Sucking the Marrow Out of Retirement (05/21/2026)

It has been more than a month since I have written here and updated the world on what I have been up to. I am not planning to stop or disappear from the written word or the world, but these past five to six weeks have been absolutely jam-packed with excitement or activity.

It all started out with the delivery of our new travel trailer or camper: an airstream (model, World Traveler). We got a Ford F-150 the week before, so we had something to tow the airstream with. I drove the airstream home with a friend and backed up into our driveway in the dark. It was all successful. But we had applied for a loan to pay for all this, and that was the stressful part; all the hoops we had to jump through. We can afford all these purchases, but a loan made sense from an investment strategy.

Our neighborhood had a community wide yard sale three days after parking the trailer in our driveway. On a whim, I put a for sale sign on our camper van, and to our surprise we got an offer on the van that we could not refuse. Next was getting the van ready, emptying it. But we also needed to outfit our new rig. On top of that, my wife took off for California to visit the family. Followed by an exciting board meeting at our UU church (of which I am the president) where we decided to follow our principle and spend around $80,000 to put solar on the roof of our church. That weekend we had our annual cluster meeting where all the local UU churches come together. This was followed by a trip to the airport to pick up my wife. Subsequently, we needed to get ready for our shake-down cruise, our first (weekend) camping trip with the new camper, to figure things out. Mixed in to all of this is managing the church contracts for solar and another meeting or two. And here they tell you that life gets slower when you retire.

The word life, reminds me of a YouTube clip I watched where someone old stated something like “I don’t know how much longer I have to live, but I want to make the best of it: I am going to make sure that I use and enjoy the remaining time to the best of my ability.” This reminds me of the words Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden: “Suck out all the marrow of life,” or “when I came to die, discover I had not lived.” I have noticed that you become more aware of your mortality when you grow older. “How much time do I have left” has been going through my head. It hasn’t stopped us from buying the camper; currently I am planning a three-to-four-week trip through the Canadian maritime. I hope to do this early in September. But first an off-grid trip to The Peaks of Otter campground on the Blue Ridge parkway to celebrate our 49th anniversary. Interesting fact, Thomas Jefferson thought that the Peaks of Otter were the tallest mountains in the entire USA.

So yes, life sometimes gets in the way of writing my blog posts, which are a form of diary for myself as well as an update to the rest of the world. I promise I will keep doing this as long as I can; but maybe not that frequent.

The airstream arrived in our driveway!  We are still debating where to place it.

Camping in Westmoreland State Park.  We decided to cook our first meal outside, which we will probably do with more.  It was just very pleasant to be there with the dogs.  Westmoreland is one of our favorite parks.  We have stayed here at least three other times in the cabins.  This is our first time camping. 

Our first meal in the new camper.  We cooked steak, fried potatoes with onions and peas.

Breathing Botany’s Baby Batter: A Pollen-Season Memoir (04/07/2026)

Or, the Yellow Haze of Spring

It’s spring. The days are getting warmer; the birds are chirping; the daffodils in our garden have finished flowering; leaves are popping out everywhere; the redbuds and dogwoods are blooming; the May flowers have woken up—and yes, there is pollen everywhere.

Pollen is so thick right now that our gray deck is yellow, and you can watch it drift over the boards when there’s even a slight breeze. Our concrete driveway is yellow, and the vehicles are coated, too. While the major culprit in our pollen plague is the loblolly pine, it started earlier with the maples and oaks. They announced the start of pollen season about two weeks ago.

The first time I mentioned pollen on this blog was in 2014. My first post was in June 2013 (wow—13 years ago), so April 2014 was more or less the first time I could have complained about it in these pages. I think I mentioned it every year since. Spring pollen has been a perpetual issue here in Virginia (and farther south). For a few weeks, the sky looks yellow and—somehow—everything else does, too. We were walking along the York River and clouds of yellow dust drifted over the water from the shore. When you walk the dogs in our neighborhood and a gust of wind kicks up, you get a face full of the stuff and your eyes sting from all the tiny particles. Even your shoes turn yellow after a stroll through the grass or along a forest trail.

I had a perverse sense of humor when I was still teaching—actually, I still have a streak of it. I’d ask my students if they knew what pollen was: plant sperm. Tree sperm. “Now everyone, take a deep breath in through your nose and inhale all that sperm through those nostrils into your lungs.” A few weeks later, the water in my rain barrels smells horrible. Rotten eggs smell like perfume compared to this brew. Pollen has a high protein content, and all that protein has to break down—ferment, rot, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve always assumed this liquid is fine to use on my bonsai; I’m sure it must be nutrient-rich. And, over the years it hasn’t killed a plant yet.

Soon, this pollen episode will be a thing of the past. We’ll have forgotten it until the end of March next year when it begins again. Now, the seasons will get warmer, and summer will be upon us. Heat and humidity will be there, and maybe a chance of hurricanes? Let’s just hope I can keep complaining about pollen on our deck and cars for a few more years.

Our deck covered by pollen

Uganda here we come (03/17/2026)

The couple was aimlessly wandering through the departure halls of Zanventem, the international airport of Brussels in Belgium. He was 24 and she was 22. It was February 1978 and they were filled with apprehension. They had met two years earlier and got married 7 months ago and now they were going to the man’s first full-time job as farm manager at a leprosy center in Uganda. It was 10 o’clock in the evening. They were taking a Sabena (the Belgium National Airline) flight to Nairobi, Kenya and from there to Entebbe, Uganda. Into the unknown.

At the time of their move, Uganda was ruled by the ruthless dictator Idi Amin who had given himself the title "His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular." He was known for the deportation of all Asians in the country and a brutal murderer of anyone who opposed him. Moreover, flying to Entebbe meant they were going to the airport that was famous for the hostage crises and Israeli raid of 1976. Everybody they knew told them that they were crazy and that they were going to be in severe danger by going there. The couple kept telling themselves that leprosy would repel anyone that could threaten their lives; people were afraid of that biblical disease called leprosy, or so they thought. Now these two were not religious, they went for humanistic reasons and for adventure. Little did they know what would happen in the next year and a half.

The two had arrived in Brussels in the morning by train from Rotterdam. They deposited their luggage at the hotel from where the Sabena shuttle to the airport would leave that evening. Having time to spare, it was time to do some sightseeing: the Great Market and Manneken Pis, have a last Trappist beer and a nice dinner. After that, they sat in the hotel lobby waiting for the shuttle to the airport.

Their flight left Brussels around midnight. They were flying over the Sahara when the sun came up. It was one of the most beautiful sights they had ever witnessed in their young lives; parts of the mountains and dunes illuminated by the orange light of the rising sun, while the opposing sides of hills were still in the dark.

They never exited the plane in Nairobi, but they could feel the warm tropical air rushing into the cabin when the doors opened to let passengers off and allow new ones to come on board. Th majority of the embarking folks were Africans and so, the ethnic makeup of the passengers changed dramatically. Reality hit, they suddenly realized that they were no longer in Europe but were entering dark Africa.

The landing into Entebbe gave them some beautiful views of Lake Victoria and their first Ugandan villages down below. Once landed the plane taxied to the terminal where they were greeted by a huge banner with the face of that ruthless Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin Dada, the conqueror of the British Empire. The banner was draped from the roof of the arrival building and reached all the way to the ground. Now in 2026 the couple is being reminded of that sight by similar banners with the picture of the current U.S. president that are draped of buildings. Let’s not talk about Amin’s massive deportation drive of folks that had migrated into Uganda and did not look like him. Nothing new under the sun.

Once they cleared customs, the couple was met by Pieter, the Dutch doctor and medical superintendent of the leprosy center, and Steve, the Ugandan anesthesiologist. Later they learned that Steve was a wheeler dealer for the hospital, he knew which buttons to push, who to bribe and even had sex with him. But so did the sworn bachelor Pieter, neither gentleman had ever heard of sexual harassment and avoiding sexual relationships with underlings. But after all, this was Africa and late 1970s.

Naturally, that couple were my wife and I. As you know, my writing is a collection of autobiographical sketches, environmental essays, and political commentary. Hope you enjoyed this one and it gives you an insight into my brain and who I have become over the years. Feel free to browse the keyword list for the word Uganda; there is so much more, and more to come.

Manneken Pis

The conqueror of the British Empire

Resillence (3/2/2026

The other day, at our UU church we had a program on the resilience of nature or may be on how nature helped us with our resilience. This brought me back to my Ph.D. study, and particularly my research project. We moved to Las Cruces, NM in 1986 for my studies. Nine years married and yes, we had our occasional marriage spats. I think the issues were mostly my doing and most likely caused by my insecurity concerning my qualifications even to pursue a Ph.D. (imposter syndrome) and the decision we had made to finally settle in the U.S.A. (being a Dutchman who had traveled most of his life, that was an alien concept).

My research plots were in the Jornada del Muerto. It was at the southern end of the of an area in New Mexico made famous by the Trinity site, where Oppenheimer and his compadres detonated the first nuclear bomb. My site was far enough away from that area for any remaining radioactivity to ever have gotten that far south and have any effect on me. This was a good thing, since we (my wife) became pregnant in 1988, midway through my studies.

One of the things that stayed with me from that time were the weekly trips to my research plots. We had to travel about an hour into the desert away from all civilization. I was taking physiological measurements on broom snakeweed (Gutierrezia sarothrae); a common weed in this area of the country. I had to get there before daylight to take what are called pre-dawn plant measurements and compare them to changes that occurred during the day, when it got brighter and warmer. We got to the site when it was just getting light and stayed until two or three in the afternoon and took measurements on the hour. We hid in the shade under a shelter that we set up between measurement times. On some really hot days I would take a quick dip in a nearby stock tank if the water looked clean. Remember, the temperatures in southern New Mexico would easily soar over 100 degrees (38 Celsius) in summer.

At sunrise, exactly when the sun hit the site, the coyotes in the area started howling, just for a minute or so. It was absolutely amazing and, in a way, very moving. It sounded so wild and primitive. To think that there were all these eyes watching us and we hardly ever saw them. And then all the snakes (rattlesnakes) that were also observing us, the birds and other critters.

Recently I wrote a couple of posts about the more bashful coyotes in the woods behind our home. They excite our dogs, especially when they start howling at two in the morning. Hearing the howl or even seeing them brings me back to my studies in the Jornada desert and those early mornings when the coyotes graced me with their concert.

Coyotes are amazing animals. Persecuted and killed, they seem to survive, even in our urban areas. These are resilient species and fit into the discussions we had that Sunday morning. Resilience, we biologists sometimes used the word plasticity in place of resilience. At times this seems more appropriate, nature is resilient by being adaptable or what we would call plastic. An interesting concept to ponder.

The Coyotes behind our home (left and center)

All you need is love (2/7/2026)

What a world we live in. A goon squat patrols the streets, murdering unarmed US citizens; what a dystopian world we live in. It looks like that they want to prevent folks from protesting and showing their empathy. In this country where weapons are ubiquitous, it is open season on folks like you when you show empathy for your fellow human beings. Let’s not talk about what they try to do to you if you are against what the current administration is doing and you carry a weapon. It is dangerous what is going on; it really tastes like what Hitler did in Europe. Anything to distract from the Epstein case; we don’t want to know what our current Hitler wannabe (tRump) did with underaged girls. It is very distressing to me.

Initially, I wanted to write a post that detailed the retreat that I attended last week in the mountains on the border of Idaho and Montana. We discussed the settlement of the western part of this country that the USA obtained as part of the Louisiana purchase. I left Missoula for home on a high, much like the retreat last year. We were with eighteen folks and had the best time, intellectually and just in friendship. I knew at least eight of the attendants either from last time or meetings we have on Zoom. It was so familiar and there was an atmosphere of pure love and respect for each other. I liked the discourse and the deep thinking we all did. We all respected each other even when there were disagreements. It almost felt like a meeting at the forum at our Unitarian Universalist Church. This is how our country could and should function.

While Jefferson was highly educated, well cultured, a great writer, scientist, and a wonderful tinkerer and inventor, he absolutely had some non-admirable qualities. Were these a reflection of the times he lived in? For example, in the Declaration on Independence wrote in it that “All men are created equal,” he was a slave holder and considered the Native Americans savages. I do not think tRump believes that all men (human beings) are equal; in his eyes you have the humans (rich, multi-millionaire) and the savages (middle class and poor). He called Somalis savages. I believe he considers many non-citizens barbarians. The emperor has no clothes, that’s for sure.

How the hell do we solve this problem? I have learned one thing over the years: whether you live in the USA, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brazil (the four top countries where my readers come from) or anywhere else in the world, Your Vote Matters! Secondly, I stand on the side of love. As the title says, love is all you need! What the current regime is doing is broadcasting hate. The only way we can conquer hate is with love. Yes, love includes demonstrating for what you believe: our love for our fellow human beings. All of course, by the right have cost the lives of Heather Heyer (Charlottesville), Renee Good or Alex Pretti, and of course all those people who died in the custody of those goons. It needs to stop, this is insanity. All we need is love!

Photo of the day.  It has been crazy weather here in Virginia.  Global warming is showing its cards.
These crazy love birds met each other 50 year ago this past January.  Yes, we have had fights, arguments and alike, but are still able to solve our differences.  Having gone through so much together in our past, nobody would be able to understand our psyche anyway.