Semester is done, grades are posted, and I can focus on trivial fun things. Like watching the Republican Party implode. Watching a bunch of egomaniacs start eating their own never gets old. Why would anyone watch “Night of the Living Dead” when you have the Republican primary process?
Finally get to do some outdoor activities too. Tomorrow Lise and I will be helping Barb do what has got to be one of the worst possible Christmas Bird Count areas possible. Barb, only doing this count for about 15 years, is still junior on the totem pole. So she gets to drive the trailer parks counting birds at feeders. And we get to help her. Still, better than sitting at a desk.
I might even be able to try out my biggish lens. Lise let me buy one a couple weeks ago. Not quite up there with the big boys, but getting there. We have been so busy I haven’t gotten to use it yet. If I get desperate I’ll start taking pictures of the lizard from across the room.
My biggish lens. Don’t worry, it’s mostly lens shade.
Haven’t had much of a break in a couple weeks. I helped to bury the second family member in less than a year. First was my dad in February. Then Jack Heisey, a good man and my brother-in-law, died on Sunday, Nov. 22. Lise, Molly and I went back to Pa. for the funeral. Following is the eulogy I gave at his service:
Jack came to our family 30 years ago, when he married my sister Lynn. So I have known him for 30 years, but kind of sporadically, at a safe distance. Lynn and Jack lived in Washington and here, I lived in Indiana and Michigan. A safe enough distance to make some objective observations.
I liked Jack, as I’m sure everyone in this room did too. Jack wasn’t perfect. He had his faults, as we all do. I understand that eBay stock has taken a major dive due to lack of activity since last September. But when all is measured, the positives and the negatives, I would say that the positives far outweigh the negatives.
So how do you measure the worth of a man? One measure is their willingness to serve others. Jack served in many ways. Whether you count his service to the country, doing tours in the Navy and the Air Force, or his service to people, like playing Santa Claus at the AmVets kid’s parties, Jack served.
Another measure of a man is how they face their own mortality. Jack faced his mortality, and faced it well. Jack spent the last days of his life in hospice, but figured out ways to have some fun while he was there. How many hospice patients do you know will hold their breath and lay real, real still, so when the nurse bends down to check for breathing they can go “Boo”? Jack did. Jack may not have laughed at death but he tried to have some fun on the way out the door.
Maybe the most important measure of a man is how he touches the lives of others. Jack touched many lives in many ways. Starting with Lynn, sugar boogar, his wife of 30 years. Or Lee his son.
And not just touching human lives. Nobody could spoil a dog like Jack. I think Nick, his golden retriever, is taking Jack’s death harder than Lynn and Lee. They can understand death and try to make sense of what’s happening. Nick can’t. He just wants to know why his buddy isn’t coming home.
Jack touched many kids’ lives. He loved them, and they loved him. He played Santa, in many ways, doing things like giving rides in a red convertible. How cool it that. He was every kid’s Uncle Jack.
Jack had friends everywhere. Wherever Jack went, he somehow immediately fit in. He was accepted into the gang, and was everyone’s best buddy. I don’t see much Italian heritage in Jack, but while he was just starting to go upstate and build the cabin, he became a fully accepted member of the Renovo, Pa. “Sons of Italy” club. Not sure how a half Choctaw Penn Dutchman from Annville could become a full-fledged Son of Italy, but Jack managed to.
I think the reason why Jack was accepted by many is because he accepted them in return. For all their bumps and bruises, he accepted people as they were, unqualified, no questions asked. This room full of people is a living testimony to the lives he touched. In many more ways than I could ever say. We’re going to end with a traditional parting song and a toast to a good man.
We ended the ceremony with the song “The Parting Glass” and a toast. You had a choice of Tullamore Dew, an Irish whiskey, or apple juice. A lot more whiskey went down than apple juice.
Arthur “Jack” Heisey. August 5, 1945 – November 22, 2015.
Not too much going on with the Schools household. This past weekend I helped Lise map some trails at the Galien River Park in Berrien County. A very small park but quite neat. They built a canopy walk boardwalk and observation deck. When you go out there you can feel it swaying. Pretty cool as long as you don’t mind heights.
Galien River Park canopy walk and platform.
The park is located in the town of New Buffalo. A nice enough place, but since it’s right on Lake Michigan there is an element of touristy about it. Studio condos cost about $150,000. At least they seem to be pretty proud of their bacon. Wonder why they aren’t flying a scrapple flag.
Can’t be bad.
While we were there we tried to get in some coastal birding. A mile inland it was in the 60s and pleasant. On the coast it was in the high 40s with a wicked wind. We pretty much got blown away. The winds were too strong to keep the scope steady. Still, a lovely day to be outside, especially for November.
Lise birding the coast.
About the only other excitement this week has been a sick lizard. She started having some problems while we were back in Pennsylvania. Like trying to turn herself inside out through her bum. Pretty nasty. Luckily, Lindsay the Lizard Sitter was watching her and admirably rose to the occasion. So after the vet stuffed everything back in where it belonged and stitched her up, he gave us ten hypos of antibiotics. Every night I have to play Dr. Ed and give her a shot. Boy. she really likes me now. She hasn’t been eating and I think she’s just building up her appetite, hoping I die so she can start gnawing on me like a piece of scrapple.
Lise and I did a quick trip back to Pennsylvania to see my sister Lynn and brother-in-law Jack. Jack is in the last stages of cancer and probably down to a couple weeks. He’s going into the VA hospice unit today. His dog Nick has been at loose ends without Jack around so I took him in to the hospital to see Jack. It was good for both of them. Hard not to get emotional when they saw each other.
Jack and Nick
On the lighter side, we did a side trip to the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. Hawk Mountain is a great example of a single person seeing something wrong and taking action. Hawk Mountain is part of the Kittaning ridge line, a major hawk migration route. During the season, hundreds of thousands of hawks migrate past the sanctuary. In the early 1900s, the North Lookout was used as a place to shoot migrating hawks out of the sky. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation even paid a bounty for dead goshawks. Thousands of raptors were killed every season. Then Rosalie Edge, a New York conservationist, got sick of the carnage. She bought the lookout and barred shooters. Early on she met a lot of resistance but she persevered. The sanctuary has gone from preventing hawk massacres to an active educational and research program. They have partners and interns from all over the world, and are internationally recognized as an example of how to protect migrating raptors. Interestingly, I grew up less than an hour from Hawk Mountain but never heard of it until years after I left the area. Going back after taking up birding I got my life goshawk there.
Lise and I haven’t been there for over 15 years. Things just haven’t been conducive to getting out there during migration. Like a kid in school at the prime migration time. So we tried a quick outing this trip. Luck wasn’t with us this. We didn’t have much time to spend, it’s late in the migration season and the weather conditions were not very conducive to migration. Had a few sharpshin hawks fly over not much else. Still, it was nice to be sitting on the North Lookout rocks and taking it all in.
Hawk Mountain, late season view from the North Lookout.
We spent the weekend in Chicago for my niece Amanda’s wedding. Got to see some family in a really fun city. Major sleep deprivation but it was a fun time. The wedding was right in the Loop, at the Chicago Cultural Center. Right across the street from Millennium Park and the Bean.
We got to see the adorable Stella, the newest member of Clan Schools. And Anita brought some good Pennsylvania neck pumpkins, the absolute best pumpkins for pies. Back home, when you say pumpkin pie, the assumption is neck pumpkins. There’s no other to use. The Jack-o-lantern style pumpkin is known as a cow pumpkin, not something you would feed to company. She didn’t bring any scrapple though.
Baby Stella.
Neck pumpkins with Fido for scale. They are pumpkins, not squash or gourds.
The wedding ceremony was interesting. It took place in the Chicago Cultural Center, the beautiful former Chicago public library. Mainak DasGupta, the groom, is a Captain in the US Air Force with deployments to hot sandy places under his belt. So there was an Air Force honor guard with drawn swords. The first reading of the ceremony was Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in the Obergefell decision. The best man was deployed in Afghanistan and Skyped in to do another reading. In a nice touch, both Amanda and Mainak dedicated the wedding to their deceased grandparents.
We also had a little time to play in The Windy City. Downtown Chicago is the most photogenic city I can think of. I can, and did, spend hours just wandering around. The general rule in photography is the best light is early morning or just before sundown. All rules are off in Chicago. The shapes, surfaces and patterns give you something to play with any hour of the day. And we got a new bird for the year too. A very late and lost gray-cheeked thrush was in Millennium Park. I’m pretty sure it is trapped there. During south bound migration it probably dropped into the only green it could see at dawn after crossing Lake Michigan. Then it couldn’t figure out how to get past the skyscrapers ringing the park. Prognosis for surviving the winter isn’t good unless it buddies up with the starlings.
Anita’s back, Anita’s reflection, and Ed’s reflection at the Bean.
The reflection of Lise messing with Ed at the Bean.
We haven’t been getting out much, in no small part because I’m teaching two classes this semester. This is adjunct work, in addition to my regular work. I like some aspects of the teaching but it sucks up the time in a major way. But it helps pay for Molly’s collage and the occasional photography toy.
One of the classes is a programming class using the Python scripting language. As an intro to Python I have the students start with a list consisting of Who, What, I don’t know, and Today. Then they write a script that prints out the lineup for the Abbot and Costello Who’s On First routine. Last year when I told the students to write the Who’s on first lineup, I had 12 blank faces looking at me. Stopped me in my tracks. Three of the students were nonnative English speakers, so I could understand them not knowing it. But the other nine? How could they not know this piece of classic American comedy? I didn’t even want to ask them what brand of scrapple they preferred.
I tried again this year, with almost the same results. Only one person heard of it. So I found a YouTube video of Abbot and Costello performing the routine and played it for the class. Some of them even found it amusing. So if they get nothing more out of the class, at least I can say I broadened their horizons a bit.
We did a little rarity chasing today and got a Hudsonian godwit. And no, I didn’t make that name up. These guys are a shorebird that nests way up in Canada and Alaska and migrates through the Great Plains to South America. So it was really out of range here in Michigan. Someone reported it at a small park about 20 miles from here yesterday. Luckily it hung around today until we go to see it. A nice little find.
On the science front, the Nobel prize for Physics was awarded to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for showing that Neutrinos have mass. May sound trivial but it helps explain how the universe ended up in the configuration it did. But as our friend Evie said, isn’t the more important question determining whether Catholics have mass?
Haven’t had much time for any new photography. I have been organizing files and found a few pictures I could do some quick black and white work on.
Not much exciting going on in the Schools’ household. I’m teaching two classes as adjunct this semester so there isn’t much time for frivolity.
We did get to watch the super moon, blood moon eclipse. Super moon because the earth and the moon are the closest they will get in their orbits, a mere 31,000 miles apart. The light from a rising moon goes through more of the earth’s atmosphere when it rises so it looks larger than later in the night. So when we are this close together, the rising full moon looks even larger than normal. And this full moon coincided with a total eclipse.
Not to dampen the spirits of the end of the world nut cases, the coincidence and the reddish cast of the moon don’t signify the end of the world. The moon looks reddish (blood moon) during the eclipse because of Raleigh scattering, the same effect that makes the sky appear blue. Anyway, it was fun to watch what we could. I went out on our roof for the moonrise but it was covered in clouds. Luckily we went out later and the clouds had cleared, allowing us to watch the start of the eclipse. It was a lovely warm evening and we sat in the driveway with our neighbors, watching the moon go into the earth’s shadow. Once it was in total eclipse the clouds rolled in again so we never got to see it come out of eclipse. Still a nice evening. And I learned that it takes some time and practice to do good celestial photography.
The super full moon, in the clouds.
The moon in the clouds, going into eclipse.
The blood moon.
So what do we do around the Schools’ household when there are no grand celestial events to observe or we don’t feel like grading papers? We screw with the lizard. Every castle needs a dragon.
Not too much to report on. Between work and teaching there just isn’t the time for the fun stuff. Which is kind of a shame since we are heading into fall to be quickly followed by winter.
Migration is in full swing. The Detroit River hawk watch reported over 14,000 broad-winged hawks just for today and over 55,000 for the month. Our neighbor had a bird kill itself hitting his window. He asked Lise to ID it and it turned out to be a gray-cheeked thrush. Which neither of us have for the year. Unfortunately you are only supposed to count birds you see alive. No amount of CPR was going to help this one and we still don’t have a gray-cheeked thrush.
Colors are turning and fall plants are coming into their own. Lise’s New England aster is blooming in its full purple glory. We had a migrating monarch butterfly spend a good hour nectaring in the patch. It’s kind of nice when you get some colors opposite each other on the color wheel together. In your own yard no less.
Monarch butterfly on New England aster.
Monarch butterfly on New England aster.
We did get out a little this week. Lise has a project at the Pierce Cedar Creek Institute. This is a private foundation, endowed to do environmental research and education. They have 650 acres of various habitat types, including prairie fens and some fragments older forests. Molly and I helped with Massasauga rattlesnake surveys there the past couple years. Lise and I spent beautiful a day at there, scoping out the place for her project. Lovely way to spend a near fall day. And for a bonus, we did a leisurely kayak trip down the Grand River with Molly and Mitchell. Lovely way to spend a near fall Sunday afternoon.
Cedar Creek.
Pierce Cedar Creek prairie.
Pierce Cedar Creek wetlands.
Lise and some stately oaks on at Pierce Cedar Creek.
What a week. I came back from the Upper Peninsula on Tuesday. Had some time to relax at the cabin and did a nice paddle with Joanna on Sand River.
Slender spreadwing damselfly on Sand River.
Ovipositing spreadwing. She slices the stem with a blade on her ovipositor and put the eggs in the slit.
Joanna paddling on Sand River.
Sunset over Lake Superior at the mouth of Sand River.
Sunset over Lake Superior at the mouth of Sand River.
Trees at Seney National Wildlife Refuge in the UP.
Sunset at Seney National Wildlife Refuge in the UP.
Then Thursday night it was up to the Midwest Birding Symposium in Bay City. The Midwest Birding Symposium is held every two years. Over 400 people, from numerous states, all interested in birding. Where else will you find sessions on the nuances of gull identification or how to identify raptors by their silhouettes. Important stuff. Lise and I haven’t been to one of these symposiums for over 20 years. Molly’s age; what a coincidence.
I wouldn’t say this symposium was well organized, but it was fun. Good sessions but the highlight was meeting up with friends and acquaintances. Some from prior lives and some from our current lives. People we haven’t seen for many years and the former coworker that lives a couple blocks from us. People we recognize from birding around Michigan but whose names we don’t know. Like the lady we met while waiting for the swallow-tailed kite. She is now at 301 species in her Michigan big year quest. I thought of the movie “The Big Year” where they kept running into each other at the same birding spots. We also hit some new Michigan birding places, like Nayanquing Point State Wildlife Area and Tawas Point State Park. We both got a few new species for the year including palm warbler, sharp-shinned hawk, and Virginia rail. I got an American bittern. Best views I’ve ever had of a bittern. To top everything off, I won a pair of binoculars in the raffle drawing. All in all, a great time.
Should put in a plug for Bay City too. It’s had some problems, like being the birth place of Madonna and a crashed ship building and timber mill industries. But it seems to be coming back. They have a good variety of pubs and restaurants in their downtown, many in historic buildings. The Stein Haus had excellent German food, several hundred steins on the walls and ceiling, and a corkscrew collection that has to be the envy of corkscrew collectors everywhere. There’s a good coffee shop called Brewtopia. And a nice walk along the Saginaw River.
There were some minor down sides to the symposium. It was a birding symposium with birding field trips. Led by serious birders for serious birders. Which meant early morning rise times. I drove up after teaching Thursday night and only arrived after 12:30 AM Friday. Then had a 5:30 AM rise time for a field trip. Our friend coffee really helped there. We got up at 5:00 or 5:30 each morning. Plus the weather turned much cooler than it had been. Lise and I were very underdressed, especially for the sailing trip. We rode the Appledore, an 85 foot schooner, down the Saginaw River and out into Saginaw Bay. Great ride but it was windy, rainy and cold. One would think that after 15 years of living in Michigan, plus numerous freezing trips with Barb, we would learn to always carry some warm clothes with us. But no, we decided to test natural selection. Still better than sitting in an office I guess.
Huddling on the Appledore.
The crew setting sails, the passengers huddling.
Under sail. It was so windy that only the foresails were set.
Sunday, September 6 Sitting in the dark on the cabin porch at Sand River, a really nice place to be. Spent the day playing on the river and now I’m watching lightning and listening to thunder. And listening to frogs. They’re liking this rain. And listening to coyotes. Not so sure they’re liking the thunder and lightning.
I came up to the UP to remove some bat monitors from the Hiawatha National Forest. Between teaching and a symposium next week, this is the only time I could get up here. So I threw in an extra day or two to play a bit.
Mating spread-winged damselflies. Not sure of the species without field guides.
Spread-winged damsel eating what I believe is another spread-wing species.
Green frog. Because frogs are almost as cool as dragonflies.
I tried a little food experiment today. My brother and I are planning a backpacking trip for next June. Been a long time since I’ve done any self sufficient hiking. I had an old dehydrated backpacking meal laying around. Noodles and vegetables with Parmesan according to the package. I bought this thing sometime before Molly was born. Maybe quite a while before Molly was born. Reagan may have been in office. So it was a good quarter century old. Not sure what the half life of a dehydrated backpacking meal is but I think this is pretty close. Adding to the fun it was made with wheat noodles which I’ve quit eating. When I eat wheat now there can be some pretty dire digestive consequences. At least up here there are fewer people to be harmed.
Mostly I was interested in finding out if a two serving dehydrated meal fed two people. Well, it doesn’t, at least not two hungry people. So that part of the experiment was successful. I don’t know if my tastes have changed, or the age of the meal was a factor, but I really don’t remember these things being that nasty. I cooked it a long time and the noodles never softened up much. The vegetables didn’t fare much better. Eating this thing would be better than starving, but I’m not sure how much better. You would be better off throwing it in a lake and waiting for the dead fish to float up. So now I’m waiting for the wheat effects to kick in and hoping the next thunderstorm can mask the consequences. Probably get the coyotes howling again.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 