she's just saying...

Baby Porky Video

Mom doesn't seem very maternal, but she's just a teenager herself.

It's a little (prickly) baby!

High Desert Museum welcomes baby porcupine

Posted by Terry Richard, The Oregonian July 30, 2009 12:38PM

How do you know whether a porcupine is pregnant?

Wait for her to give birth.

The baby porcupine born at the High Desert Museum south of Bend came as a surprise today because the parent porcupines didn't seem as if they liked each other.

The father porcupine, Thistle, came to the museum when he was less than a year old, in 2004. The museum introduced the mother, Honeysuckle, to him in January.

To the surprise of museum staff, a baby was born this morning, July 30. Museum staff discovered the softball-sized porcupine walking around its outdoor habitat at about 7 a.m., still wet after being born just a few hours prior.

Both parent porcupines came from wildlife rehabilitation facilities. Like all of the wild animals at the museum, the porcupines cannot survive in the wild due to their life history.

The birth of the baby porcupine is evidence that these animals are thriving at their outdoor habitat at the Donald M. Kerr Birds of Prey Center, open to visitors daily, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Female porcupines bear one young after a pregnancy of seven months. Newborns typically weigh 12 to 20 ounces and have all of their quills _30,000 of them _ and four teeth.

When the museum's new porcupine is bigger, it will be sent to a wildlife facility where it will be used for education programs for school children.

In the wild, porcupines leave their mothers when they about 2 months old.

The High Desert Museum is a five-minute drive south of Bend on U.S. 97; 541-382-4754, www.highdesertmuseum.org.

-- Terry Richard; [email protected]

Q: How do porcupines mate?

A: Very carefully.

Cool and fresh and salmony

I made a fantastic pasta salad last night, and if I can keep typing in this offensive heat, I'll post the recipe.

I'm not normally a pasta salad fan. They're either too bland, too oily, too weird or too crunchy (I don't like raw broccoli or any kind of bell peppers, which show up in most of them.) They used to be really popular - I recall one memorable patio party with the girls where everybody brought pasta salad. Luckily I was serving margaritas, so it really didn't matter. I don't know if they still are the go-to potluck dish, as I don't go out anymore. And if I do, it's not to a potluck.

So anyway, the one I made last night was stunning, especially as I concocted it with Ingredients On Hand. Here's my ingredient list. I don't have any quantities as it depends on your particular I.O.H.

1. Curly pasta - I like gemelli, but whatever you have O.H.
2. Strips of gravlax or smoked salmon (I just happened to have some leftover gravlax in the fridge. Odd, really.)
3. Cucumbers, diced
4. The itty-bitty fresh mozzarella balls you can buy at Costco, or other fresh mozz, diced.
5. Scallions, sliced, with some of the green part
6. Parsley (pretty much the only thing I grew in the garden this year. You could use dill.)
7. Olive oil
8. Lemon juice
9. Salt and pepper

Whisk the last three ingredients into a vinaigrette, then toss it all up, gently.

I ran out of capers (I know! A kitchen disaster!) which would have added a bit more piquancy, but maybe they would have been overkill.

Anyway, yum.

Yes, I do knit -- why do you ask?

I think this blog was supposed to mention knitting from time to time. It is even listed in knitting blog rings, something that must frustrate devoted knitting-blog readers (there's a lot of them).

As mentioned previously, once summer comes, knitting tends to drop off around here. Knitting magazines attempt to entice us with "summer styles" which tend to be a bit weird IMHO. Knitting just doesn't fit into a summer scene - who wants a hank of wool on their lap at the beach? Too sandy.
(I'm sure I'll get comments by dedicated summer knitters who disagree with me on this, which is fine 'cause I'll take all the comments I can attract.)

But I still knit a bit these days. Mostly cotton and silk, simple stitches on small projects. This scarf fits the bill.

 Montego Bay scarf

This is as close as I'll get to lace knitting, which is incredibly frustrating and tedious for me.

My friends turn out exquisite lace shawls and sweaters and socks knitted with toothpick needles and thread-like yarn, but I'll stick with the humble worsted-weight and my size 7's.

                                                               

Cindy's shawl

Friday Frylet, sponsored by Snap, Crackle and Pop

You're kidding me, right?

Takes me back to the bad ol' days working on the Hostess Bakery advertising account, when we came up with the brilliant phrase: "One Quarter Cup of Milk in Every Donut!" as the "reason-why," as they say in the ad biz.

I don't know about immunity, but they do make great little glue globs that are impossible to remove from bowls, spoons and sinks. A new use, perhaps?

Top 10 Tues: summer supper edition

I really don't like heat. That's one of the reasons I moved to Oregon. I now realize that when I heard the term "high desert" I should have focused on the possible implications of the "desert" part.

Anyway, here in Bend we're having a heat wave (in my opinion) hitting over 90 on some days. Of course, it drops into the 40's at night, but I do have to go through that four hour stretch from work to darkness, and I don't like it. I know, the sound of a hundred tiny searing hot violins from friends in AZ, CA and TX. Well, why do you live there? It's stinking hot, for gawd's sake!

Sorry. Flareups from my inner hormonal furnace aren't helping. But that's another post.

So, what we eat in the summer. Recipes upon request. This list does not include the standard chicken/fish/shrimp on the grill that we have regularly. This is when I'm cool enough to cook and have the urge.

1. ratatouille with couscous
2. fish tacos
3. french potato salad
4. linguine alla vongole (clams to you)
5. greek salad - hold the bell peppers
6. gazpacho with shrimp: ditto
7. killer shrimp (stolen from the LA diner of the same name)
8. salad nicoise
9. the humble fresh tomato parsley parmesan omelet
10. grilled eggplant with soy sauce

I just realized that I've been making these same dishes for years. We don't eat beef, pork or lamb so it can be a challenge to come up with new menus. What do you cook when it's hot?

Compost diving

Note to self:

When dumping a vase of faded flowers into the compost, check if there might be hundreds of little glass balls in the bottom of the vase first. 'Cause they don't decompose.

On the plus side, I can personally attest that my compost bin is alive with bugs, flies, smells and rot. However, I can't seem to find the half-pound of worms I dumped in there last year. I assume they're happily munching away somewhere, extruding compost gold.

A post of the green-yellow persuasion

Henry was talking about colors the other day. What to mix together to make Crash Pink (pink and silver was his decision); the exact shades of Laser Lemon, Neon Lime, Racer Red, Quicksilver and so forth. These are the cool colors 10 year-olds talk about when talking about color, highly influenced by Crayola and anime.

Then he asked me, "What's your favorite exotic color?"

Oddly enough, I had an instant answer, because I'd been thinking about this myself.

"Chartreuse," I answered. He asked what it was and I held up my new handbag.

"Oh, you mean swamp green!" he replied.

No, I did not. But it had occurred to me recently that I have accumulated a lot of chartreuse. Which is odd because green is not one of my go-to colors. Black, definitely. Pale pink, white and cream, yes. Denim blue, brown, tan, occasionally a periwinkle; but green, purple, orange, yellow, red, not much. (I do have a weakness for garish floral designs that I indulge in summer skirts, but whatever.)

So I've been noticing all this "swamp green" around me. Maybe I'm branching out.

For your edification I looked up the color chartreuse (used the Google as my mom says) and learned entirely way too much on Wikipedia as usual.

I now know that the shade I like is yellow chartreuse or traditional chartreuse (versus web chartreuse), in the shade family of pistachio or pear. Also known as green-yellow (not yellow-green). The wiki entry is kind of funny (Chartreuse in human culture, anyone?) but now you know much more than you want to, so I won't copy it here.

So what's your favorite exotic color?

kitteh frylet

My kittehs, someone else's caption:

Batty cuteness

The Live Bat Encounter is at the High Desert Museum through Sunday 7/19.

Reading with your ears

I've been told that after my eye surgery, I can't read for at least a week. (I don't really get this because I'm just getting one eye done, so why can't I read with the other eye?) The prospect of not being able to read is freaking me out. Does that mean I can't knit either? What the heck am I going to do -- listen to talk radio?

So I'm exploring audiobooks again. I've read listened experienced a few audiobooks over the last couple years, as it solves the perennial problem that I can't knit and read at the same time. (I do know of people who claim they can, but I'm skeptical of the quality of either activity.) Of the eight or so books I've downloaded, I've really enjoyed three and never got beyond the first hour of the others. My problems with them have been:
1. annoying narrator
2. losing track of the story
3. falling asleep
None of which is a problem for me with actual reading. But I liked a few, so I'm trying to figure out what it was about them that worked and look for similar styles.

I usually download them from audible.com which has thousands of titles of all genres, including a lot of soft-core you-know-what, more than one might expect. (I can't type the word in my blog or I'll get interesting spam.) They can be pricey, about as much as a hardcover bestseller, so you have to look for the bargains and guaranteed winners. The library offers downloads, but it's pretty cumbersome and incompatible with iPods, so that's not very useful.

My biggest problem with audiobooks is that I'm an extremely fast reader. (I'm not saying this out of pride, but fact. It's actually not always great, as I'll buy a book while waiting for a flight and finish it before I land. It really ups the cost of buying books if you finish them in one sitting.) So audiobooks drag considerably versus my own reading speed. I just found that my iPod has a "faster" option which does help, even if the narrator sounds a little funny.

There's some controversy (of course) about whether hearing a book is equal to reading it. It's an interesting issue: just because we've traditionally read words on paper, does that make listening less intellectually pure? After all, civilization started with the verbal tradition of stories being told around the campfire, before they figured out how to make paper and get a global publicity tour for a multi-book deal. People rhapsodize about the heft of the book and the smell of the paper, but the speed I read and the poor quality of the used books I buy makes that kind of moot.

So I'm on the quest for some good audiobooks. If you have any favorites, let me know. Nothing that'll make me cry, and no self-help, please -- this is as good as I get.

Friday frylets: another flowchart

I'm getting a kick out of these. This one's pretty good, akshully. There's a program to build your own on the Graph Jam site. Go for it! Come on, you have plenty of time on your hands...

Torn cheese is feeling torn...

the long, dreary path to eye surgery

[If you weren't aware, I'm scheduled for trabeculectomy surgery for glaucoma in August. This is one of a series of posts about it. Not that it's that interesting, but it's good blog fodder.]

I started this journey at my local ophthalmologist's office. Bonus: I've now learned to spell ophthalmologist - there's a hidden H and L in there that can trip you up.

Jason (if a doctor is young enough to be my kid, I get to call him by his first name) is a great guy - funny, accessible, smart, and caring. (Plus, it turns out we both went to Middlebury College, a small liberal-arts school in Vermont. Odd coincidence. Of course, he says I was there the same time as his uncle, smart-ass whipper-snapper that he is.)

But anyway. Jason recommended I go up to Portland for surgery by one of the country's leading docs for this procedure. He (Jason) does this surgery, but says that for a patient as *YOUNG* as myself, he'd rather I get the best. He'll manage the extensive follow-up on the surgery here in Bend. I'm going with his recommendation, so had to first go to Portland for the pre-assessment.

The Devers Eye Institute is part of the Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital system - confusing but impressive. I went up a few weeks ago, and four hours later, after they poked and prodded and measured and photographed and nearly blinded me it was agreed I should have the surgery.

But not so fast. First I'll have to get a complete medical here, including EKG, then go back up to Portland for the pre-surgery exam. I thought that's what I was doing there the first time, but I guess not. Following that, I'll fly up Sunday Aug. 2 for the procedure scheduled for Monday morning. I have to stay overnight for a follow-up exam on Tuesday, then back home. They want me to return again that Friday, but I'm going to push to have Jason do that exam here.

I've been told that I won't be able to bend down (head below chest) for four weeks afterward. This restriction has really struck me for some reason. I'm now practicing feeding the cats while deep-squatting, which I'm hoping will at least tighten up the thighs a bit.

Stay tuned for more fascinating detail to come.

Screwy

Back in the wonderful state of Oregon, but not much else to say. I can't face recounting our endless travel saga, and vacation was vacationy: eating, drinking, reading, family and hanging around the pool. Very pleasant -- too bad we have to travel two days to experience it.

The X-man dropped by for a visit yesterday and was pressed into fixing stuff. It's so nice to have a man around the house and all that. This photo is from that effort.

And the day got screwier from there.

Burning Butte (kind of like Burning Man but not naked)

OK, so the thing about the Butte catching fire:

Every year since I don't know when, the city of Bend puts on a fireworks show on the 4th of July, launching the rockets from the highest spot around, Pilot Butte. (From Wikopedia: Pilot Butte is an extinct volcano located in Bend, Oregon. It is a cinder cone which rises nearly 500 feet above the surrounding plains. Bend is one of the very few cities in the United States with volcanoes located within their boundaries.) [I did not know that. But shouldn't it be within its boundaries?]

Anyway.The sparks inevitably land on the dry sagebrush on the side of the Butte and "the sucker lights up with flames" as Jen put it in her last comment. The show is ended early and the firefighters do their thing.

And inevitably, the headline of the local paper the next day is:
Fireworks start blaze on Butte!



Thanks to the monkey, Chris K, for this photo that I stole from him.