali Gandaki valley by a landslide after this year's earthquake. 

Reflection (9/4/2015)

Amazing, this blog was started as a photo blog.  I posted a nice picture from my sailboat on June 25, 2013, with just an amazingly simple one sentence statement, that had less depth than something a 6^th grader would write.  I used to be an avid photographer and this was my way of trying to get back to my hobby.  Moreover, since I would be traveling to a different part of the state of Virginia to teach every week, I felt it was a great opportunity to share some pictures of the often beautiful sights or at least my views of the State.  Finally, it also was a way for me to let off some steam.  That day was the first day of a forced move where I and my program moved from one State agency to another State agency and that caused a lot of anxiety to the group of people who were forced to move to the other agency.  We did not feel welcome at all, there were definitive signs that we were not, and we did not know what would happen.  Comparing notes among colleagues now, the anxiety has gone away and we feel accepted and fine where we are.  Now just a raise and everything will be fine!

From left to right these are the three locations I have successively worked at in Richmond over the past six years (left DCR, DEQ to the right and what I would call the half way house in the middle) .  I have not been job (employer) hopping, just forced building hopping and agency shifting.

In fact, I really did started this blog for me.  I announced my blog to no one; not even my family.  I did not want my ego or anything else to get in the way of expressing myself and doing what I did.  I had no ambition with this blog.  Little did I know this darn blog would grow up to be like this.  When I post this entry, it will be my 254^th.

Looking back through some of the posts I put up, there definitively is a trend.  I have become more verbose; I have become bolder; more outspoken; become a bit more of the teacher that I am in real life; maybe too self-indulgent; and taking myself a bit too serious?  Yes, I have always tried to include an outside link or two (too much Wikipedia maybe) since I do not want to claim to be a “know it all”, but as I mentioned in this blog post, there is a lot of stuff stored in that big head of mine.

Did I mention my big head?  This picture was taken last year during a nature walk in the Roanoke area last fall (2014) after a fun day of lecturing in a nature retreat.

So why write about this now?  There is no anniversary of this blog or of the move to DEQ.  Well, this past Thursday morning I read an article in the newspaper about a Dutchman with the name Jaap Haartsen.  Mr. Haartsen is the inventor of the Bluetooth.  He invented it while working for Ericsson in Sweden.  It seems that he only works (worked) 40 hours per week, turns his phone off at 6 pm and does not check emails in the evenings and on weekends.  Moreover he goes hiking on weekends.  It claims that his way of recharging and reconnecting with real life is what he needs to be inventive and creative.  This is very different from what we see here in the U.S.  When I came in the office this morning, the first thing my supervisor said was "have a productive day" (and he says that almost every day), that is what our U.S. culture seems to be increasingly based on, productivity, not creativity.  It would be so much nicer if he would wish me "a creative day", because that is what course design should be, especially when your do it from scratch.  I think Google is still doing it right, giving people an hour or so do do something different, but the Amazons and other groups, it seems like they are just emphasizing putting in hours and mouse clicks.

So the story about Jaap Haartsen made me think about this YouTube clip that I saw recently on Nature RX; it is a spoof on the need to reconnect with nature,  I have written a lot about it in my blogs and borrowed the phrase "nature deficit disorder."  Looking at the labels, I have used the term in at least 20 blogs of the 253 that I have written up to now.  I used Nature 79 times as a label on posts.  I do think it is so darn important to reconnect with nature, with ocean, with water, you name it; just the natural world.  I find it disarming, calming.  As the naturalist John Burroughs wrote:

"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order"

No, I will not invent the next Bluetooth, but it brings down the blood pressure; it is where I formulate a lot of my ideas for my classes, my blog and just life.

We went for a sundown/moon rise kayak trip last Saturday which culminated with a picnic dinner on a narrow sandy peninsula in the bay.  It was very private and the views were spectacular.  This is what I call taking care of your "Nature Deficit Disorder", while even getting some exercise. 

Evening sail on the Chesapeake Bay (8/22/2015)

We had a great and interesting evening of sailing this past Saturday.  We took our daughter and significant other sailing in the area where the York River enters the lower Chesapeake Bay.  We had a couple of firsts and it was an interesting time.  Sara, our daughter’s girlfriend had never sailed in her life, so that was a first.  The week before there were reports in the newspaper about major algae blooms causing gorgeous bioluminescent events on the river.  The photographs in the newspaper were spectacular.  We had seen the same thing during the meteor shower when my wife and I walked along the York in the evening and aquamarine waves were crashing into the shore that night and we hoped we could replicate something similar for our guests. 

So we decided to make it an evening sail in the hope the algae were still going strong.  We made chicken-humus-spinach-sprout wraps for dinner and armed with some snacks and drinks we set sail at around 5 pm.  The wind was from the north at 10 to 12 knots.

Well, 10 to 12 knots does not sound too much, but coming from the north is fun sailing especially in the southern Bay.  Typically waves are the highest when the wind is from the north and northeast.  With wind from that direction, the waves do not encounter land for a long stretch and are able to build (this is also known as fetch); and even with just 10 knot wind the waves can easily build to 2 feet in height.  Maybe no big deal, but especially when it is dark you cannot see the few extra-large wave that sneak in from time to time; both my wife and Sara were surprised one of them and got thrown around and were slightly hurt and definitively shaken up.

But let’s start with the beginning.  We started out with a somewhat bad omen.  The head sail (jib) went up great, and when it came to raising the main, I had forgotten to connect the halyard to the main.  So I had to get on the cabin to connect the halyard.  A little screw up, no big deal.  Somehow, the main did not want to go up all the way, whatever I tried.  It was stuck, this dummy did not put on his sailing gloves and I am still bothered by a blister on my finger from trying to pull the main up.  Oh well, it might not have looked that pretty, but the boat sailed and I was not going to let it ruin our evening.  I just lowered the boom a bit and it worked.  Next problem, I was not able to pivot the outboard out of the water, oh well again, in hindsight, even with our little sea anchor we still averaged 4.5 knots over the ground that evening.

We were flying, but boy it shows that, now I have all the windows in, I need to pressure wash the boat.  Also the headsail is a little dirty, but there is little I can do about that, I understand.

About hour into our sail, “BANG”, and the boom flies down wind.  The shackle that holds the mainsheet block attached to the boom snapped.  What to do?  Start the motor.  Time to take the vang apart, and use the block and the shackle from the vang.  So while the crew holding on to the boom, I tried to get everything rigged up.  Here comes one of those larger waves and the pin goes overboard.  So let’s try the other end of the vang.  I am able to get that one installed without any additional incidents and we are off sailing again.

After the repair.  The admiral and me with the new block and shackle from the vang.

In the meantime the sky is getting absolutely gorgeous.  We are all clicking away, cell phones, go-pros, Olympus T-3, you name it.  After having dinner it was getting dark and it was time to get the lights up.  We still do not have electricity on out boat, so I bought a set of battery operated navigation lights.  Somehow I had not put them up before we left, so I gave the helm to my wife and crawled up front (without life preserver and two to three foot seas) to put the thing up.  Well, a screw came lose.  Miraculously, I was able to catch it but I needed to crawl back to get a screw driver and fasten it again.  Then crawl back to the front and attach it.  Finally back in the cockpit I checked the GPS for our position and had the shock of my life.  Because of all the time it had taken me to get the navigation lights up on the bow, we had gone too far and actually crossed an area that we usually would avoid at all cost.  The area we crossed has a sand bar with a depth of 4 to 6 feet and our boat draws 4 feet and having no electricity we have no depth finder.  Thanks goodness it was mid-tide, but with two foot seas, we could have hit bottom at the bottom of the waves.  With me up on the bow, trying to attach navigation lights, that would have been very interesting.  Nothing happened, but we learned an important lesson: situational awareness; make sure you know where you are and that you need to have enough wiggle room just in case you need it especially when working on something!

The sun is about to set in the west.

A nice head wind, waiting for darkness and the algae glow.

Shutterbugs.

The rest of the evening went great!  After it got completely dark the light show started.  The sail was absolutely spectacular.  Black seas with aquamarine streaks (the crest of the waves), and an aquamarine wake from the boat sometimes bright enough you could read a newspaper by.  Unbelievable.

The algae that are causing the bloom are Alexandrium monilatum.  The algae is somewhat toxic; not horribly toxic to humans, but this species does appear to be toxic to young fish, young oysters and young crab.  Older ones seem to be able to withstand it.  While the bioluminescence is a sight to behold, it is also an indication of too much pollution in the water.  The algae bloom are caused by the pollutants we generate on land and that runs off in our stormwater, in particular phosphorus and nitrogen in animal waste and fertilizer.  An interesting juxtaposition, my hobby (sailing) and my profession (sttormwater education), all together.

On trainers and teaching, Part IV (8/20/2015)

Most days when I commute to Richmond I listen to Doctor Radio on Satellite Radio SiriusXM Channel 110.   Thursday mornings between 8 and 10 is the Emergency Medicine Show with Drs. Billy Goldberg and Howard Greller.  In his show Dr. Billy lamented about someone complaining about him being a clown on the radio and his shtick and that struck a nerve with me.

Being a public speaker/teacher who travels throughout the state of Virginia people are always surprised to hear that I consider myself an introvert.  When I am in front of a class I make the darnest effort to lose that and I try to fake being as much as an extrovert as I can be.  Yes I move around a lot, that is my way of loosening up; I joke, I tell (to many?) stories and anecdotes; and during breaks I try to interact with the students to see how the class is going.  Yes, I have been told that I am too flippant or cynical at times, but in my eyes that's to make a point.   Trying to be an extrovert is absolutely exhausting to me!  It is so nice to just sit alone in a restaurant later that evening and people watch, not having to interact with anyone.  There are exceptions of course, and that is when I teach with close friends.

So yes, I do understand Dr. Billy, you have to be serious in your job, work is a serious business, but you need an outlet, some levity whether you are an emergency doctor, or an introvert in a job made for extroverts.  You can heal, teach, do your job at your best without taking yourself too serious all the time.  This reminded me of the episode of MASH where Alan Alda came into the O.R. dressed like Groucho Marx. 

How can I be sure I am an introvert?  I’ve knew it all along, but really figured it out when I went to leadership school for the UU church we go to.  We had to do the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and it showed I was an INFP or someone who is an Introvert, who relies on Intuition, who is Feeling and Perceiving.  Reading some of its descriptions even in Wikipedia INFP describes me to a T, including the desire for creativity but also (as most of the people close to me will attest to) my sensitivity to criticism.  Wikipedia shows an interesting list of people who are INFPs.  Wow. 

How does this relate to training?  Well borrowing this from Wikipedia:

• I – Introversion preferred to extraversion: INFPs tend to be quiet and reserved. They generally prefer interacting with a few close friends rather than a wide circle of acquaintances, and they expend energy in social situations (whereas extraverts gain energy).
• N – Intuition preferred to sensing: INFPs tend to be more abstract than concrete. They focus their attention on the big picture rather than the details, and on future possibilities rather than immediate realities.
• F – Feeling preferred to thinking: INFPs tend to value personal considerations above objective criteria. When making decisions, they often give more weight to social implications than to logic.
• P – Perception preferred to judgment: INFPs tend to withhold judgment and delay important decisions, preferring to "keep their options open" should circumstances change.

Combine that with statements like low assertiveness and poor organization, and that is probably how I might be perceived by some of my colleagues.  My office may look like a mess, my brain is a mess, but it is all there.  I brood, and at one point it all come out and it flows out on Power Point, in a blog, all in a concise package that we can call a class, or rambling like this.  Even in planning trips, or shed building projects in the back yard.   My wife has learned to roll with the punches it all comes out ok even without paper plans and assertiveness.  I know it and so does she.  

On Environmental Sustainability (8/11/2015)

On April 1, we premiered a new class that I developed on the use of plants in erosion and sediment control and stormwater management.  When we announced the class it was still in the design stage and I had hoped it would have even more emphasis on native plants than it did; but looking through all the materials on the books, I felt there was such a tremendous need for a more comprehensive approach to the use of plants and planting that it quickly became a much broader class for people reviewing construction plans and inspecting construction sites (and that from someone not formally schooled in landscape architecture or planning).  Honestly, I am still not sure I cover the entire issue, but what can you do in a six hour class?

It is well recognized that with the increased population throughout the U.S., there is a tremendous pressure on the natural (land) resources.  The cartoon below illustrates this very well.  I use it very often in my classes.

This is actually a sad cartoon, but I think this cartoon is applicable wherever you live: Yorktown, Richmond, or even Dallas (TX).  I have this nagging feeling that we are allergic to moving into the inner-city or older homes and renovating them, but that we all want that new home out in the suburbs, away from what we would consider riffraff.  With it of course comes abandoned buildings, increased city blight, urban sprawl, traffic jams, road rage, and environmental degradation, just to name a few negatives.  The great exception I have seen lately is Cincinnati where we visited in April this year.  Boy what a difference 15 years make, people are finally moving back into town and it has become so vibrant.  I am sure there are other examples as well.

A photograph I took in Over the Rhyn in Cincinnati in April.  The area has been revitalized; all kind of small independent shops and even small chains have moved in, and is an amazing place to hang out. When we lived in Cincinnati more than 15 years ago you would not go to this area.

The photo below shows an example of what I mean when I write about the move to the suburbs and urban sprawl.

Built three (3) years ago, the grass had a hard time getting established in this yard, after the soil was abused during the building process.  This yard had 40 to 50 year-old trees and shrubs growing in it.  They were all cleared in favor of grass (they left those three trees against the fence, or did they misjudge the property line when clearing the site?).  We have been walking by this yard for three years wondering what landscaping they were going to add, but you guessed it.  You can see the surrounding yards where the neighbors left some of the trees.  In addition to being an ecological desert, this house has no shade and I am sure their air conditioning bills are much higher than my home which is surrounded by trees.

I am sure this is a well built home; it was was built three years ago in an infill lot in our neighborhood.   Previously it was a wooded lot with mature trees that were at least 45 years old.  The site was completely cleared or as I called it in my classes "nuked," and just seeded with grass.  That's all!  To me this yard has absolutely zero ecological, biological, or environmental value.  It is a biological desert!  Before this one small infill lot was the home to birds, snakes, frogs, salamanders, turtles, insects, raccoons, rabbits, opossums, mice, etc., and now, I don't think even a bird would want to live in that yard.  Let's not talk about aesthetically value as well.  Boy, can I be any blunter?  But it is not only this house, I see it everywhere.

But you still see this everywhere, a forested track gets cut, turned into a subdivision with 5- to 10-acre lots that are all completely turned into lawn with no trees or when there are trees growing on it they are introduced and have very little ecological value for native animals such as birds and other critters.  Moreover, we fertilize and chemically treat the lawns so that they become net exporters of chemicals and pesticides, while in the past the forests that were growing there absorbed all the chemicals and exported oxygen, clean air and life.

We have a choice how we treat the land don't we?  Even when we want to live in the suburbs.  Landscaping can be done responsibly with humans and all the critters in mind.  I am sure that the people in the home of the photograph above did not choose this landscape with the thought of intentionally messing (or f...ing) up nature, but they obviously did not know any better; do no have the resources; cannot be bothered; are taking the easy way out; or in the worst case have no pride (I am sure you can come up with a few more reasons).

Steve Allison writes that we choose the world we create in our landscaping decisions; it is not only an ethical decision, but of course also a financial and often a maintenance decision as well.  But the question remains: why not do the best for the environment?  I understand that from a builder's/developer's perspective that there is a profit motive; we all need to make a living; and yes I am generalizing here, but I would like to see more people who are proud of their work and more concerned about future generations.  Money is not the end all; actually in the end we can not take it with us any way, but we can leave a legacy of a great ecologically sound landscape for future generations.  I know I am generalizing here; however, I also know there are people who are proud of their work.  I have met them and it was fun working for and with them.

In many of the books and reports that I read, I am told that we humans have reached the level where we are changing the world's environment.  We are the only species on the earth that can do this, all others have to adapt to the environment.  So instead of only changing it for the worst, why not try to change it for the better, or at least try not to have any impact at all?  Yes, we need to build and live, but let's do it with nature instead of against nature.