Drinking hot chocolate by the bowlful, I'm waiting out the flash flooding to return with my pup to my soggy tent in the woods of north central Massachusetts.  The sky is ablaze with the first glimmer of sunset, and I am grateful for the rain.  For fungal diversity and earthworm invasions especially.  It's been a rollercoaster of a field season, full of lots of time alone thinking about life and worms.  I am in the middle of a sampling blitz, collecting samples like mad before classes start up again.

astro

you're in an especially favorable time to detect any way you might be under the spell of an eclipse, and then take dramatic steps to get out from under it.
amen

Little green things

 

Nose to nose with a carpet of moss

We pretend to be small

Making borrowers out of the clumsy and imperfect

Building a make-believe world in between

Squinting one eye

Than the other

The little monkey-flowers create a canopy

Above rusty soldiers marching shoulder to shoulder

We spend lunch building cropland

Using seeds for tomato plants and sticks for fences

Refusing to grow up

Living outside in

Eons and acres away

Alone in a forest of laundry

I feel the heat of mountain sun

Chill of silent shade

And rock damp beneath my fingers

The fairyland inches away

I wonder which world is real

How we get to be where and who we are

And wait to wake

1 down, 3 to go

Days are full. Of puppy playing, breakfast making, note taking, paper writing, number crunching, procrastinating, panicking, poverty line hugging, laughing, talking in grunts and in song, drinking too much coffee and not enough beer, lab teaching, poop scooping, crying over dogs, and blissful sleeping.

The tulips and cherry blossoms are blooming, the grass is bright green, and my puppy is growing into a handsome dog whose favorite foods are used chewing gum and flowers.  Summertime hovers on the horizon, a short three weeks away.  I can't believe I made it through my first semester alive, and relatively happy and sane.

This summer will bring adventure and a whole lotta solo field work.  I can't fucking wait.

 hiding out in a forest of laundry

wondering how we get to be where and who we are

biking home in the hail

Cuter when sleeping

Thinking about training Meatloaf to ride in a bike trailer, run without trying to wrestle with his leash, find truffles, wear a backpack, climb mountains, hike 25 miles a day, sit in a canoe, and swim.

Which are lofty goals when we're working on potty training and bite inhibition at the moment...

Meatloaf

It seems like 2012 will be just fine - in its first few days, I acquired health insurance, got a big grant to study the effect of invasive earthworms on mycorrhizae that associate with hemlock trees, and adopted a Rottweiler-Pit Bull puppy abandoned in the animal shelter's waiting room.

Maybe 2012 is the year I become less itinerant?

2012

I welcomed the New Year and bid goodbye to the Old Year in what I really think should be the traditional way: buying a bottle of pink wine and some jalapeno corn bread from my local hipster Mexicanish restaurant, and finishing said bottle of wine while hanging out with a giant dog and looking at photos of the past year and feeling both sad and happy, but above all: no regrets.  I'm pretty sure there was some chard involved as well.

2012 will be different, and I think it's entirely up to me to make it better.

I didn't fall in love with Syracuse right away, but I am slowly warming up to it.  Fatty and I roam the neighborhood looking for windchimes and shadows (me, not him), bushes to shit on and fossilized chicken wings (him, not me).  There is room to dance around our living room and happiness to be found.  At work, there are dogs to adopt out to good homes, and good dogs put down because there just aren't enough good homes.  There are things to learn, people to teach, friends to make, and drumlins to "climb."

And cavities to fill.  And so it goes.