Found Squirrels: Subway Squirrel

I found this lovely piece of squirrel art the other day while we were on our way to Governors Island on the N train.


I spied it through the dirty windows of the train and, without actually telling B what I was doing or why, I just walked right off and onto the platform. Luckily, he followed me and immediately understood when he saw me standing, wide-eyed, in front of this mosaic.
Here's the closeup. I think it's just exquisite. As an added bonus, we got to wait in front of it for like 10 minutes while we waited for the next train (B probably did not see this as a bonus). I should probably add that this was at the 8 St-NYU stop on the downtown platform.

Volkswagens on Governors Island

We went to Governors Island again last weekend. Getting there was quite the trial! First, we woke up late because it was Sunday and we're lazy. I had neglected to mention to B that the Volkswagen show was over at 4 PM, and so at about 1 PM when he said, "Hey, when do we need to leave to get to the Volkswagen thing?" we had to rush out the door.

I won't get too detailed in my description of our travel difficulties, but here's what happened:

1. Took the 7, switched the N at Queensborough Plaza within seconds. Nice.

2. At some point we discover that the N does not actually go to the South Ferry station, that's the R. Oops, our fault. We get out at 8 St-NYU anyway because I'm distracted by a mosaic squirrel. Successful transfer to the R.

3. On the R train they announce that the R is not actually going to South Ferry this weekend. We get off at Canal Street and debate whether to take the 4,5 or J. Decide on the 4,5.

4. Then a 6 train shows up! But we can't take that! But wait, we can! Because this weekend the 6 is magically going to Bowling Green!

By the time we got out at Bowling Green it was POURING rain. We got out and RAN to the Staten Island Ferry terminal where we purchased awesome yellow ponchos (2 for $5!) and then continued to the Governors Island Ferry terminal.

We are very dedicated to our love of Volkswagens, apparently.

Since the weather wasn't so great, the Volkswagen festival was pretty sparsely attended, which I thought was great. We were able to check out the cars pretty easily, even if there were only probably 30 or so cars. There were a TON of beetles, and just a few vans (and only three or so of those were Westys). It's really a cool place to have an event like this; you're right on the water with the Statue of Liberty behind you, a nice big green field, quiet... I do like Governors Island.

Probably the coolest thing was the Westy that had been converted to serve beer. Note the two taps to the right of the slotted window. Those were functional taps connected to kegs of beer in the Westy! How cool is that?

Here's the whole beer garden set up with the converted Westy. This was pretty awesome; I think B wants one now. The beer was tasty, but warm since they had run out of ice for the kegs hours ago. But seriously, how popular would we be if we had one of these? We would get invited on everyone's camping trips!
It was a very nice little Sunday trip out to Governors Island, and I hope they do this Volkswagen thing again next year and maybe open it up to water-cooled VWs too.

Connecticut Adventures

We traveled to the tiny state of Connecticut this weekend (that's right, I just called it tiny) to visit my friend M. We rode Metro North, and even got a train with a bar car, but as it was before noon they sure weren't serving.

We went to Connecticut to see the meerkat exhibit at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk (actually Southern Norwalk which I've been informed is referred to as SoNo). You may be asking yourself, "Since when are meerkats aquatic?" There is no good answer to this question, but it should be noted that meerkats are ridiculously cute and the stars of a show called Meerkat Manor which I believe is popular with the under-10 set (and me). Clearly bringing these little weasels to the aquarium is a good way to drive up attendance rates in the summer. (Note on scientific inaccuracies in this blog: meerkats are actually a member of the mongoose family, not the weasel family.)

Turns out meerkats move WAY too quickly for my camera, so this picture of the giant inflatable meerkat on the roof of the aquarium will have to suffice for this blog.

Okay, so I was a big fan of Meerkat Manor for at least the first season until my favorite meerkat died after bravely defending the baby meerkats from death at the paws of the neighboring tribe. I wasn't able to watch again after that (it was really upsetting, shut up), but I have maintained an appreciation for meerkats. I was really surprised at how tiny they are! In the show they keep the cameras at about ground level, so the meerkats seem pretty tall. They were only probably a foot long counting their tails! And so adorably rambunctious.

There were a lot of interesting things at the aquarium. One of our favorite exhibits was the jellyfish, which were AWESOME.

Jellyfish are just the WEIRDEST creatures ever. I do not understand them at all, but I loved watching them float around in their tanks. It probably helped that the aquarium was piping in a mix of psychedelic Enya and fantasy movie theme music in this exhibit. We watched the jellyfish for a long time.

There was also a giant sea turtle. I did not know that sea turtles could get that big, and I'm honestly a little freaked out now and unwilling to talk about it.

I would like to end this post by stating that I spent the rest of the evening in Connecticut kicking ass at James Bond on Playstation 2, but that would be a lie (the part about me kicking ass, I mean).

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.