Two new kittens have moved in -- the gray one, Haru, and the younger black one, who hasn't settled on a name yet.  Our grumpy old cat, Chloe, just as she did when Wilbur arrived, moved outside for a week.  But now it's been raining and she can be spotted once in a while slinking by or growling menacingly at one of the kittens.


We've considered Aye-Aye, Snowball, Cole, Kaboodle, Ash, Gatico, or Steve.


Anyone have any good name suggestions?


UPDATE:  


Prince Haru's name has stuck.
Porter wanted to name the black one Medallion (for a white spot on his throat) and the rest of us accommodated that by calling him Leon.


So, welcome to Haru and Leon.

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The summer's hurricane whipped up enough salt from the waves that down toward the coast leaves turned prematurely crisp, and they fell like little brown scrolls in August.  Here we are six miles inland, and the trees only looked a bit discouraged.  But the autumn's warmish, damp weather, hard rains, and now a few days of blustery wind seem to be stripping trees even as they break into color.  So the fall forests are only gorgeous rather than mind-boggling.

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My brain is still all jellied from our current mind-melting pace.  The report on jobs quality was quality work and has gone out as a draft, but some reports on race, media and Black male achievement have come back to be synthesized and summarized.  The analysis on communicating sustainable food policy has been ricocheting around the virtual office (Manhattan, Berkeley, Maryland, Rhode Island) and growing tattered and bruised in the process, but the paper's due tomorrow and I'm still scratching out some internet surveys to settle a hundred nagging nuances.  Good, robust findings still rattling into final shape.  And all along I had planned to be out video-taping confirmatory interviews on the labor research with some taxation work piggy-backed on it.  But that'll have to wait to the weekend . . . .

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Like dishes in the sink, half-imagined blog entries can stack up, get rotten, begin to smell, and finally just make the kitchen a depressing place to be avoided.  Fortunately, unlike dirty dishes, half-imagined blog entries can just be swept away like a pile of paper plates.  So I won't write about the hurricane's snapped oaks and the flies that swarmed upon them.  Or our 5 days of house camping after Irene passed through, camp stoves and candles.  You won't hear about the Red Portage potatoes or why I had to replant a late crop of Jacob Cattle beans.  I won't discuss the boys' meander through the end of summer, Monica's days at camp, or Patti's visit from Japan.  My outrage and weariness with U.S. politics, our dysfunctional news media, my sense of being in a country steering toward the rocks -- all that swept into the bin.  Because otherwise I'd never start writing again.


A big part of my neglect of this blog has been due to work.  There's our usual pattern of laying the groundwork for a research project, conducting the research, reading and analyzing the data, re-tooling the research, drawing our conclusions, and writing up our reports.  Normally there is a fair amount of filler in those work-hours: administrative work, back burner issues of company infrastructure, and so on.  But in this late summer we have 4 distinct projects all coincidentally in full flood of research and analysis.  And we shift between them all the time.  One of the big labor unions has us working on how to frame the idea of unionizing in new ways.  For a science advocacy organization we're working on communicating about the importance of regional food systems for sustainability and loosening the hold of agribusiness.  We're analyzing the mediascape for a coalition that wants people to understand better the importance of improving job benefits and maintaining job quality even in hard times.  And finally we're working on how to talk to Americans about raising taxes rather than just hacking away at budgets.  They're all difficult and complex challenges, and haven't left much creative energy for blogging away.


So I'll just post a picture of a happy Nico to please the family relations, and start getting back to it.

A dapper bumblebee works the flox.

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The stock market took another stumble downward yesterday.  The press attributed it to a struggling global economy and especially the "debt crisis" in Europe.  But there is an idea that is being seriously discussed in parts of the blogosphere, but which gets no mention in any mainstream press at all.  The idea is that the world economic system as we know it is about to violently shake apart, because it is absolutely not designed to survive a contraction in the Global Economy.

Most people don't understand that economic growth is not just a happy by-product of our current capitalistic system, it is the crucial underlying ingredient.  To the extent that any of our wealth is counted in dollars or yen or euros - as opposed to beans or goats or clean shirts - the "value" is only and solely determined by what other people are willing to believe it is worth.  So far, fine, that's basic market economics.  But we have taken things one step further and built our economy of value on what we think things are going to be worth in the future.  If we think there is going to be more wealth in the future, then it makes sense to invest your money in something that will return your capital plus a bonus - or if there isn't a clear investment opportunity handy, to lend it to someone who can invest it.  You eventually get back your capital plus a bonus.  In fact those loans themselves, that empty spot in your wallet, since they are supposed to gather the bonus to itself, become valuable things themselves, to be sold or used as collateral to borrow more money to create more debt, more bets on the future.

However, if there is no growth, if there is stagnation or contraction, then those interest-accruing debts become burdens, whose value is shrinking rather than growing.  Investments become losses.   A stock market loss of 5% means that trillions of dollars in wealth that people thought they had - just vanished.  Next week trillions more may disappear.  

The main difference between the mass media and the blogosphere is that the mass media (which are all embedded in vast multi-national corporations wedded to the status quo) speak as though perpetual economic growth can be regained and sustained.  In the blogosphere you hear serious and well-articulated doubts.  Many economists and environmentalists have tried for decades to point out that our system wasn't sustainable over the long term - that physical and environmental limits (or just incompetence) would eventually bring growth to an end.

But the coming decline in fossil fuel accessibility could itself bring an end to growth.  So to could the disruptions of climate destabilization or the acidification of the oceans.  Even an expansion of unrest among the poor and dispossessed of the world could be enough to put an end to growth.  Because, when the fall of global finance happens, a vast amount of imagined wealth is going to go with it - and people are not going to have the things they thought they did.

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Mosquitoes have been rare this dryish Autumn.  Maybe they are around, but harried by the bats, swifts, dragonflies, swallows, robber flies and so on that dive and zig through the airspace.  And then there are the frogs, toads and snakes that hunt in the grass.  


It is grasshoppers, katydids and their kin seem to be ascendant at the moment.  I saw the garden spider among the herbs binding a good-sized brown one, but that can't put a dent in the population - (nor will the blister beetles at least for now) - and besides I think the wasps have been thinning out the spiders.  A few years ago I found coyote scat in the yard and it was entirely the casings of grasshoppers.  I hear the coyotes in the night, and something has been making off with the mouse carcasses we toss out, so maybe they are visiting and gorging themselves again.  For now, every stride in the yard is a splash of fleeing hoppers.

She feasts on a large, leaf-shaped katydid

We could eat them ourselves I know, but I'm not going to.  It's a very human thing to carve out a category, "food" from within the larger category of edible things - and until I'm a great deal hungrier than I am now, insects aren't food.  When we get chickens they can eat bugs and transform them into eggs for us.

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Porter was gone for all of July, 

off among the extended family in Pennsylvania and Maryland.  

He's back now.  With a voice an octave lower.

Iced Coffee on the front step.

Because it's August.

       

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I'm no orchardist yet.

But the peach crop increased fivefold.

From two peaches to ten.

One of the hard things to do in life

is to actually be in the moment.

To slow down and be.

But watch a peach 

grow from bud

to flower

to green marble

to vulnerable, unlikely fruit.

Steal it before the others can.

When you taste the wet flesh,

and chew the tart, berry-like skin,

and the rough, jagged stone grates against your teeth,

how can you not be in the that moment?

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A male Reddish-Brown Stag beetle (lucanus capreolus), 

picked up by Porter on the walk.

Harmless enough . . . 

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Since the early 1950's the Metz Family Reunion has been taking place at Brown's farm in Airydale, Pennsylvania.  This Saturday was the latest gathering, and here are a few pictures and some video of the barn dance.

My great grandfather, Samuel Metz had 12 brothers and sisters.  It's the clans that have descended from them who have returned here every July for the past 60 years.

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brachonid wasps and hornworms

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Garden Blogging

Here's a beautiful thing.  

A small hornworm with its burden of pupating wasps

A larger caterpillar climbs a squash stalk

The parasitic brachonid wasp (cotesia congregatus) uses its long ovipositor to lay eggs inside the body of the tomato hornworm.  When these hatch, they eat the innards of the hornworm before burrowing out and pupating in cocoons attached to the dying caterpillar.

All the gardeners say to leave such caterpillars be, since these wasps are the best ally you've got against the beasts.

I think people who use insecticides miss half the fun of gardening.

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In the mid 1990's I was traveling in the Kyzyl Kum desert in Kazakhstan, near the Syr Darya River.  The great rivers of the Syr and Amu Darya are the main flows to the Aral Sea, and back then it was already clear that the Aral Sea was going to dry up unless something was done about the diversion of waters for irrigation.  The stakes were high.  It seemed that there were two choices: on the one hand an ancient inland sea with its own industries and fisheries and marine ecologies, representing a unique oasis in the arid heart of Eurasia -- on the other hand, the death of all that, the creation of a vast moonscape of pesticide-laden salt flats, internal migration, and the desert cotton industry could limp along for another generation.


As I looked at the Soviet era irrigation conduits -- open, crumbling, leaking troughs of weathered concrete, spilling every other drop out onto the muddy dust --  it was clear that there was a third option.   Cotton could be grown at a scale that allowed a flow into the Sea, or crops less thirsty than cotton could be grown in this desert.  But even if the economic and bureaucratic inertia were too much for those sensible changes, conduits could be patched, less water could be spilled, less left open to the thirsty desert air.  Not only was it not necessary to destroy the Aral Sea, the destruction would be a huge and pointless stupidity in no one's real interest.


This filled me with a sense of optimism that the crisis could and would be averted.

But of course, we did destroy the Aral Sea -- we sacrificed it on the altar of the status quo.


Today, I hear people say that our accumulating problems of climate instability, energy decline, overpopulation and resource depletion can be solved with some common sensical adaptations - no problem, when the time comes - before things really go to Hell.  Yes, I think, just like the old Aral Sea.

Photo NASA

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There are caterpillars that will nibble on your tomato leaves.  Then there is the tomato hornworm, a big green middle finger for your garden that will eat every leaf down to the nub - then shove its face into the tomato fruit itself for a little added insult.

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A few photos from Nico's and Monica's trip to see Patti, Charles, Anya and Estelle in Japan:



UPDATE:  For Monica's full photologue click on the slideshow below:

Margined blister beetles

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Garden Blogging

The tortoise beetle larvae have been chewing on the potatoes, and I finally got around to going out with a cup of soapy water to drown a few score.  They are little green worms with a brown shield on their backs. They build the shield out of their own shit, but luckily I'm not interested in eating them - only killing them.)

Among the harvestmen, wasps and dragonflies that hunt the foliage, I found a few long, black beetles hanging out among the stalks.  None of them were actively chewing on anything, but they didn't look very predatory either, so I read up on them.  

Margined blister beetles (as they are called) do chew on the foliage, but in fair exchange, since their larvae prey heavily on the eggs of grasshoppers and crickets - and those critters are all a-swarm and eating the plants.

The ten life stages of the blister beetle

The beetles are laced with the poison cantharidin, the active ingredient in the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly (which was always made up of pulverized blister beetles, not flies at all!)  If you can get the toxicity just right you can irritate the kidneys and urinary system enough to get a raging erection.  Unless you die of the poisoning instead.

Nowadays it's mostly grazing animals that get poisoned, and horses, cattle and sheep can die from ingesting a few of these potent insects.

None of us are likely to eat one (or crush one, which gets you nasty blisters on any exposed skin), so I'll just leave them be and count on their panoply of larvae to make omelettes of the local hopper eggs.

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Thievery!

This edible fungus, Chicken-of-the-Woods,  in the forest behind our house was too tempting for my virtue.  Not content to harvest the fruit, I stole the mycelium, log and all.  


I shifted out a log in our woodlot and settled this one into its place.

We'll saute the flesh with the flounder that Monica bought down at Stonington harbor . . .  a little purslane and pickled radish on the side . . . 

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As space shuttle touched down on earth for the final time, the US Space Age came to a close.  And this country's last semblance of a forward-looking vision closed.  The robots will still go out, though for how long is anybody's guess.

It may be that the manned space flight, with it's implicit promises of exploration and colonization was never anything but a chimera and an impractical daydream.  But it may be that it wasn't -- could movement off planet could have been a reality?  I think we'll never know.  But now, is anyone imagining a future beyond iPhone 8 or Jersey Shore 2015 in hologram?  Or the latest, faddish post-apocalypta?

Meanwhile, the percentage of the population looking for jobs and not finding them ticked upward again toward 10% - though the actual number of people idle in the current economy is closer to 20%, or one fifth of the population.


The oddness of this is maddening.  Extinction-quality challenges are coming down the pipeline toward us.  The destabilization of the climate; the destruction and acidification of the oceans; the impending decline of cheap energy; the dangerous challenge of providing material for 9 billion human souls - all leading to an erosion of too many global life support systems.


But not only are we not mobilizing for any of these challenges, we are idling people - a vast reservoir of human capacity that is being given no resources, no task, no vision beyond someday getting themselves back into the suicide pact of consumption-work.


Is the humanity-beast just averting its eyes from a future it doesn't want to face?  

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Chloe says, it's too damn hot.

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Dad was clearing out the shed of old bottles - the remnants of his collections of milk bottles, and old soda bottles, century-old medicine bottles that we used to dig up in ancient Pennsylvania dumps, overgrown with forest.  I took the best ones, figuring I could get them stowed away before Monica returns from Japan.  And Dad says they're probably done with canning, so I took four boxes of jars, quarts and pints, some salvaged in turn from the end of my grandmother's canning career nearly 30 years ago.  I'll return some in the autumn filled with applesauce or sauerkraut.

I left him and his indebted grandson to deal with the rest.

I dug up some of his bergamot and took some of the potted milkweeds he's grown from seed.  And a poorly placed black walnut sapling that started dying as soon as I dug it out, bare-rooted.  Still, I'll put it in the Rhode Island ground and see.

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