Jomegat's Weblog

Today Beth and I walked to the Union Church. One of my caching friends had hidden a cache there, and it had somehow escaped my notice until now. I had been thinking about placing one there, but thinking about it and doing it are two different things. I thought. She did. And actually, she had hidden it exactly in the spot I had intended to.

On the way there, we saw a garter snake.

I haven’t seen many snakes this summer. I think this is actually the only one I’ve seen.

Once we got to the Union Church and found the cache, we headed over to Beth’s first geocache. Not so we could see the cache (but we did check on it), but so that I could check up on a shrub I had marked there last winter. I marked it by tying a length of yarn to it so that I could identify it when it had leaves. I find it funny that I marked it on the winter solstice and checked it on the autumn equinox. Pure coincidence! Here it is with leaves:

I still don’t know what it is, but I’ll dig through my books in a little while. If you look closely, you can see the blue yarn marker right in the center of the frame behind some of the leaves.

While we were out that way, we stopped by Sandogardy Pond for a few minutes. Then we headed home again. After I caught my breath, I put the roof rack on my car and loaded up my newly repaired canoe. David was spending the day with some friends, and I couldn’t talk Beth into coming with me, so I went alone.

I paddled it around the pond in a counterclockwise direction. For some reason, I always paddle around this pond counterclockwise. Maybe because that gets me to the wilder side of the pond more quickly.

I found a bullhead lily (Nuphar lutea) still in bloom.

And several fragrant water lilies (Nymphaea odorata).

I soon found myself at the north end of the pond where the leaves were beginning to redden. Autumn equinox indeed.

When I took the boat out I realized that I had failed to tie the grab loops onto the ends. In Virginia, that would have been illegal, and it may well be here as well. I should look into that. I’ll need to drill the tie holes out again, as I covered them with fiberglass during the repair. It will be easy to do – I just need to do it!

I haven’t been able to get out of the office very much lately as work has been insanely busy. But I had to step out on Wednesday just to keep my sanity. I only went around the block, but I decided to pay a visit to the kousa dogwood I found early this summer. The fruit was ripe!

I plucked one off and examined it. Then bit it open. Here it is:

The texture of the flesh reminded me a lot of pawpaw, but I would imagine that description is not terribly helpful to most people, as pawpaws are not commonly eaten. Maybe mango. The taste was rather like a peach though. Nice and sweet. Unfortunately, the skins are kind of bitter, so that if you get any of that, it almost ruins everything.

I picked about a dozen fruits and brought them back to the office. I had a plastic container there in which I had previously transported some soup. I had eaten the soup for lunch and had washed out the container, so it was perfect. I was intending to do something with them when I got home, but all I managed was to pop them into the fridge.

I intended to do something with them on Thursday too, but that didn’t happen either. But tonight… yes. I ran them through my chinois in an attempt to separate the pulp from the skin and seeds. It mostly worked, but some of the skin did make it through.

I ate the pulp with a spoon, but didn’t offer any to Beth or David (I know Va well enough to know that she would have refused). Since it still had some bitterness in it, I didn’t want them to dismiss it permanently. I’m hoping the day will come when I figure out how to make this stuff irresistible.

In other news…
My canoe is almost ready to go again. All I have to do is let the varnish dry. Well… I’ll have to touch up the gunwales too. I varnished them with the boat upside down, and couldn’t reach the part of the gunwales that was sitting on the sawhorses.

The way I dealt with the bubbles in the fiberglass was by sanding them off and patching them over with small bits of fiberglass cloth (and more epoxy). That worked out pretty well. Once I got the patches sanded down, it was pretty hard to tell where they were.

The varnish instructions said to not use the product unless the temperature was between 50-90F. It’s supposed to get down to 48 tonight, but I did the deed in the garage. I’ve closed the door and left on the lights (about 260 watts total), so I’m thinking it should stay at least 2 degrees warmer in there vs outside. I’m not worried about it.

With any luck, I’ll take it for a cruise tomorrow.

Tonight I will give you a month-old photo of some Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) that grows in my backyard.

While we were eating dinner tonight the power went out. It was raining, so I presume that might have had something to do with it. I had downloaded a couple of blog pages and some email to read, so I went ahead and read that. Then I took Penny outside in the rain and threw sticks for a bit. Then I came in and realized it was the perfect time to do something I had been meaning to do for some time – untangle all the power cords in the “IT” corner. It was a mess!

That kind of work does require light though, so I fished out my camping lantern. This is a solar/crank charged LED lantern, so there are no carbon monoxide fumes to worry about. When it gets dim I just crank it for another minute and we’re good to go for a while.

I found five cords that were plugged in only on one end. I don’t know what they used to power, but I’m guessing two of them were for the old desktop, two were for charging hand-held gaming systems, and one must have powered the old wireless router that we no longer use. I freed an entire surge protector and put the unused cables in a box of old computer parts down in the basement. I also disconnected our old very reliable HP LaserJet 5. That printer was a workhorse, and it still works perfectly. I think we got it in 1995. Unfortunately, we no longer run a computer with a parallel port, so it just sits there gathering dust. I ought to buy a USB-to-parallel converter. That thing is a tank.

About the time it got dark, we all loaded into my car and went to DQ for dessert. While we were out we noticed that the outage is pretty limited. They have power over on the next road.

When we got home, I rounded up a 60 watt inverter and an extension cord. I plugged them into Va’s car and routed the cord through the kitchen into the family room. We now have enough juice to run the essentials. And by “essentials” I mean the cable modem and wireless router. Forget the fridge and well pump! We must have Internet!

Actually, 60 watts doesn’t come close to running either the fridge or the well pump, but it does run the Internet OK. So we do what we can.

Ah! Power’s back!

Yesterday I went with Va’s Adventurer Club to the Miller Farm. This is a working dairy farm in Vermont, and the conference Adventurer leadership team had a full day planned.

We brought two refugee girls with us – one from the Sudan, and the other from Burundi. There were other kids from our club there too, but they came with other adults.

Beth is too old for Adventurers now, but we wanted her to come with us anyhow. She was not the only Pathfinder-aged kid there either. She didn’t want to participate in the “kiddie” things, so she found a barn cat and played with that pretty much the whole time we were there. I think she enjoyed herself.

Of course no trip to a farm is complete without a hayride, so we had one of those.

I was amazed when our host threaded the tractor and wagon through an S-curve made by a barn and an outbuilding. Pretty sure I would have snagged a post and brought the barn to the ground if I had tried that, but he did it masterfully.

They had a half dozen goats on the farm, but the main focus was clearly on the dairy cows. This one tried to eat my pants, but I wasn’t having any of that.

They showed the kids (err… children) how to milk one of the goats, and several of them tried their hand at that – and most were successful. Va gave it a shot too.

They also let them hand milk one of the cows. Va tried that too and said the cow was a lot easier to milk than the goat was.

That surprised me, but I guess it shouldn’t have.

They told the kids that if they wanted to be farmers, they would have to get in shape. So it was exercise time!

In addition to these push-ups, they also did some chin-ups. Then it was off to a field to sow some grass. This is where I tell you that the farm abuts the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant. Really. See the power transmission lines?

Both the state and the power plant test the water and milk at this farm on a regular (and frequent) basis. I don’t know if that would make me feel better or worse if I lived there.

The kids sowed the seeds a little… unevenly.

With that job done, it was time for more fun. The kids got to bob for apples.

As an added bonus, one of the cows calved while we were there.

Ewww! When that was done I turned to one of my friends and remarked that this was just as repulsive in cattle as it is in humans. He agreed!

It wasn’t too long after that that it was time to milk the herd. I think this is my favorite shot of the day:

Beth abandoned the cat and came with us to see that.

We left pretty soon after that. It was a two-hour drive back to Concord, and Jonathan and David met us there for dinner. Then I took Jonathan back to UNH, and finally got home around 9:30pm. I was pretty tired. It was a long, but interesting day!

I made another attempt at photographing the Sand Jointweed (Polygonella articulata) at the church today.

This one is almost passable, but I’m still not 100% satisfied with it. The background is still too cluttered, and this one was lying over instead of erect. I was still fighting the wind though, and this low-lying one was the only one holding still.

After church today we had the second Adventurer meeting of the year. I taught my group about weather, and Va’s group studied rainbows. Va made these cupcakes, which are best appreciated when they have been bitten into.

The kids had a great time.

Tomorrow is the annual Adventurer Fun Day, and we will be taking them to a dairy farm in Vermont. I’ll try to take a few photos and share them here.

David was happy tonight. He finally got over a 2000 rating in chess. Good job, David!

2000 is significant because in some rating systems, that’s the threshold of being a titled player. His 2004 was from chess.com though, not from a “real” chess organization (such as the USCF or FIDE). David says it’s pretty hard to correlate the two, but still… 2004 is pretty good!

He plans to play in another tournament next month, so we’ll see how he does there.

This is a new-to-me plant, Sand Jointweed (Polygonella articulata). It’s not in any of my field guides, so it took me a while to find out what it is.

To tell the truth, I only discovered its identity by happy accident. I was reading Saratoga woods and waterways and there it was. A plant I have seen for a couple of years and not known what it was.

It does not seem to be a very common plant. Wikipedia has no article on it, and Wikimedia Commons doesn’t seem to have any photos of it either. There is not very much information on it at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center either.

This one was growing between the edge of the woods and the edge of the parking lot at the church. I took a hurried shot of it this morning, but I need to get out there and take a more careful one. Maybe then we can think about Wikipedia and the Commons.

I spent yesterday and a good portion of today backpacking with some of the Pathfinders in my club. Last month I taught a class on backpacking during Honors Week, but no one can get the patch until they have actually gone backpacking. We checked that box today.

When we got to the trailhead, we noticed that Google was there.

I had never seen one of these before, and frankly, I was never expecting to. While we were still getting our backpacks out of the cars and paying the use fees to the US Park Service, the Google guys popped out of the forest. They gave some of the kids a partial can of Pringles. I think they were just as excited about having gotten something from the Google guys as they were about getting Pringles.

We set out a little after that, and not far up the trail, I found a neat little spot where the trail comes close to the river. We cooked our lunch there, and the kids all seemed to enjoy the stream. David found a perch in the middle of it, and none of the kids could figure out how he got there. Hint – he can jump farther than they can.

Perhaps two hundred yards upstream from there, the trail crossed the river. We forded it with no issues. David crossed it expertly, but some of the kids were a tad nervous.

We hiked up, and up, and up. I guess we went in about 2.5 miles which doesn’t seem like much, but with seven kids in tow (plus four adults), and all of them carrying more gear than they should have, it took a while. My plan was to hike all the way to East Pond. I have been there before, but by approaching it from the south. We were coming in from the north. All the while, I was looking for a suitable place to pitch our tents and spend the night, and that was a tough job.

The forest there is loaded with deadfall, and we were hard-pressed to find a place big enough to pitch a tent without it landing on a log. I looked at several places, and then pressed through some really thick hemlock and found a flat, mossy place. It was nice – but I suppose we would have to classify it as a bog. But bog is better than log, so we found the driest places available, pitched our tents, and stowed our sleeping bags in them.

I found some winter berry (Gaultheria hispadula), which I had never seen before. I knew it was in one of my books, but couldn’t recall the name until I looked it up at home.

This is in the same genus as wintergreen, and like wintergreen, it is edible. Most white berries are not, and since I didn’t know this plant, I did not sample it. I will next time though. The books say it tastes just like its close cousin.

I also found this bright red mushroom.

I have no idea what kind of mushroom it is, and I haven’t looked it up yet. I think it looks like one from any Mario Brother’s video games, so I’m just going to go with that for now.

While pitching the tents we met one minor disaster. One of our tent poles broke. I effected a repair with some duct tape from my pack, and some “available material.”

This repair was incredibly effective, and I was rather pleased with myself for having made it. I will have to address it on a more permanent basis soon though.

With our tents pitched and bags stowed, we continued up the trail unladen (for the most part).

We didn’t make it all the way to East Pond as I had hoped. Before we got there, turn-around time arrived, so I turned us around and we went back to camp to begin cooking supper while we still had light.

We beat the sun back to our tents and began supper prep. I boiled up a bit of penne pasta with some broccoli, mushrooms, and garlic that I had dehydrated late last week (just in time). Then I tossed in some olive oil. It was very good if I do say so myself.

The penny stoves performed pretty well. I did learn of one drawback to using isopropyl alcohol vs denatured alcohol – isopropyl leaves a lot more soot. Everyone (me included) had black all over themselves by the time they were finished handling their pots. It scrubs off the pots easily enough, but I’ve still got it around my fingernails and in my fingerprints. But I think the visible flame (denatured burns with an invisible flame) was well worth the sooty downside.

We didn’t build a campfire. That was partly because there was no good place to sit in the bog without getting wet bottoms, and partly because we were trying to engage in “leave no trace” camping. I don’t think we left a trace either, and I’m pretty pleased about that.

We turned in around 9:00pm, and I got up around 6:30. I ran into some regular wintergreen in bloom – it quit more than a month ago at my house, but I guess the higher altitude made it bloom later here.

Sorry for the darkness of that shot. It was handheld, and I was in a hurry (nature was calling). I would have gotten a better shot if I had taken the time to set up the tripod and lengthen the exposure time, but… I had to go!

When all the kids were up, I had them strike the tents and load up again. The plan was to hike back down to where he had eaten lunch the previous day. The bog was nice (really! no bugs, and not nearly as wet as one might imagine) but I wanted to eat in a slightly drier spot. That exercise took about two hours. The tent that I repaired has a somewhat porous floor, so Beth’s “pillow” got wet. She stuffed all her clothing in a pillow case, and that meant that all the clothes she had other than her PJ’s were very damp. So she hiked out in her jams.

The stream was just as nice for breakfast as it had been for dinner. I had pancakes (as did several of the kids). Others had oatmeal, and some had dry cereal. We loaded up again at 11:30 (it was a late breakfast) and in thirty more minutes found ourselves at the cars.

Now I have the tents pitched in the back yard to dry the bog off of them. With any luck, I’ll be able to take them down tomorrow, and consider repair strategies for the broken one.

Last night we had a gray tree frog on our glass door.

As I tried to take its picture, it leapt off the door and onto the siding. I stepped out and tried a little flash photography (the above being the result).

I wasn’t sure at first if I had correctly identified it because the color seemed off, so I looked it up. That’s when I found out what the species name versicolor means. Yes, they can change their color like a chameleon, only not nearly as fast. I think that’s pretty cool. No wonder they always seem to match the bark of the tree they are on. I don’t often see them, but I don’t think they are uncommon.

Today before church started I went out to the Pathfinder trailer to fetch a backpack. On the way I spotted a plant I had never noticed before.

I thought it looked like a little tiny St Johnswort, and as it turns out, that’s exactly what it was. I was running late so I didn’t have a chance to take a careful photo of it. We’ll have to settle for this very hurried hand-held shot instead. I read up on this one too, and now I think it may have been a good idea to be late for what I was doing rather than pass this one up. The blossom only opens when there is strong sunlight. Maybe I’ll get another chance soon.

I sure hope so.