summer

Image of a tick stealing a meal from: www2.outdoorchannel.com Ticks are blood-sucking arthropods that can act as vectors for various diseases in both animals and humans. A recent article published in Frontiers in Zoology summarizes findings that suggest ticks may also be considered venomous ectoparasites. For example, Ixodes holocyclus is a species of Australian tick whose saliva can induce paralysis in humans and animals. According to the new article, about 8% of known tick species can induce paralysis. Ornithodoros savignyi ticks even secrete a lethal salivary toxin (for mice at least).…
So I somehow forgot to mention when I went on maternity leave and promised to post on Thursdays that I meant I would start this Thursday, since I was on vacation last week.  Sorry 'bout that.  I will shamelessly blame the baby and sleep deprivation again. We spent much of last week visiting family near Boston, which was lovely - the transition with K. and C. really took it out of us.  I'm not a high-stress person, I tend to be pretty relaxed, but we really needed a break after two very hectic weeks and a lot of emotion.  Among other things, we had sent K. and C. home two days before the movie…
"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." -Groucho Marx Now that the solstice is behind us and summer is officially here (for most of us), it's time to start enjoying the greatest fruits of the season. With the technical difficulties of the great scienceblogs migration (hopefully) behind us, I think I've discovered how to successfully bring a weekly song back to my weekend posts, too! Have a listen to Aimee Mann as she sings one of my favorites of hers, Little Bombs. Out where I live, in Oregon, now is the season that one of my favorite fruits…
"Soon the earth will tilt on its axis and begin to dance to the reggae beat to the accompaniment of earthquake. And who can resist the dance of the earthquake, mon?" -Peter Tosh Every year, there are two special days where every place on Earth receives the same amount of sunlight -- 12 hours -- split evenly between night and day: the equinoxes! Image credit: timeanddate.com. Like all known objects that revolve around another due to gravity, the Earth rotates along its journey around the Sun. But on those two days of the equinox (from the Latin, meaning "equal nights"), the Earth's axis-of-…
Greenpa asked me to talk about how we cook in the summer, and that's a very good subject to talk about - what does a woman who "dances with wood" and cooks on a wood cookstove all winter long do in the summer?  Well, part of the answer is that when we're lazy, we use the electric stove that came with the house. Now from an environmental standpoint, electric stoves are a pretty lousy option.  Using electricity to create heat mostly means burning coal in the US.  Now my family purchases renewable electricity and also my region uses a fair bit of hydro-power, but that's something of a grey area…
Some parents are soccer parents. Some parents are baseball or gymnastics parents. Some drive constantly to swim, cheer, play volleyball or cricket. My kids do swim, play basketball in winter and pick-up baseball anytime, but our primary family sport is fruit picking. Historically speaking, berrying is children's work - one sent the kids out into the woods for the afternoon and if they are not eaten by bears (think _Blueberries for Sal_, _Farmer Boy_, and other classic treatments of the "meet the bear in the woods while berrying") they come back with a pail of berries for canning. We, of…
When the heat wave finally broke this week, I found myself dying to cook again. After days of it being too damn hot to cook - and too hot to eat anything that had been cooked, when salad and corn on the cob were the extent of my culinary ambitions, food appealed again. This is good, because the list of things you can do with raw zucchini is somewhat limited and we had reached the "For the love of god, someone, please cook something with these damned zucchini" stage. So we did. And with the tomatoes, the blueberries, the eggplant, the kale, etc.... Zucchini make wonderful dried zucchini…
We shared two cherry tomatoes this morning, the first ripe ones of the year, and that, to us, is the proof we're fully into high summer. If I don't pick the zucchini every day, I'm sorry. The weather is hot and sultry, the apricots are close to ripe and the peaches are following. The boys drown in fruit every day - it is the one thing I can't say no to. The fireflies sparkle like fireworks. The kids live in the creek and under the sprinkler, and seem to stretch out daily, getting taller, stronger, learning new things. Tonight we're headed to a baseball game (local minor league) - what…
I came home last Monday night after three days spent in Washington working on business for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, and it was one of the most glorious homecomings I could imagine. Not only was there the joy of coming home to my boys and Eric, but also my home is more like paradise in June than at any moment. (Mac the Marshmallow waiting to welcome me home) We're headed into the transition point from spring to summer, and you can feel it. The spring bulbs are behind us, the peonies are in bloom, the animals are fat and happy on lush growth, and there are jars of…
It was a lovely weekend with lots of friends, Eli's belated birthday party, spring, peace, quiet, music, good stuff. My house is even clean. I mean, well, for me. I'm too happy to worry about anything. So I got nothing today. I do, however, have a contract with science blogs that requires three posts a week. Well nothing but a contract and a mind on summer, which is, I'm told, icumen in... And one of the top songs of the last 1000 years! What have you got?