Better than squirrels?

Those of you who know me in real life know that I have a wide variety of interests beyond rodents. I'm really pretty obsessed with the Space Race, and with space exploration in general. So when my friend E, who lives in Washington, DC, suggested that we could see the space shuttle out at the Smithsonian, I was pretty excited.

This happened like a month ago, actually, and I've been struggling to write a post about this in my head for weeks now. Today I finally decided that I didn't really need to write a real post concerning the space shuttle. It's AN AWESOME SPACE SHUTTLE and I really don't think that me trying to explain aspects of it is going to make this post more interesting.

I do want to say that the space shuttle was WAY bigger than I had imagined, for some reason. Possibly because I had a toy space shuttle when I was a kid and the little astronauts that came with it were clearly not to scale.

Also, you know how in the news you're always reading about tiles falling off the shuttle? Well I was strangely surprised to find that the shuttle really is covered with tiles! The whole thing!

Anyway, I was way excited. I'm told that this museum we went to had other things in it as well, but I can't remember them at all. They weren't the space shuttle.

Squirrels in the News: Rocky Mountain Marmots

There's an excellent little snippet in the New York Times today about how global warming is affecting marmots in the Rocky Mountains.

Observatory: Some Like It Warm (If They're Marmots)

The warmer weather makes it more difficult for the marmots to shed their Christmas and Thanksgiving weight gain, and marmots now are 3/4 of a pound more on average than they were when the study started back in 1962. (Side note: How do I get an awesome job like that, weighing and observing marmots in the Rocky Mountains?)

Also, the size of the marmot population has exploded recently. Apparently the combination of fatter marmots (I love fat marmots!) and shorter winters has led to a tripling of the population in this area in just the last decade.

I would also like to recommend, while I still have your waning attention, that you visit the marmot entry on Wikipedia. That profile picture just cracks me up.

Squirrels in the News: Wenatchee Squirrels

This article was sent to me by my mother a few weeks ago, but I never blogged about it. It's from a newspaper called the Wenatchee World, Wenatchee being the "big" town in the area where I grew up.

Squirrels: Locals love 'em, but the state doesn't

This article is about an invasion of fox squirrels in East Wenatchee, and the state government's concern that they are an invasive species.

Perhaps this calls for some background. You see, we didn't really have squirrels in the small town where I grew up. We had one that I can remember, and we saw him pretty infrequently. One day the power went out at our house for a couple hours due to a "rodent incident." And we never saw that squirrel again.

So you can imagine how incredibly excited I was when I moved to Minnesota for college and found that my campus was just bursting at the seams with rodents! And they were relatively friendly rodents too, always interested in the last bits of a bagel you were munching on your way to class. I loved them dearly, and this is when my love of squirrels really surfaced.

Other people think I'm crazy. "They're pests!" they say. "They're rabid half the time!" say others (not true). These people grew up with squirrels all over the place; they don't know how good they had it. I've only had eight years of enjoying these ADHD little rodents.

And I should note, that the squirrel population in my hometown has started to rise again. There is a particularly large grey squirrel who has taken up residence near my mother's home, and she is very excited about it. It's genetic, people!

Squirrels in the News: The Genius of Squirrels

So the very same day that I posted the article about how squirrels keep cool in hot weather, I found this article in the New York Times about how amazing squirrels are.

Nut? What Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive

Some highlights from the article, since I know that most of you won't actually click on it:

1. The article quotes a professor at the University of Arizona who is a squirrel expert. IT'S A REAL JOB! I took the liberty of tracking down his website. Not only does he teach an awesome course on small mammals, he also maintains a Groundhog Day website where he tallies the results from each groundhog. Also, I went to one of his student's website, and am now wondering why I bothered with classics when I could have been doing biology and zoology. Seriously, one of his grad students did a project on rodent density in alpine meadows. She counted rodents all day, wrote about it, and got a degree. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?

2. The Eastern Grey Squirrel is so successful that many consider it a pest.

3. Squirrels in a family will greet each other by nuzzling their cheeks together.

4. A squirrel's peripheral vision is as sharp as its focal vision.

5. If a squirrel knows it is being watched, it will sometimes keep the nut hidden in its mouth but pretend to bury it to fool would-be nut-stealers.

Lots of great stuff in this article, guys. I highly recommend that you actually click the link to read it.

Squirrels In the News: Sweaty Squirrels?

This article has some great information about how squirrels keep cool in hot weather. (Spoiler: it's all in the tail!)

Animals in Heat: Do squirrels and pigeons get all sweaty in hot weather?

I haven't been in the habit of posting links to squirrel news in this blog, but since I've been so terrible about posting lately I figured I should give my audience something.

Found Squirrels: Basket Squirrel

We went to a lovely wedding this weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'll have to put up the rest of the pictures from the wedding on Facebook when I get a chance, but I wanted to share my squirrel sighting from that wonderful day.

This little guy was carved into the basket of hand towels in the restroom at the reception venue. And let me tell you, it was not easy finding a moment alone in the restroom to get a picture of it. I spent at least two hours running back and forth to the restroom trying to get a photo (and let's be honest, I was drinking beer too so there were many reasons for the many trips).

Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn

So I'm a little behind in keeping this thing up-to-date. We visited Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn a few weekends ago. It's apparently quite famous, and has lots of famous dead people interred there (I think most of them were historic sports celebrities, and I'm just really not familiar with them). It was a VERY nice cemetery, probably the nicest I've ever been to. It was filled with trees, green grass, and lots of squirrels.

They have lots of great sculpture, and tons of family mausoleums dating back to the early years of New York City. I love peeking into the mausoleums for some reason. Some of them have chairs and flowers scattered about so you know people have been there in the last six months. And some look like they haven't been opened in decades.

But, as I said, the sculpture was awesome. They just don't make cemeteries like this anymore, it seems! And maybe I'm particularly entranced by it because where I great up nearly all the cemeteries just had the flat headstones, and they were nearly all the same. I was told this was to make mowing the lawn easier, but I'm not sure that's true. Anyone have any insight into this? Is it just the cost?

I did notice that in this cemetery, as in many cemeteries out here on the East Coast, there are big family plots, and a big family plot usually calls for a large and costly monument of some sort. Seems to me that back in Eastern Washington even if a family does have a whole plot, everyone still gets their own headstone and there isn't necessarily a large, shared monument. What sort of zany conclusions about culture can I draw from this?

Anyway, there were a ton of squirrels, but I didn't manage to get any squirrel pictures. We did walk on Nut Path for a bit, which was quite exciting for me.

This is still not a knitting blog.

So I recently took up crocheting, which seems (at least in knitting circles) to be the older, dirtier, and less popular sister of knitting. I kind of like it, because it's REALLY easy and moves along very quickly. I finished my first crocheting project a few weeks ago, a sushi scarf!

When rolled, it looks like a nice maki roll, with fish on the inside, caviar around that, and some sort of green thing (avocado? celery?) stuck in there. Of course, when you unroll it it just looks like some crazy color-blind person's crochet project.

Yeah, not very attractive. I made it for my friend M (of the swing blog; you remember him) who loves sushi and give it to him when he was here a few weekends ago. I do not expect him to actually wear it, for the record. It was a great first crochet project, and I think it's pretty awesome.

The pattern can be found here if anyone is interested.

Governors Island

Well last weekend B and I went out to Governors Island with a small group of friends. Governors Island has a long history of use as a military facility, and was used as a Coast Guard station (I think that is what they call their bases?) from 1966 to 1996. It's now open to the public and accessible via a free ferry during summer weekends so we went to check it out.

The coolest part about the island is probably all the old buildings. While some of the structures are being put to use as museums or cafes or storage space, many of them are just totally abandoned, left as they were in 1996. Here's the old library on the island, neglected. (Don't cry, A!)

They have a huge range of building styles on the island! There is a large fortification called Castle Williams on one corner of the island which dates back to its earliest use as a military facility (it was covered in scaffolding when we were there so I didn't get a picture). And they have some fantastic old officer's housing, also abandoned.

They also have housing that is not... quite so stately or beautiful.

It's really cool to me, though, that this is all abandoned. Like in the picture above, they now have this chain-link fence to keep the tourists out, but if this picture had been taken 20 years ago I'm sure this area would have been crazily bustling with children and Coast Guard parents and diaper delivery trucks and whatever else happens in large buildings with lots of children. And how cool would it have been to grow up in this tiny island full of greenery and quiet, and yet be just minutes away from Manhattan? Very cool.

They have opened up the commanding officer's house, which is a nice big mansion. They've renovated it a bit, I think, but it's lovely. You can tell it was build for entertaining. And it has a great view of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Governors Island was very cool, and although I'm sad that they intend to tear down many of the old buildings, I'm excited to see what they end up doing with the island in five to ten years. It's kind of a hidden gem of the New York City area, in my opinion.

Found Squirrels: The Tudors

So we've been watching The Tudors lately, although we're only in Season 3 as we don't get Showtime and we're watching it on DVD.

Anyway, there was a squirrel in the most recent episode we watched!

This is on a dish of quail eggs that Queen Jane was enjoying at dinner with the king. I got excited and rewound the DVD just so we could see it again. And now I'm posting about it in my awesome squirrel blog, because that's how I roll.