Tag Archives: outdoors

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Salish Sea

Today in the Salish Sea, it is 7.9 to 9.1 degrees C. I do not want to swim in it, though I have a neighbor that swims in it year round.

Yesterday the sun came out, so I hurry to Chetzemoka Park and down to the beach. I walked towards Point Hudson. The brandt are there. They need time on shore and we are supposed to leave them alone, but a tourist walked out the point. I promptly sat down with my camera in the sand, because the brandt left the point and came over to me. It’s the closest I’ve been to them.

Brandt make a noise that’s half chuckle and half purr. It’s a really nice sound. They were dabbling to feed. They are geese. More here. These are migrating to Alaska nesting grounds, but they feed along the shoreline. They are smaller than Canada geese and do not show up in our parks.

Eventually I got up and moved back down the beach slowly. They did not spook. I think there was quite a bit of Brandt community flirting and arguing going on.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: cold.

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Xeno or infection phobic?

So is Xenophobia a pathological fear of strangers or foreigners? Like agoraphobia or arachnophobia? The Mayo Clinic site has a listing for agoraphobia but not for arachnophobia or xenophobia. Perhaps agoraphobia is more disabling. Though with our world having more and more people, xenophobia might be terribly dangerous as well.

Current world population: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/.

Number of people with Long Covid: at least 65,000,000, though the talk I attended yesterday say that’s a low estimate. Nearly one percent of the world population.

This article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2 is about Long Covid, the research to date and the areas that need research. This is a very fast moving target with information exploding from multiple labs.

I attended an on line continuing medical education about Long Covid yesterday: https://hsc.unm.edu/echo/partner-portal/echos-initiatives/long-covid-fatiguing-illness-recovery/. This is a global monthly teaching session about Long Covid and current research and diagnosis and treatment. Yesterday’s talk was about immune cell abnormalities that persist and evidence is showing up that they are causing some of the problems. However, as one researcher said, the problems are multifactorial and any system in the body can be affected in more than one way.

Essentially some of the immune cells are puffy, sticky and enlarged. The suspicion is that the postexertional malaise is related to these puffy sticky cells. During exercise, or for some people normal activity, the muscles need more blood flow and more oxygen. The puffy sticky cells are stiff and won’t slide through capillaries easily. The muscles send a panic “I need oxygen!” message to the brain and the muscles do not work. The recovery can take a day or two days because of the food/oxygen deprivation. The researcher said that the same mechanism is suspected in ME-CFS (myalgic encephalopathy-chronic fatigue syndrome).

My muscles are feeling normal. My chronic fatigue is comparatively mild and happens with bad infections or with a vaccine that raises antibody levels, as it is supposed to. That’s how immunizations work. Do I have antibodies that shut down my muscles or do I have puffy cells? I would postulate the former but I can’t be sure right now. My home science kit is not quite up to that study.

When my fast twitch muscles are not working, are affected, it is very weird. They DO NOT WORK RIGHT. It is hard to describe: it is sort of pain, but it’s more of a very very strong STOP EXERCISING NOW message. And then I am exhausted for 1-2 days. In contrast, my muscles are a bit sore after a four mile beach walk 2 days ago and then an intense physical therapy session, but I am not exhausted. No naps the last two days. I have returned to my normal sleep patterns, less hours.

One of the researchers presented new technology that can make a movie of the microscopic cells going though a space with a narrowing like a capillary. Video electron microscopy. They are describing the cell shapes and whether they go through a capillary diameter normally or stick, for people with no Covid, diabetics, acute Covid and Long Covid. All are different. It is fascinating new technology.

I think I am more infection phobic than xenophobic. People all have the same basic blood cells inside, even with lots of different genetic patterns. So far infection phobia has not led me to agoraphobia, but the talk yesterday sure makes me want to keep my mask on.

There were over 350 attendees yesterday from all over the world. Lay people can sign up as well and the videos are stored for anyone to watch. I will watch yesterday’s a second time because five different scientists presented in 30 minutes and I ignored the chat which was going full speed with references to look up. Homework. And progress is being made.

Blessings.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: xenophobia.

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I took the photograph two days ago from East Beach on Marrowstone Island. The distance between the sea lions and the container ship is much further than it appears, and this is taken with a Canon PowerShot SX40HS zoomed most of the way out.

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Daily Evil: M is for moan

M for moan and maudlin and mourn and mountain.

Another watercolor, 14 by 27, 1987. There is another older watercolor, no year, on the reverse. Misty mountains. This could be West Virginia, the panhandle where my grandmother lived for a while, or a trip to the northwest.

M is for mother, too. I miss her.

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Daily normal

This is normal during the Great Port Townsend Bay Kinetic Sculpture Race. Feathers, headgear, human powered land, water and mudbog machines, as well as Kinetic Kops and bribery of the judges. All trying to be Most Mediocre.

Not whacky, nope.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: whacky.

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Cautionary tale

I climb in a flower gullet
That’s eaten by a horrid pullet
Then an eagle with a mullet
Grabs and flies with the wicked pullet!

The pullet’s dead, I must escape
I climb the warm wet red throat like tape
crawl out her beak, I’m on her nape
Staring down at a far landscape!

The pullet swings in the thermal’s rise
I can’t believe I am alive
The eagle soars and then she dives
A nest with fierce small beaks: a hive!

I jump as the eagle lands
her greedy children shout demands
they tear the pullet wing to gullet
while the eagle grooms her bloody mullet

I crawl through the nest and jump away
eaten and freed in just one day
to tell the tale for many days
of eagle mullet pullet gullet

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: gullet.

Why doesn’t bullet rhyme? Words are weird.

I took the photograph in Michigan in 2017 in July, at my friend Maline’s garden.

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Daily Evil: H is for Hill

I can’t think of anything evil this morning.

This etching is titled Golden Hills, 2nd Edition, 14/20, 1980. The plate is 4 by 5.5 inches, so this is a lot of very delicate work. My mother used dental pics to draw in the tar on the plate. The darker lines are etched deeper in the acid bath. The shadowed hill is tricky, isn’t it? I think that the texture is a fine piece of fabric pressed into the tar and then lifted, to make the pattern so even.

I think these hills are in upstate New York. My maternal grandparents lived in Trumansburg, New York. By 1980 my parents were living in Alexandria, Virginia.