Little Bit of This, Little Bit of That

Salsify

Depression

Still not feeling particularly motivated to write.  M. has been pretty down lately and as much as I try, it's difficult not to get similarly down, as well as frustrated that I can't just argue and urge him to feeling better.  He is making efforts to reduce his physical stressors and manage his health (less time in front of the computer, for one, better sleep habits, and more walks, for example), and I very much appreciate that.  But other people's depression is frustrating as hell, precisely because it's irrational, defensive and resistant to change, and self-perpetuating.

Everyone I've ever been close to has been subject to depression.  According to the Center for Disease Control, one in ten Americans reported experiencing major depression or other depressive state during the two weeks prior to the survey (http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsdepression/).  The groups most likely to report major depression were:

• persons 45-64 years of age
• women
• blacks, Hispanics, non-Hispanic persons of other races or multiple races
• persons with less than a high school education
• those previously married
• individuals unable to work or unemployed
• persons without health insurance coverage

The depressed people I've known have mostly been employed or in school, under 45 years old, and college educated.  Of course, most of the people I've spent significant time around during the last twenty years have fit that demographic, so it's merely another indication that one shouldn't generalize from personal experience.

Reading

I've been reading about the ethics of food lately.  I finished reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma last week, and this morning I finished his book In Defense of Food.  I really enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma; it was an enjoyable read with lots of interesting information about the production of food, especially meat, both on small farms and in industrial-sized food lots.  In Defense of Food was not as in-depth, it contained a lot of common sense and material already familiar from The Omnivore's Dilemma, and the arguments were repetitive and not sufficiently substantiated. 

I'm now moving on to a selection of books that just came in the mail yesterday on animal rights:  Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and In Defense of Animals, and a collection of essays edited by Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum entitled Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions.

Gardening

The seedlings I planted a few weeks ago recuperated from their sun- and wind-burn and they now look pretty hardy.  Yesterday and today I worked on building hills in the garden for the squashes and cucumbers, and mulching.    Later this afternoon, when the sun is not as intense, I'm going to put the seedling in the hills.  I need to protect them somehow from the critters that have been munching on other things.  I lost the entire bed of red leaf lettuce to some kind of varmint, even though I had covered the row with chicken wire (I had been thinking the varmints were birds but now I'm thinking it's more likely they were mice who were able to get in through the holes in the wire).  My peas (which I also covered with chicken wire) are up a few inches now.  It's a race against time; if it gets too hot they won't send out pods.  I'm also planning on planting my green and yellow beans today or tomorrow.  Our last frost date is estimated to be May 24th and I don't see any cold nights in the forecast. 

I'm pretty scared to put my beautiful seedlings into the garden.  That garden seems pretty rough on things, and not through my inattention or neglect.  I've lost many things in the last year, either through failure to germinate or being eaten by critters: whole beds of spinach, green lettuce, red leaf lettuce, carrots, onions, broccoli, and kale.  On the other hand, random crap sprouts and does really well:  I've got two very vigorous looking potato plants growing in the compost pile, and last year the garden was filled with arugula, sunflowers, and zinnias.

Critter Tracks

About a week ago, M. and I saw elk tracks in our driveway.  I have a hard time pulling up the word, elk, to associate with that animal.  To me, with my New England roots, it's a moose. 

Then yesterday M. and I found some very odd tracks in the driveway that we could not figure out for awhile.  It appeared to be from some three-toed creature, but it clearly wasn't a bird because the toes were too fat.  I did some looking at tracks online and compared them to the photos I took.  A few people had found similar tracks and were looking for identification help, too.  Several people responded to them, and some suggested they were made by humans and were a hoax; others suggested Big Foot.  I considered the possibility they were from an armadillo but there were no characteristic claw marks.  Then I realized I was looking at the tracks backwards; what I thought were toe marks were actually marks from the heel; looking closely I could see that extending off of the heel marks were much fainter indentations from toes.  I'm pretty sure now that the tracks were from a mountain lion.

 Here's a shot where you can see how the track looks like that of some weird fat-toed bird:

Here's one where, if you look closely, you can see that there are toe pads in front of what I had thought were weird bird-toes.  The bird toes were actually the lobes of a heel pad:

Here's an awesome site that shows the variability of mountain lion tracks under different conditions: http://www.bear-tracker.com/cougar.html. 

 Technology Woes

Our satellite service finally cut out about a week ago.  It was already connected when we moved in, and when we called them to get the bill transferred to our names, they told us they couldn't simply switch billing information from the old tenants to us; they'd have to come out to the house and charge us something like $200, even though the dish was already here and working.  We weren't so cool with that, and since the service was already up and running, we'd informed them of the change of tenancy, we never received a bill or any kind of notice from them or the previous tenants, and the charges they cited seemed like extortion, we just took it as an amenity included in the cost of renting the house and any expense they incurred as a result to be the consequences that followed from extorting their customers.  But last week the service stopped, and currently there is no alternative way to access the internet other than dial up (at long distance rates).  Now we're reduced to using our phones as hot spots.  This makes uploading photos a real pain in the ass, so my blogs in the near future are less likely to feature pretty pictures of the garden and the mountains.

I'm having a hard time even telling if the pictures I've embedded in this entry will show up; right now they're not displaying, even though it seems like they uploaded and attached.  I can't tell if the problem is in the uploading/attaching of the photos, or the failure of my browser to fully load and display to me all the photos I've attached to the blog. So, sorry if things don't look right.  I may need to take a trip to the library in town or an internet cafe in Taos to make things copacetic.