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21.03.10
I keep waking up between 4 and 5am, then falling back into vivid, frenetic dreams. Last night's involved some kind of castle with mirrors that showed you your reflection, but in a different time. There were shadowboxes of disembodied, malformed heads, though these may have been made of green and white polystyrene. A life-threatening chase was proceeding on staircases made of yellow ceramic tile treads and glass railings which caused the participants to A) slip and B) crash into the railings they couldn't see. Meanwhile someone was freeing a collection of live freshwater fish into the ocean. I blame at least half of the preceeding imagery on work.
18.03.10
You could smell it before you saw it; a heavy animal scent with hints of tannery, thick and coarse enough to suggest airborne hairs coating the back of your throat. The plastic bags were being emptied of their temporary residents; the unstuffed skins of various large mammals. One was laid out on a table; formless folds of skin and fur disturbingly close to human dimensions. We guessed it was a llama, hooves still attached, the head a grotesque deformed skull-less mask of empty eyes and a leering, toothless mouth. I made the mistake of voicing my unease, whereupon my lovely co-workers set about re-animating various bits of it for my enjoyment.
And you wonder why I went into botany.
14.03.10
I suppose scientific accuracy is too much to expect from the free newspapers. Deadlines are tight, graphics can be hard to get, and when all you're doing is (mis)informing the public (or selling ads between bits of copy), who needs to check facts?
I'm talking about a cover story last week, on allergies and the early pollen counts. The cover was a badly photomanipulated image of a woman being attacked by flower petals, superimposed in front of a blurry photo of a golden field of what looked like wheat. The inside story showed a photo of a vase of roses and in the background, a person blowing their nose... because the problem we're having is all the roses blooming out there.
Generally speaking, if it has a flower you can see, you're not allergic to it (at least not in the seasonal hayfever sense). These plants are usually insect-pollinated, so the grains of pollen are too big to become airborne and cause allergies. They were closer with the wheat image (at least in the right family), as grasses are wind-pollinated, and so their pollen is dispersed through the air and a source of allergies, but grass usually doesn't release pollen until summer (or turn golden until autumn). The main source of wind borne pollen right now is the large trees dripping in catkins (pendent inflorescences of only male flowers, lacking in petals, and churning out pollen). Every cottonwood tree on my walk to the station is festooned with them. These should have been the subjects of the photos.
Of course, first you'd have to know this (ask a botanist, any botanist, or an allergist, some of whom were quoted in the article), then you'd have to find a photo (hey look, wikimedia commons has lots), then put it with the article. Then maybe people would actually gain some minor bit of knowledge about the stuff that's directly affecting them, instead of ignoring all of nature as that sometimes-pretty-but-mostly-inconvenient stuff that gets between them and the mall.
Photo by David Perez
This is a great image of a European alder, the catkins are on the upper branch, the lower branch shows last year's female cones and this year's just starting to grow in. The colours and composition works nicely as well, all under GNU free license from wikimedia.
09.03.10
Today I found a grey hair.
05.03.10
How is it March already?
This morning I did that thing where your alarm is going off, so you get up and turn it off, only it doesn't shut off, and you're going "why isn't this working?", then you realize you're still asleep and only dreaming that you're turning the alarm off, so you get up and turn it off , only it still doesn't shut off, and you're going "why isn't this working?", then you realize you're still asleep and only dreaming that you're turning the alarm off, so you get up...
They delivered a shipping palette of bits I needed for work. It was a large and very heavy palette. It arrived during our receiving person's lunch break, and was thus abandoned outside on the loading bay dock. Due to construction on an adjacent wing, there is currently no way to get off the loading bay dock with something on wheels; thus, we were marooned. I called in reinforcements and we managed to borrow a vehicle, a large, rusty white van lacking side windows. My small car is of the same make and vintage as the van, so the controls were strangely familiar despite the vastly different size and power of the vehicle. I had to back it up from its parking spot through a loading zone full of construction fencing and other vehicles. Even though I had someone outside guiding me, it still surprised me that I did it in one go. It was one of those all-too-rare moments when you attempt something you think will be daunting and you turn out to be unexpectedly competent. Vehicle in place, the palette was broken down, materials loaded through a human chain. The now-empty palette was moved aside, various packing materials placed in the appropriate container, and the loading bay cleared.
It wasn't until after we had unloaded and I had returned the van that I noticed a smear of blood on the inside of my right palm. At some point, a sharp corner had taken out a chunk of flesh. Once again, work takes its toll of blood and sweat, and we'll see if we can't manage some tears in the next few months.
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