Saturday, October 5

Haven’t had much time for birding or writing. And my count shows it. We just seem to have lives too busy for things like birding, photography, and recreational writing. Self-inflicted wounds, just like the Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Trying to keep up with my daughter’s life seems to suck the time out of me. Last weekend Molly had a tournament over in East Grand Rapids. I had to drop her and company off two hours before the tournament so had some time to kill. East Grand Rapids has a nice little lake right in town with some park space around it. Didn’t get any new birds but at least I got out a bit plus had great views of some ruby-crowned kinglets.

Molly did OK in the tournament but as a whole the team didn’t do too well. They competed against some great teams. There were four heats of each event and it seemed that in each heat Molly’s team was seeded against people that had better times. It might be the coach wanted them competing against girls faster than those in the local league. Today at practice she was crowned Swimmer of the Week for her performance at the Jackson meet on Thursday and her attitude all week.

Swimmer of the Week tiara

Work kind of eats into the pleasure time too. Yesterday I did a one-day, 520-mile trip up to Rogers City and back. I had to install bat monitors on a 50 meter pole. There is a proposed wind farm going in and we were brought in to do bird and bat pre-construction surveys. The proposed site is an old calcite mine that looks like a moonscape. One would think that this is an ideal utilization of a blasted out space but it’s right on the Lake Huron coastline. On one side is a river that Salmon migrate into. They were jumping around and you could see schools swirling around in the water. Salmon in shallow waters draws salmon eating birds like eagles. After I got the monitors installed I went out to the river mouth to scope it out. I had 16 individual eagles during one scan with the scope. Hoped to turn one into a golden eagle but no such luck.

The tower.

Road leading to the tower.

Bat detectors. A couple expensive ultrasonic microphones cabled to a couple thousands dollars of electronics encased in PVC with pipe insulation and duct tape.Trailer park science at its best.

Bat detector 50 meters up.

The view from the tower base.

Rogers City is a really small town that doesn’t seem to have a lot going on but they sure know how to do meat. There’s Plath’s Smoked Meats which produces  smoked pork chops and smoked salmon worth fighting for. Then on this trip my contact turned me on to Rygwelski’s for homemade sausage. Nine letters, two vowels. You know the kielbasa gotta be good.

Another major draw on my time is teaching two classes as adjunct this semester. Adjunct is a nice way of saying just slightly higher than lab rat in the academic food chain. Lab rats can’t eat me, unless I die unattended in the classroom, but I can eat them. We can both be eaten by custodial staff. I believe using us as a protein source is considered part of the custodial staff’s benefit package. I wish we could sic them on House Republicans but some things even lab rats won’t eat, let alone custodians.

One class consists of teaching programming utilizing the Python scripting language. So I’m getting some writing in, it just looks something like this little script to demonstrate for loops and equivalency tests.

#This is a practice script.
#It will print the player names from the Abbot and Costello
#“Who’s on first” skit
#Written for the GRET 260 course
#Ed Schools  schoolse@lcc.edu

#create a list of player names
playerList = [‘Who’, ‘What’, ‘I dont know’, ‘Today’]

#make a loop to print the names of the infield
for player in playerList:
    if player == ‘Who’:
        print player + ’ is on first.’
    elif player == ‘What’:
        print player + ’ is on second.
    elif player == ‘I dont know’:
        print player + ’ is on third.’     
    else:
       print player + ’ is the catcher.’

#Do some clean up
del player, playerList