Jomegat's Weblog

I was at Sandogardy Pond Saturday and saw this spider hanging out on the surface of the pond. I think it’s pretty cool the way they can take advantage of surface tension to walk on water.

In other news, I just wanted to say that I am astounded Vermont has not been getting more news coverage following TS Irene. In my blogroll I have a link to Little Bang Theory. I have been reading his blog for a year or two. He lives in Western MA near Southern VT, and he has some jaw-dropping photos of the devastation there. His account is heartbreaking.

Next month the Pathfinders are scheduled to have our annual Fall Camporee at Molly Stark State Park. We expect clubs from all over VT, NH, and ME. But I just don’t see how it’s possible that we will be able to camp at Molly Stark after looking at the photos. Google Maps has removed portions of route 9 in southern VT, because Irene has removed portions of it from the face of the earth. Molly Stark is on a closed section of that road (which is a major thoroughfare in that area).

There’s a chance that I will deploy with ACS after all. We do not have an agreement with the state of VT, so setting things up will take longer. Also, I don’t know what good a warehouse would do, since it is not possible to deliver goods to the stricken areas of VT via the roads. You can’t get there from here!

9:12pm Sunday
Irene is finished here. There’s still a little rain and wind, but nothing major. We were getting a little cabin fever this evening, so Va and I went into Tilton for some takeout. There was a tree down in the road, so we had to take an alternate route. We brought dinner home, and afterwards, I drove to Concord to do some work on the school’s network. They will have school tomorrow, though most of the public schools cancelled classes (too far) in advance. I guess they’ll get to make that up in June.

2:31pm Sunday
We lost power for thirty minutes. I had just put on some water to make Ramen noodles. It had almost come to a boil when we lost power, so I went ahead and added the noodles and let them “coast” to the finish line. Then I forgot about them. They did cook, but they got a little squishy. Then power came back after less than a 30-minute outage. If this is the worst that happens to us, then we can count ourselves blessed.

1:43pm Sunday
Irene seems to have run out of steam. We never got more than a heavy downpour, so I guess we should count our blessings. Radar shows that most of the rain has passed to our North (even though the “eye” is to our southwest, coming up the NY/MA border.

10:00am Sunday, Aug 28, 2010
It’s raining pretty hard right now, but not more than it does during a good thunderstorm. It’s a bit windy, but not too windy. I’d guess 10-15 MPH and coming from the east. I put on my rain pants and rain coat and went out to get the paper. Penny came along too.

She brought me her football, so I kicked it a couple of times. I didn’t stay out long though.

8:30pm Saturday, Aug 27, 2011
We started hearing thunder here tonight a little after 8:00pm. I’ll try to update this page as the storm progresses (as long as I have power anyhow).

This evening when I got home I battened down the hatches. I moved some lawn chairs into the basement and stowed some of Beth’s yard toys under the deck. (Stowing under the deck and battening down hatches both sound nautical).

I also put away a few garden tools. Basically, I was looking for anything outside that would make a good missile and securing it.

Then I went out and picked more blackberries. I got about a quart I guess, but there are still a lot of red ones out there. If they survive the storm, I should get another gallon or so. I was surprised to find a spring peeper hopping along a blackberry cane and from leaf to leaf. It was about three feet off the ground. I had no idea they’d ever hang out in a blackberry patch, but there you go!

It’s not supposed to be terrible up here in New Hampshire. We’ve got CT, RI, and MA to blunt the force of the storm. Still, it could get nasty. We stocked up on food and made sure we have lots of water on hand. I think we’re good for a week with no power, and we can make do after that.

I am ready to deploy with ACS-DR in case we need to open a multi-agency warehouse. I’ve written here several times about training for that, and this will be my first deployment if we’re called out (and if I don’t have my hands full here). I might be able to work the warehouse for a week, but we’ll see. There’s no training like on-the-job training!

I found a couple of these in the woods this evening. I don’t know what they are with any confidence, but I sure think they look cool.

I found out yesterday that Beth and the neighbor kids have been catching frogs and keeping them in a 14 gallon tote out in the yard. They’ve been feeding them bugs. I went and had a look, and saw that the largest of them (a green frog, Rana clamitans) was not the picture of health:

Maybe I should call that a gangrene frog. I questioned her and found that they’ve had these frogs incarcerated for about a week. I told her that was not good for the frogs and pointed to this one as a prime example. After I took its portrait (fit more for an amphibian medical journal than for a blog), we took them the the catchment pond where they were captured and set them free.

They had three species in there, or maybe four. R. clamitans cell mates included a couple of American toads (Bufo americanus), two spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer), and perhaps a bullfrog – I couldn’t tell if they were bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) or green frogs, because they were pretty young and hadn’t developed ridges yet.

So it looks like the frogs are making a come back at my pond now that I don’t have neighbors draining it out on me or hiring pest companies to poison my yard. And I’ve told Beth I don’t mind if they catch frogs as long as they don’t keep them incarcerated over night. Catch and release girls!

This evening I walked the trail through my wood lot. As I emerged from the forest, I spotted a dead wasp, head-down in a white pine sapling. It looks like she was mooning someone when she expired.

There were several ripe blackberries near the mooning wasp, and I ate several handfuls before deciding to capture one that was growing near the ground:

Incidentally, I have a new favorite way to eat these. I put about a half cup of vanilla ice cream in a bowl and then add about a cup of blackberries. Then I cover the whole thing with some Orange Crush dessert topping (basically, a syrup). Man… that is good. I had another bowl of that tonight. My hope is that since the bulk of this is fresh blackberries, it’s basically good for me (sugar from the ice cream and syrup aside).

As I made my way through the yard to check out the catchment pond, this little pickerel frog leaped out of my path.

I think this is the first one of these I’ve seen this summer.
They aren’t nearly as common as American toads, green frogs, bullfrogs, wood frogs, or spring peepers. Those six species are the only frogs I’ve seen on my property.

I mid-identified the small furry mammal in Wednesday’s post, and I am super-embarrassed about that. In the back of my head, I had two names – ermine, and Neovision vision [sic]. I Googled Neovision vision which corrected it to Neovison vison, and when that turned up an American mink, I figured it was solved.

But it was not. I should have pursued the other name as well. An ermine is better known as a stoat, and has the binomial name Mustela erminea. In winter their coats turn white except for the tip of the tail, which remains black.

We saw one of these at the church a couple of years ago so I took several photos and sent one to Fish & Game for an id. And they said it was a stoat.

I organize my photos using a program called digikam (which is an open source package available for Linux, which is my preferred OS). It allows me to tag my photos, and I usually tag by binomial name. I already had a tag for Neovison vison, but there were no photos listed. This is not unusual, because sometimes I archive my photos to DVD to free up hard drive space. This is necessary, because I have taken 30,000 photos in the past three years. When I archive them away, the tags stay in digikam, but the photos disappear. If I bring them back onto my laptop, they show up still tagged.

I suspect N. vison was probably a mistaken tag from when I found the M. erminea, but when I saw the tag, I used that as confirmation.

And that was incorrect! I also have a tag for M. erminea, and here’s who I found under that:

Sorry for the mistake! I will be more careful from now on!

Today when Jonathan and I got to work, I happened to notice a small, furry animal just outside the parking garage. My first thought was that it was a ferret, but I knew that was wrong. As soon as we were parked, I asked Jonathan to take my laptop upstairs to the office while I went in search of this critter.

He was still there, but he was fast. I was fiddling with the camera trying to get the setting right as he dashed in and out of the shadows. Twice he went into the stairwell – a dead end. The first time he did this, he quickly slipped past me. I followed at a distance, still fiddling with exposure times and f-stops. Then he returned to the stairwell again. This time I blocked his exit while I took several shots.

None of them did this creature justice, and I am most definitely not happy with any of them. I guess that’s what makes flower photography so comparatively easy. Sure, they are oft times buffeted by the wind, but they can’t run away!

Believe it or not, I was able to recall a semblance of the Latin name before I knew the common name. Ferret? Ermine? I thought “Neovision vision”, but Google told me “Neovison vison”. Or as most people would say, American Mink.

Update: What a dope I am! This is not Neovison vison at all, but rather, a stoat, aka ermine, aka Mustela erminea. A stoat has a white underbelly and a black-tipped tail. A mink does not.

Here are my awful shots:

I didn’t keep him hemmed in for more than a minute. But now I wonder how he made out after I left.

Last year I drafted the requirements for two new Pathfinder honors: Fire Fighting, and Fire Fighting – Advanced. I submitted them for review to the forum at pathfindersonline.org because there were a handful of volunteer firefighters who frequented the forum. Their first suggestion was that the first honor was more of a Fire Safety honor, so we decided to change them to Fire Safety and Fire Fighting. They also replaced some of my nonsense with material that made more sense.

New honors are introduced to the Pathfinder organization every year, and in the North American Division, they go through a well-defined process. One of the requirements is that they be piloted by at least three clubs. One of the firefighters on the forum took the honor with him to Romania and piloted it there (where it was approved, and is now part of the curricula in one of the European Divisions).

Before he left for Europe, the guys on the forum and I were all pretty happy with with the requirements, so by early winter, I approached Paul Watson to see if he’d take it under his wing.

Paul wears many hats, the most famous being his moose hat:

He is a member of my local church, and serves the Northern New England Conference as our Associate Pathfinder Director. He is also a volunteer fire fighter, so he was the perfect person to have shepherd this honor through our conference. He first presented it at our Leadership Training back in January 2010. Then in the spring, we began working on it in our club in Concord. Paul came several times, but we did not manage to finish it before the Pathfinder year ended.

So when fall rolled around, we invited him back to work on it some more. We continued working on it as Paul was available throughout the year. But still, we did not finish it! So I scheduled a special summer session for last Sunday, and we finally knocked out the last requirement (and repeated a few of the most fun ones).

Paul wanted to be absolutely certain that all the requirements were covered thoroughly, and we hit every single option spelled out in the requirements. He made a few tweaks to the requirements, and I have fed those back to the Pathfinder forum.

Now “all” we have to do is get the kids to evaluate the honor, see that it gets piloted by one more club, pull all the information together, and have our conference Youth Director submit it to the NAD. Then they get to review it, make any adjustments they feel are necessary, and accept (or reject) it. I’m pretty confident that they will accept it though.

So finally, I leave with with a few shots from our last pilot session.

One other thing – we did not tell Beth beforehand that she should only pull the trigger on the fire extinguisher for a second or less. She just about unloaded the fire extinguisher – but the fire did go out! Paul was telling her, “Stop, stop, stop! That’s enough!” but in her excitement, she just hung onto the handle. So… now we know that this has to be stressed ahead of time!

Yesterday we had a special summer session for our Pathfinder Club so we could finish off the Fire Safety and Fire Fighting honors our club has been piloting for… 18 months. More on that in another post.

While we were waiting for Paul to show up (he has been our instructor), I went to the trailer to straighten up some of the mess we managed to make when we put things away in the dark last Thursday. As I approached the trailer, a little sparrow chirped loudly as it hopped through the grass in front of me.

But I was on a mission. I noted the bird and moved on. However, Joy was not on a mission. She noted the bird and gently followed. She managed to actually catch it!

I was pretty surprised to say the least. I have never caught a bird. I guess this one had not yet learned to fly. I quickly abandoned my mission and went into photographer mode. Beth saw what we were doing and she came to see. Joy let her pet “her” bird:

I allowed the other kids to approach one at a time. Eventually, the bird hopped up Joy’s arm and onto her shoulder. Then she hopped up on top of her head. She deposited “sign” on her sleeve in two different places, but I think Joy thought it was worth it. She returned the fledgling to the woods where she captured it after a little while, and we began working on the honors a little while after that.