If you thought this post was disturbing, think about the results of a new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which was reported in various newspapers yesterday.

The newspaper reports state that the study predicts:

a future of nasty extreme weather [that] also includes fewer freezes and a longer growing season….extreme events are the kinds of things that have the biggest impacts, not only on humans but on mammals and ecosystems…the scariest results had to do with heat waves and warm nights. Everything about heat waves — their intensity, length and occurrence — worsens.

That’s the big picture. There are little picture disasters happening right heer not far from Mother Mountain. In my local newspaper today is a piece about an alien (to this area) species of turtles (red-earred slider) being dumped into various park lakes and ponds because those who owned them didn’t want them anymore.

Home for red-eared sliders and other dumped species is south and way west of the Catskills. Right now, no one knows what kinds of diseases those turtles might have brought to this brave new (for them) world. All kinds of weird domino-falling stuff happens in nature.

That’s why scientists insist you not expose native species to invaders. Too much isn’t known.

One naturalist suggests that:

…some turtles, like red-eareds in Chinatown, are kept in unsanitary pens covered with visible fungus …. Fungus has been linked worldwide with the death of frogs. Harriman State Park’s native endangered northern cricket frogs are almost gone.

Could it be that the fungus introduced by turtles from Chinatown was what did in Harriman’s cricket frogs?

As a city girl from Yonkers who never owned anything that grew and needed to be fed until I was in my twenties, it sometimes amazes me what an affinity I have for the natural environment. When I moved here to the middle of the woods, I spent my first fall digging up naturally growing ground cover and flowering plants and moving them closer to the house.
Often, as I stand outside and absorb the forms of things out here — fallen trees and broken stumps, stones from boulders to rocks — I see them as natural sculptures. The esthetics of the natural environment. Sometimes I think about moving this limb here, that stone there — creating my own nature-based formations.
Alongside the long, steep driveway, there’s what’s left of the bottom of a tree that fell long, long ago. It’s looks like a four foot high spire rising out of the debris of the seasons. One side of it has rotted away on the inside, down to six inches from the ground. I’m thinking that, in the spring, I will try to find some flowering vine that tolerates shade and plant it in the hollow dead trunk — a combination of nurture and nature, the living and the dying.
Appropriate for this place, this time.

Uh oh, the cat’s still outside, I say to her as I walk over to open the door. She comes running after me, calling Who died? Somebody died? Who just died?
She gets mad when I shout so she can hear me. When I don’t shout, she keeps asking What? What?
What? What? is what I said when I got on the scale this morning. This is the most I’ve ever weighed, including when I was pregnant. I eat when I’m bored. And I’m bored almost every evening when all I can do is sit and watch television with her. And shout so that she can hear me when I try to explain what’s happening on the small screen in response to her periodic assertions that she doesn’t understand.
Stop! Stop! I’ve got to stop eating so much. And I’ve got to stop shouting so much. It gives me a headache.

On the news today, a report of a stingray leaping into a boat and piercing an 81 year old man with its barbed tail. Imagine that — a fish several feet wide just flinging itself out of the water into a boat! Not very natural behavior for this graceful ocean dweller.
Yesterday, a herd of wild elephants went on a rampage and killed a sleeping family of five in Bangladesh.
Today, our government announced that the precious ozone layer above the Antarctic is the largest ever — 10.6 million square miles.
Personally, I believe that we humans are hell bent on destroying our planet. I found an interesting article that lists many of the environmental catastrophes that we are currently instigating by our assumption that we have the right to rape and plunder this planet for immediate gains in personal comfort and wealth. (The article also attributes these catastrophes to breaking “god’s” laws about how to deal with the natural world. I’m igoring that part of it all because of my non-belief system. But for those who believe, it makes sense as well.) I quote below the best of “Our Dying World.”

The elderly usually don’t have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do.

I have to admit, there are things that I regret not doing. I think I would have regretted not taking care of my mother.
POST SCRIPTS:
UN reports increasing ‘dead zones’ in oceans

The number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in the world’s seas and oceans has risen more than a third in the past two years because of fertilizer, sewage, animal waste, and fossil-fuel burning, United Nations specialists said yesterday.

Loss of species that pollinate is cause for global alarm, researchers say.

Birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life are losing population, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Research Council. This “demonstrably downward” trend could damage dozens of commercially important crops, scientists warned, because three-fourths of all flowering plants depend on pollinators for fertilization.

Every year about this time of year I wind up with a sinus infection. This is the time when the windows get closed and the heat gets turned on. We have forced air heat, which makes things even worse. And then there’s also all of that leaf mold being blown around outside.
It always starts with a drip down the back of my throat. I start to feel the glands under my jaw getting larger and tender to the touch. Then my sinuses start to get stuffy. Within four days, I am at the doctor’s office getting an antibiotic because, although the whole thing begins with allergies and a virus, all of that yuck in my head is a great breeding ground for bacteria as well. I have, in the past, been laid up for almost two weeks.
This year I was ready. I was ready with Vitamin C, Echinacea, Oregano leaf and oil, Goldenseal, Zicam swabs and Zicam mouth spray, and saline nasal spray. At the first sign (the scratchy throat) I quarantined myself for one day and spent the day dosing myself every three hours with all of the above. In the morning and at night, I added a Benedryl to the drill.
The mouth spray pretty much kills your taste buds for the duration, so the orange juice I consumed throughout the day tasted like metal. As did everything else I ate. But that’s a small price to pay for avoiding being miserable for two weeks.
The kalilily cold cure means having a day with no stress — a day when you can rest, drink all the juice and tea you can stand, and dose yourself every three hours with immune system strengthening products. Over the course of one day, I ingested about 3,000 mg of Vitamin C, 1300 mg of Enchinacea, 900 mg of Oregano, four droppersfull of Goldenseal extract, and a quart and a half of orange juice. At night, I rubbed Vicks on my swollen glands and wrapped my neck in a towel.
That was yesterday. Today, except for some stuffiness in my sinuses (which I tend to have all winter) I am feeling fine. Well, also except for the stubborn cold sore, on which I’m using Abreva. What I should have done at the first sign of the cold sore is start taking L-lysine, which is an amino acid that that makes one’s system inhospitable for the Type 1 herpes simplex virus (which is what causes cold sores). My mother takes it to prevent a recurrence of shingles.
For the rest of the week I will continue to take daily doses of all of those substances, but cut them down to 1/3 of what I took yesterday. And I’ll keep using the saline nose spray all winter.
I discovered an interesting product called Xlear — a saline nasal spray with xylitol, a sweet-tasting substance that discourages the growth of bacteria in the nasal passages and throat. That got me through last winter with no sinus infection at all. I need to start using it as soon as the heat gets turned on. Obviously, I neglected to do that this year.
So, if you’re prone to colds and sinus problems, set yourself up with an arsenal of immune system strengthening products, megadose yourself the first day you feel symptoms starting, and avoid the misery that so many of us are confronted with each winter.

Frank Paynter posted about it, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t pick up on the implications until I read what he wrote. He begins his post with this:

This post is not about the grim and twisted irony of the violence of a school shooting in Amish country. Rather, I want to draw attention to the unspoken horror of the misogyny, the hate crime against the female gender that it represents.

Frank links to several female bloggers who posted vehemently and accurately about what seems to be an increasing number of hate crimes against females. He ends his post with this:

Misogyny is everywhere. It’s in the burka. It’s in the genital mutilation of so-called “female circumcision.” It’s in the Chinese infanticide of baby girls. It’s practically a human condition. Yet once slavery was a human condition too, and now, except for a few corporate monsters, some backwards nations, and the perversion of sexual slavery it has largely been wiped out. Can we make progress against misogyny too?

I wonder why all of us female bloggers aren’t all posting about how the status and safety of all of us females is consistently being eroded. Why aren’t we mad as hell!
Every night, my news stations report the rape and murder of some female, the lethal violence against some child. Tonight it was what was believed to be a mother and daughter murdered in an apartment on NYC’s upper west side.

Despite the parallel construction, the two statements in the title of this post are not related.
The truth is, I’ve got a wicked sore throat and a cold sore in the corner of my upper lip that even Abreva is having a hard time with. I’ve been spraying my mouth with a zinc acetate spray, which really does help, but now everything I put in my mouth tastes like zinc acetate. I have to stay away from my mother so she doesn’t get sick. Every cloud has a silver lining, right?? On the other hand, while I have lots of projects I’d like to work on, I’m just too wiped out to get into any of them.
And, on top of that, my daughter and her family were going to come and visit this weekend, but both my grandson and I are sick. So it goes.
Meanwhile, here’s the best of this week’s Harper’s Weekly Review:

That’s what a 14 year old boy who was locked in a burning shed by other boys said about the lesson he learned from the experience.
Most of us have always known that. Everyone has the potential to do evil deeds, but whatever sense of morality we have tends to keep that potential in check. It seems to me, however, that these days there is a worldwide shift to the darkside.
Violent crime in England and Wales has risen 14%.
Murders in the United States jumped 4.8 percent last year, and overall violent crime was up 2.5 percent for the year, marking the largest annual increase in crime in the United States since 1991
With the number of homicides in Sacramento already past last year’s death toll, 2006 could prove to be one of Sacramento’s most violent years in recent history
And on and on.
Elder abuse is a growing problem.
Whatever the reason/s, an increasing number of people seem to be either unable to keep their cool or have simply forsaken their humanity.
You just can’t help wondering what’s pushing so many of us in that dark direction. Is it the war and all of the publicized violence associated with it? Is it the glorification of violence and immorality in video games, on television, in the movies? Is it the frustrations of living in poverty — getting poorer as the rich get richer? Is it the tragic lack of role models among our leaders — both cultural and political?
I suggest that it’s the cumulative effect of all of the above (and more). More than ever belfore, we are surrounded constantly by seductions toward the darkside.
No, nobody’s all good. But it used to be that most were mostly so.

Have you noticed that if you turn upside down the date of Cory Lidle’s airplane crash into the NYC high-rise apartment building — 10/11/06 — you get 9/11/01?

On the day this nation celebrates Columbus Day, i watched the televised parade in New York City with my mother. She likes parades. It seems that everybody’s Italian on Columbus Day (the way that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day). At least that’s what Major Bloomberg was heard to say.
Now, those of us who were taught the accurate version of history know that the Vikings actually discovered this land long before Columbus missed landing on the continental shores of what became America. What I didn’t know until I watched a Discovery Channel special that aired on the afternoon of Columbus Day, was that Christopher Columbus might not have been Italian at all. Chances are that he was the son of a Catalonian mariner/mercenery and his last name was really “Colom.”
Garrison Keillor in a Common Deams piece suggests because George W. Bush bears a great similarity to the real Christopher Columbus, we should change the focus of Columbus Day:
The following are excerpts; it’s worth it to link over and read the whole thing.

How did we get here? Good Germans–and many of them were decent, moral people–asked themselves the same thing. The answer is incrementalism, the tendency of radical change to manifest itself in bits and pieces. People who should have known better–journalists, Democrats, and Republicans who are more loyal to their country than their party–allowed Bush and his neofascist gangsters to hijack our republic and its values. They weren’t as bad as Bush. They just couldn’t see the big picture.

And it ends with:

It doesn’t matter how much food aid we ship to the victims of the next global natural disaster, or how diplomatic our next president is, or whether we come to regret what we have done in the name of law and order. Our laws permit kidnapping, torture and murder. Our laws deny access to the courts. The United States has ceded the moral high ground to its enemies.

We are done.

If these two articles made you really depressed, take a minute to read “What the Amish are Teaching America” by Sally Kohn, which ends with:

Our patterns of punishment and revenge are fundamentally at odds with the deeper values of common humanity that the tragic experience of the Amish are helping to reveal. Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done in life. Someone who cheats is not only a cheater. Someone who steals something is not only a thief. And someone who commits a murder is not only a murderer. The same is true of Charles Carl Roberts. We don’t yet know the details of the episode in his past for which, in his suicide note, he said he was seeking revenge. It may be a sad and sympathetic tale. It may not. Either way, there’s no excusing his actions. Whatever happened to Roberts in the past, taking the lives of others is never justified. But nothing Roberts has done changes the fact that he was a human being, like all of us. We all make mistakes. Roberts’ were considerably and egregiously larger than most. But the Amish in Nickel Mines seem to have been able to see past Roberts’ actions and recognize his humanity, sympathize with his family for their loss, and move forward with compassion not vengeful hate.

We’ve come to think that “an eye for an eye” is a natural, human reaction to violence. The Amish, who live a truly natural life apart from the influences of our violence-infused culture, are proving otherwise. If, as Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” then the Amish are providing the rest of us with an eye-opening lesson.

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It is Friday the Thirteenth of October, and there’s two feet of snow in Buffalo.

My daughter’s sister-in-law, who was the same age as my daughter (mid-forties), passed away yesterday. She had MS.
It just seems so unfair that she had to suffer as much as she did before she finally died. She leaves two young daughters behind, as well as a family and extended family who will all miss her.
I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to lose a child, no matter how old that child is. I am heartsick for her parents. I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine.
And yet my mother keeps on keeping on. She has no life-threatening illness. Only very old age. Well, I guess that’s life-threatening, isn’t it?