Tag Archives: deer

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caged rose

WHY is this poor rose caged, you ask? I removed the top bit of cage to take the photograph. This is the only bloom this summer, because the rose keeps growing out of the cage. It’s in my backyard and the deer chomp down to the wires. I think they need vitamin C.

I tested this the other day. I trimmed a rose in the fenced front yard. I took the trimmings and spread them under the apple tree. This is not a great picture but I was happy to see this young visitor eating roses and fallen apples.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

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Vape

First, the definition of vapor:

noun

  1. The gaseous state of a substance that is liquid or solid at room temperature.
  2. A faintly visible suspension of fine particles of matter in the air, as mist, fumes, or smoke.
  3. A mixture of fine droplets of a substance and air, as the fuel mixture of an internal-combustion engine.

So vaping is smoking. It can be called vaping, but that is to trick us into thinking that it is not smoking, that we are not sucking chemicals into our delicate lung tissue. We only have one set of lungs. Lungs are like a tree, either the roots or the leaf parts upside down. Air is drawn in by our muscles expanding the chest and diaphragm, down the trachea, the bronchi, the bronchioles and at last to the alveoli, where tiny veins wrap each alveoli, trading carbon dioxide for oxygen.

I think of smoking as every cigarrette distroying an alveolus.

Vaping too, vaping is smoking. The nicotine is suspended in a solution and the vaporizer heats up until it is in vapor form. I started reading about vaporizers at least a decade ago. There were over 500 different types, mostly made in China, and there are all sorts of solutions. I was horrified to read that ethylene glycol was one of the solutions that held nicotine. When a dog drinks antifreeze, ethylene glycol, it is poisonous to the brain. Does anyone think that we should inhale smoke with antifreeze and nicotine in it? Really?

There is no control of what is put in the solutions. We don’t know what they will do long term but we know that nicotine is addictive and damages the lungs. Some of the vaporizers get so hot that the metal is also vaporized. Heavy metals are clearly bad for the lungs and poisonous as well.

Here is an article from the U of Colorado Medical Center with further reasons NEVER to start vaping. Because vaping is smoking: don’t let the term fool YOU. 4 reasons why you should stop vaping.

For the RDP: vapor.

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sorrow

Most of the time I am fine (I miss you I miss you I miss you).
I am busy during the day (You said I needed my own life).
What shut you down, I wonder (the family event).
You said I always try to learn daily (you say you refuse to change).
I have friends that love me and my kids (you say you do not love me).
I don’t think I know what love is (your actions felt like love sometimes).
Mostly I don’t think about you (sometimes it is very dark).
I hope that you are well (I wish I wanted you to be happy without me).
I am patching my heart again (for you I use elk sinew).
The deer remind me (life goes on, even when one doesn’t want it to).

A previous poem, when my sister died: The deer remind me.

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bleed

even when your heart is broken, monday still comes, every week
you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, make a list of your work
no one in the bank, the post office, the store sees your life bleed

_____________________________

For Ronovan Write’s Sijo Wednesday # 18: use regret.

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foxglove

The source of digoxin and digitalis. I am interested when people tell me they don’t take prescription medicines and that they only take “natural” medicines. Meaning pills. Pills do not grow on trees or bushes and are made by human beings. How exactly is the person defining “natural”?

My father said that anything a human could think up was “natural”. “Though that does not mean safe.” Think wingsuits and basejumping.

Digoxin and digitalis are used less than in the past, because there are many other medicines to choose from to control heart rate. However, they are still used because digoxin is one of the very few rate controlling medicines that does NOT lower blood pressure. Most of the others do lower blood pressure. When nothing else works or is tolerated, the cardiologist may sigh and say, ok, start digoxin. It is a tricky medicine because levels that get too high are toxic and the dose is different for each person and the dose must be lowered as kidney function changes with age. We still use it, though.

About one third of prescription medicines originate from a plant source like this, where the plant actually makes the active substance. Plants and animals and humans evolved together. We have deer all over town and they do not eat the foxglove. They love roses but stay away from foxglove.

I am seeing advertisements for a book to make your own medicines at home. I have not bought it. I would stay away from any recipe with foxglove: I want a lab to test to get the dose exactly right.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day. Heh, it turned into an essay of the day too. Wordy, wordy, wordy.

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Boa waiting

Boa Black would often wait in the yard, watching. What was she waiting for?

These:

Boa really liked the fawns. She would wait and watch the path into my second lot.

I have a 1930 house and a 1930 garage. The garage is on the lot line and one side extends five feet into a second lot, that is set at 90 degrees to the house lot. I quit mowing the second lot when I was divorced, working, and had two kids. I talked to the neighbors on the block and no one objected. The lot is hidden from the road by a huge bank of rosa rugosa.

The deer have used the lot in some years to stash young fawns while they made their rounds.

This is taken with a 26X zoom, so the fawn saw me but did not get spooked. Actually the fawn was hopping around in the second lot and managed to look guilty when I first saw it. Uh-oh, mom told me to stay hidden. It lay down and tried to pretend it had been behaving the entire time.

Boa Cat died in early 2020, after 17 years with me, a kitten from the pound. In memorium.

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Our town Covid-19 quarantine list

This is fiction. Though many of the people may exist in some form or other.

Subheading of police report:

Current covid-19 quarantine list

1. Katherine is quarantined for 10 days for chasing a deer out of her front yard with a broom without wearing a mask. Many thanks to the two neighbors who called in. Also, quit talking to deer and singing to the chickadees. You are just confusing everything.

2. Bob 1 is quarantined for 10 days for biking down his drive way without a mask on. Yes, we know you wore the mask for the other 48.25 miles. We don’t care.

3. Bill is quarantined for taking off his mask while hunting elk. No, being thirsty after butchering is not an acceptable excuse. You just be glad that you had that elk tag.

4. Two more Bobs are quarantined, one for playing the piano and the other for playing the fiddle, both with the windows open while not wearing a mask. It’s too cold for that right now and germs. Geeze.

5. Russ is quarantined because he can still talk fast, even through the mask. We aren’t allowed to say what else he’s done.

6. Joey is quarantined for miming fascism in public. We can tell who you are through the mask. Stick to magic, dude. Miming facisim is just creepy, ok? You are giving us nightmares.

7. Lou and Amelia are quarantined for abandoning the post office and for being too nice to bicyclers. What are you two, liberals?

8. Leah is quarantined for wearing that peek a boo mask and it didn’t match the rest of the outfit. Ok, you had matching gloves, shoes, hat, coat, dress and lipstick, but the mask was not right and we’re outlawing the peek a boo thing. People just get too hot.

9. Patrick is quarantined for nursing in public right out in the open. Really, now. Currently those fall under the mask rules too. You can use a big scarf or go indoors. It’s not socially acceptable yet for guys.

10. Geoff is quarantined for exposure to the 80 year old neurologist who is still working doing Independent Medical Exams. You guys took off your masks between patients in the back room. Fools.

11. Sue is quarantined for being around Geoff. Double fool.

12. Barbara and Carl and family are quarantined because they left everyone sad and hungry on Christmas Day 2020. Carl did not make the 500 gallons of hollandaise. We will happily set up a social distancing grid with 10 foot colored places for people to sit, with the neighborhood cordoned off for two blocks in all directions from your house. That is, we’d get eggs benedict first and any time one of us came on or off shift. The High School Robotics team has agreed to repurpose their robot to deliver to each person who is masked and sitting in a grid spot. We envision a pattern using both sides of each street so that the robot doesn’t go on the grass and fall over. We might even fund a second robot. Please? Could we have Christmas this year?

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Caged

I was trying to remember the name of this poem the other day. Then I put up the rose picture and remembered. I wrote this in or before 2009.

Caged


She was raised in captivity
Wild one
With her family
They knew the ways
Of the captors
Obedience

The call
Of the wild
Was too strong for her

She strained at the lead
Ears cocked
Hearing
All
And distant calls
Those who were free

She was beaten
Shunned
Thrown in solitary
They told her the rules
Over and over

She fought
Lacerating her captors
And herself

Her family
Wearied
Turned their heads away

Chained
She mourned
Isolated

They didn’t watch her
Closely
Any more

She chewed off her paw
Free

They didn’t notice
She growled
When they came near

They threw the meat
From a distance

Her cubs circled
Behaved
To all appearances

“When, mother?” they whispered

She mourned
As the leg healed
Her gait became stronger

The cubs and she
Ran at night
While others slept

At last she tried once more
Mourned
Howled
Cried to the sky
Grief
Pain
And the call of the wild

The family cringed
Pressed their ears
To stop the noise

She rose
And broke the chain
On the cage
That held them

Howled

They turned away
Cowering
In the familiar

Now she rises
Turns
Trots from the compound
Cubs behind

She sets a steady pace
A loping gallop

They do not look back

Someday
The family may choose
To free themselves

But not now

She follows the voices
To freedom
And the unknown