Not knowing what you want (9/29/2021)

My last installment I wrote about the crossroads I was at and my trip to Maine. During this trip, I had time to hike, and spend a lot of time in nature. The area we visited in Maine has a lot of natural preserves owned by foundations that are open to the public, which were absolutely wonderful. We also visited the arboretum in Augusta and a State Park. Everything to do with nature and plants really floats my boat. My daughter and I spent our time identifying ferns and looking at other plants.

One of the photographs I took in coastal Maine at the Wolfe's Neck Woods State Park.  One of the few state run places.

Vacations are nice that way; no pressure to watch the news, my daughter and partner cooked, and I had more time to catch up on my reading. Just great therapy for a few days before getting back to the grind of working. I am reminded of the fact why many folks in Europe have six weeks vacations compared to our measly one to three weeks. I strongly believe that vacation actually increases the productivity at work. I have noticed that mine has gone up these two weeks since I have been back. In the past, I explained to my supervisor that when I get stuck in my course design, it is best for me to go for long walks in the woods and mull things over. Honestly, I am not kidding, I really play things out in my head while walking; ideas come to me, away from the computer.

But that is really not what I was planning to write about in this post this time. Or maybe it is all related.

What I did want to write more about is those crossroads, my time in Maine and what I am reading at the moment. During our walks, I tried to explain to my daughter that one of the things I would love to do is become a certified forest bathing therapist. I explained to her what it was and what therapists do. You are supposed to take an expensive course to be able to call yourself a therapist, and I am sure you are considered a charlatan if you sell yourself as a therapist without the official certification, or worse, you can get sued by some forest bathing association.

That somehow gets me to the book I am reading and the quote that struck me and was the prompt for this post: “The problem with not knowing what you want is that you want everything.” I found this in a book written by Scott Stillman entitled “Nature’s Silent Message.” Darn it, you may want to put “to do” behind the words “want” and you have me, or as my mother always accused me to know a little about a lot (too many things) and be “a master of nothing.” I have been told that I am a darn decent teacher and hopefully I try to research the subjects I teach enough that I am credible as well. I study a lot of bonsai videos, but I still consider myself a dilettante. The writing I am doing here for this blog never really took off; probably because I am all over the place and not focused enough. I have 200 to 300 steady readers; I am definitely not an influencer, and neither is my Instagram site. But then, do I want to be that, or just comfortable with a few steady readers?

I realize that the critique of Stillman’s book is that it meanders and is all over the place, and so is my blog, I am afraid. But hopefully is has a common thread or in the end it comes back where I started. I just wonder if I need to focus, just on my bonsai; or on my teaching; on my environmental stance and opinions; on my biological and ecological background; on nature or forest bathing; on (god forbid) my political views; empathy; on sailing ( which I have had no time for the past two years); on my love for wine and microbrews; food and cooking; on reading; or just on (my) life and musing on what is going on around me. If you look at my subject list it is exhaustive. Crazy!

I would love to hear from you all what you think, what you prefer to read. Because I know that if I do not know what to write about (or what you all want me to write about) I will want to write about everything, to paraphrase Mr. Stillman. The story of my multifarious life.

Although I rarely post a selfie in my blog, here it is.  A happy Maine picture, waiting for lunch.

Crossroads (9/14/2021)

I have been somewhat at a crossroads in my life and on the other hand at peace with being there. Looking back at these past few weeks, it has been an interesting time, as it probably is for many of you or eventually will become for many of you. Being part of the so called “sandwich generation.” I am not sure which generation the top half of the bread is a which is the bottom, but although one, the parent part, has been reduced to only one, it has become progressively heavier or thicker. The kid, we only have one daughter, part of that sandwich is progressively getting thinner or lighter. But she has not gone away all together, in particular since she decided that she is going to get married early next fall and she wants to do it here in Virginia while she lives in Maine. So, you get the message, it looks like we will need to do a lot of leg work. We have absolutely no problem with the marriage itself, we just hoped she would elope (not really, that is just me joking).

In the middle of August, we moved my father-in-law from his spacious condo to an apartment in an independent living facility. Since he is 94, hard of hearing, technically blind in one eye, and has difficulty walking, the task fell on us to downsize him. He is still very much with it, thank goodness. But it was a lot of work going through his home and figuring what to take and what would go to our home or what we would have to take to Good Will. I think my back has finally recuperated somewhat. But our home is still one big tripping hazard. We look like hoarders! But a lot of his stuff is much better quality than ours which we accumulated in our student days of the late 1980s. Yes, we bought some new later with our limited budget.

However, it is not over. During the past year and a half of COVID, I did most of the shopping for my father-in-law. We were hoping that this would be a thing of the past with his move. Before he lived 10 minutes away, which has now become a 25-minute drive (each way). But the orders are still pouring in: peanut butter cup ice cream, lactose free milk, Post grape nuts, just to name a few of the essentials. Today I ordered a chair for his shower. His dry-cleaning lady misses him and asks my whether he is eating enough at his new place.

There are good things too. He gave us (me) his car, which is 9 years younger than mine and the same make and model. My car has 313,000 miles on the odometer, his had 31,000. I am paying is forward, I think, and I’ll be driving my car up to Maine this weekend to give it to our daughter and her fiancé, in the hope it holds up and they can use it as a second car. But Hondas should be able to do it for a while, I hope. (Postscript … I am editing this post while sitting in Maine. The car made it, and everything is fine).

Typical Jersey turnpike breakfast for champions like me.  

So yes, watching people getting older, talking about a daughter getting married, and approaching 70 in a few years (I am 68 right now), makes you wonder when it will be my time. These are the crossroads I was talking about. Should I retire or not retire, that is the question. Reading an article in the newspaper this week that Jill Biden who is 70 returned to the classroom to teach was somewhat interesting if not encouraging. Hey, I can do that too! I had a physical just before Labor Day, and while the words physical exam is somewhat disappointing, I came through it with flying colors. It was just a set of blood test which showed I was more-or-less healthy. It does make you feel good, and it was another piece in the puzzle in making that decision on retirement. Maybe I can try to break Jill Biden’s record.

There you have it. These are some of the things messing with my head and with my life. My crossroads right now. Not necessarily bad. This is why I am at peace with what is to come in my life; maybe more than ever.

Afghanistan and the Taliban (8/19/2021)

Yesterday, I checked the latest visits to my blogs. It is fun to see how many hits I get and if you all look at some of the other posts of mine in addition to the front page. Naturally, the top ten get a lot of hits, since I posts those on the right hand side of my blog. In other words, it will be difficult to bump those of the list. We may get the occasional new number 10; however, the top 5 is pretty darn fixed.

Now, I cannot see who you all are, but I can see the country you come from, what browser type you are using and the operating system you are using. But the post that you are looking at is the most fun. It struck me that that someone looked at this one post from 2017 entitled “Education is for weaklings, really?” In this post I discuss how our religious conservatives or what we probably should call are religious Taliban was railing over the airwaves that education poisons the minds of people. I discussed in that post how they favored the lowest common denominator.  If you read the post and my bio, you know I am somewhat educated and that my family is educated as well.  I am proud of it.  Moreover, I am an educator.  I taught at the university level in New Mexico, in southwestern Ohio, and here in the Tidewater of Virginia.  I am a trainer (adult educator) in my current job.

I was rereading my post last night and here on the news we learned that the Taliban had again taken over Afghanistan after we the U.S. decided to pull out. Yes, it was of course tRump who put it all in motion and Biden who completed the job. I agree both presidents are at fault, and I do not want to go into that argument today.  It had to be done, I guess. It is just a damn shame, we really tried to build a nation, educate women and children, and we will see, what will happen. The Taliban does not have a good reputation when it comes to education of women and arts and sciences, in general.

This is why I felt it so poignant that the education “sucks” post of mine popped up on the recently read list of mine. What a coincidence that it popped up!  I have always thought that the religious fanatics in this country are no better than the Taliban in Afghanistan. I initially thought they were more subtler in trying to take over and dominate the country. However, with tRump they were emboldened. They put in two or three religious fanatics on the supreme court, and who knows how many others on the court, so now we have their form of sharia law. On January 6th this year they stormed Congress in an attempt to violently overthrow the Government. Moreover, they are as racist as the Taliban and armed.

The US or Q or whatever Taliban at the US capital on 1-6-2021

Concluding, as educated folks, educators, and at least pro democracy people (and hopefully liberals), we need to my vigilant and resist the religious Taliban that is raising its ugly head in this country before they turn us into a white (racist) Afghanistan.

The AMOC is going amok (8/10/2021)

This week we learn that global warming may have some real strange bedfellows. Ice age anyone? Unbelievable, now I have to concede to some of the conservative pundits who were telling us that the climate is all cyclical, and we were due for an ice age and not for warming out of control. Where did I or all these doomsday prognosticators go wrong? Here I wrote a whole post on how things were not cyclical, but we were trapped in a death spiral. No, now we are learning that the movie “The day after tomorrow” may actually be spot on.

This was a scene from this past winter, but can you just imagine walking in the woods on August 10, in coastal Virginia and experiencing this.  Yes, I have been in a snowstorm in Wyoming on July 3rd, but that was at high elevation.

What changed? Well, it is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that seems to be getting screwed up. Now what the hell is he talking about? The AMOC going amok?

Very simply put the gulf stream is part of AMOC, a circulation of ocean currents that brings warmer waters to the northern hemisphere and the temperate climate to western Europe.  Part of the AMOC is a colder flow back over the ocean floor. Cold water is heavier and where the warm and the cold meet (for instance the Labrador Straights) it provides great fish habitat.

This past week two papers were published, one by a climate scientist (Niklas Boers) and one by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who both claim that the circulation is weakening, slowing down or may actually stopping. This may actually happen abruptly, or more likely by the end of this century (no one is sure yet). The result should be the end of warm temperate weather in Europe and North America. North America and Europe will likely experience an ice age like in the movie; maybe not overnight but fairly rapidly. In addition, there will be droughts in these areas and in west Africa and because the current actually pulls water away from the east coast of the U.S. there will be extra sea level rise. Exciting isn’t it!

But why is this happening?

Therein lies the 10-million-dollar question isn’t it. The cause is global warming. While that may seem crazy, but all that ice and melting (cold) freshwater runoff (read too much runoff and caused by global warming) from the melting Greenland glaciers that enters the ocean is essentially interrupting, weakening, blocking the AMOC. Somewhat like a feedback loop, it may actually usher in a new ice age. While the other ice ages may have been caused by the earth’s shift on its axis, this may be caused indirectly by humankind.

It would sure be an interesting scenario to think about, I am not sure if scientists really know if this will really happen and if so, how severe it would be. It is just fascinating and scarry at the same time to see and think about what is happening now that we humans are influencing the natural world as opposed of being part of the natural world. There are so many things happening around us presently that never happened before, at least not at such a large scale like the floods, hurricanes and wildfires.

20 to 7-year storms (7/30/2021)

There was a report in one of the professional publications that I read that predicts that what we call in our profession 20-year storms are shifting and becoming 7-year storms. Now that is an interesting concept that I teach in my classes on stormwater, in particular in the class entitled “Where the Water Goes.” The class has a subtitle Hydrology for ESC and SW Inspectors. ESC stands for Erosion and Sediment Control and SW for Stormwater.

So, what does a x-year (24-hour) storm means and what do these values mean? I tell my students that those famous 100-year storms do not occur only once every 100 year. I remember well that in 2003 we had two 100-year storms in one week, followed the next week by hurricane Isabel, which dumped another 100-year storm in our area. As you can imagine that September the ephemeral ponds behind our home were full to the brim, a thing that usually only occurs in February. They are usually dry in the month of September. Those two 100-year storms in a row actually created a major issue during Isabel; the soil was saturated, and the trees were extremely unstable because of this. Trees were falling all over the place during the hurricane. I lost 13 trees in my back yard that day.

In a simple explanation, I tell my students that the concept of so many year storms is based on statistics. For example, a 100-year storm tells us that the storm has a likelihood of 1% (or 100%/100) of occurring any day of the year. A 20-year storm has a chance of occurring 5% (100%/20) any day of the year, and so on. Somehow, NOAA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, could not find a better name for this phenomenon than calling it a so-many-year storm. In particular, since if it occurred today, it has the same probability of occurring again tomorrow. So, although rare what happened in 2003 having three 100 year storms in two weeks, it was statistically explainable.

So, I looked at the data for my home. A 20-year 24-hour storm at my home dumps around 6.5 inches of rain or 165 mm in those 24 hours, according to NOAA. In the good old days, a 7-year storm drops 5 inches or 127 mm in the same 24 hours. In other words, as a result of climate change the 7-year storm at my home would increase 1.5 inches or almost 40 mm of rain. Surprise, this is something we are all experiencing, thunderstorms are increasingly getting stronger and more severe.

I realize this is only an example for one place, but in the past weeks we have seen similar examples in Germany, Belgium, Arizona, and China just to name a few where we are seeing that storms are getting increasingly severe and dumping more water. Naturally this is not helped by all the development around us and the imperviousness that we are creating in our watersheds. It all means more runoff and flooding. The problem on top of this is the imperviousness that we appear to have created and are increasingly creating in neighborhoods of disadvantaged racial minority groups.

Some of these things going on with our climate and our earth are most likely very difficult to reverse. We will have to learn to live with them and adapt to them. That is part of the job I do professionally. I am part of a group that teaches stormwater management. We teach designers, developers, and regulators that it is best to try to infiltrate all that stormwater, by minimizing the impervious areas such as parking lots and roads. We also tell them that they need to preserve the soil, not compact it, so that water can infiltrate. Plant trees and shrubs, minimize lawns. Trees and shrubs intercept rain in their canopies and often only 40% of the rain makes it down to the ground. Are my students listening? Some, few are. But we keep working on them. But we don’t get discouraged, it is the right thing to do.

This is a picture I took a few years ago of a rain garden/bioretention area in Charlottesville, Virginia.  We teach students that the placement of ponds like these help with the infiltration and cleanup of stormwater and hopefully reduce the flooding danger.