adventures of a canoelover

I actually shaved my head last week. Using a Bic and some cool Kiss My Face shaving gel.

Okay, so I sorta geeked it by not asking my wife if it would be okay first. The good news is that it grows so fast that after a week it looks like my regular “clipper with the 1/8 guard” cut.

Will I do it again? Sure. It feels great in the summer. I figure I’m collecting 3% more Vitamin D from all the solar energy absorbed by my massive cranium.

Follicularly challenged,

Canoelover

No, really. The Pachydiplax longipennis is the Blue Dasher. Cute little dude, on his last legs (literally) out behind the shop today. At first he was driving me nuts, his head is emerald green and looks a lot like an Emerald (Corduliiae) but definitely a Skimmer (Libellulidae). Plus he wasn’t Blue. Well…turns out the females are not blue. He is a she. And females have green to brown eyes.

Learn somethin’ new every day.

Canoelover

P.S. Longipennis means long wings. Pachy means wrinkly, diplax means cape. So I guess this dragonfly is a “long-winged wrinkly caped” thingy.

I’ve been trying to find the spreadwing damsel so I walked the backyard slowly. No spreadsheet, just a few pretty scenes, so I shot a few pictures. My lens was acting up so some of my pictures were a little weird. I miss my 50mm macro lens.

There were lots of happy bumblebees working the burdock flowers.

Lazily submitted,

Canoelover

There has been an Elegant Spreadwing Damselfly (Lestes inaequalis) hiding out in my backyard for a few days. I have been able to get a decent picture. So I settled for a lousy one. You can see the wings. That’s about it. I’ll keep stalking my prey to see if I can get a good one.

Spreadwings are lovely creatures, and are a little more rare than pond damsels…not that they’re endangered or anything, they are just a lot fewer species of them, just ten in Wisconsin, compared to 32 pond damsels. The broadwings like the Ebony Jewelwing (Calopteryx maculata) and the American Rubyspot (Hetaerina americana) are fairly common, and since they’re large they’re easy to spot they seem to be sometimes omnipresent. Spreadwings tend to be slimmer and blend in a little better so you seem them less. At least I do…

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

P.S. Some of you are wondering if I ever post anything on canoes and canoeing. I got some good stuff coming, I promise.

Although I am not a partaker of alcoholic malted beverages, one can still appreciate the simplicity, nay, the purity of having something called “The Beer Store.” No wine coolers, no hard liquor, no shee-shee buttery chardonnays that yuppies sip so frequently. I can almost hear the truck speak.

Bemusedly,

Canoelover

P.S. Billy Bishop is the most decorated Canadian pilot from WWI. In case you were wondering, he has his own museum in Owen Sound, a lovely little burg at the base of the Bruce Peninsula.

Robbie, Gregg, and Chris.

I received the email yesterday from Chris asking if I would like to go mountain biking with him at the Kettle Moraine Southern Unit, a wonderful network of single tracks that range from mind and fun to pretty technical stuff.

Unfortunately, I suck at mountain biking. The last mountain bike I had was 21 years ago (a Ross Mt. Hood), suspension was rare to non-existent, and trails like this were few and far between. Before that I converted my Schwinn Stingray to a BMX bike and rode all over the place, but this sort of riding was new to me.

My trusty steed.

Frankly, it’s a lot more like skiing gates than riding on the street. I was not used to dodging trees and boulders at a high rate of speed, and my performance showed it. I fell about five or six times, mostly just slow-motion fall-overs when I caught a tire between a couple of rocks or didn’t quite make a hairpin turn. A couple of my falls were real diggers at a high rate of speed, missing the big tree but whacking into the small one. or hitting a small stump and going over the bars into a sandpit.

It’s weird falling down on a bike. I haven’t fallen of a bike on pavement in decades (except for the first day I got clip-in pedals and forgot to clip out at a stoplight). I felt like I was learning how to ride all over again. That’s because I was.

I did get better. I learned to trust the bike, which was my mantra as I barreled down steep slopes covered with softball-sized granite boulders, letting the suspension of the bike soak up the bumps. After six or seven miles, I started to feel comfortable. Yep, just like skiing gates…look way ahead and trust your skis to go where you point them.

As soon as I lick my wounds I look forward to getting out there again.

August 14th, 2008. 30 miles west of Laramie, 10:30 PM. Outside temperature: 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Out the window of the van, 30 mph.

In August. Snow. In August.

So when someone in Wyoming says “I’ll be a cold day in August before I [go out with that dork, eat Rocky Mountain Oysters, cheat on my girlfriend, buy a hybrid, etc.],” beware.

Meteorologically submitted,

Canoelover

It isn’t a visit to Mom’s without repairing something. One of her toilets crapped out (heh–get it?) and I found a real live Ace Hardware store in Pleasant Grove and got the parts. One of the parts I needed was this connecting hose.

The thing that threw me for a loop was this label attached to the top threaded cap.

I know quite a few plumbers. Most of them are smarter than I am. So the questions I have are:

1) Do they only put these labels on plumbing supplies from hardware stores, assuming we’re dumb?

2) Is there a secret stash of smart person plumbing supplies that don’t have such idiotic labels?

3) Has anyone ever tried to install this connector without removing the label, then returned it to the store claiming it didn’t work properly?

4) If so, how did the sales clerk resist removing this person permanently from the genetic pool?

Curiously,

Canoelover

The desert provides a lot of life if you walk slow and look down a lot. The swell was full of animal life–birds, lizards, and insects, plus some pronghorn antelope, etc. The problem is that the animals living in the desert don’t want to be seen. This little guy I almost stepped on but he scurried away, but horny toads don’t move quickly as lizards go.

The Great Basin has two subspecies of H.T.s. This one is a Phrynosoma douglassi, a Shorthorned Lizard. This is a less horny of the two toads that live in the Swell.

Luckily they’re easy to catch, and my lizard-catching skills, long dormant for 40 years, came back as if I were wearing overalls and stuffing lizards in my top pocket so I could surprise my sister with them at opportune moments.

Whitney named him Charley and wanted to hold him.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

Little Goblin Valley

Central Utah is a geological wonderland. Most of the traffic is restricted to Zion National Park and surrounding areas. This leaves the rest of it for us to explore.

Navajo Rock (“The Beehive”) in the Wedge. Ian and Emily provide a sense of scale.

Our friend Steverino and his family took us to “his desert.” It was magnificent. The scale of it was somewhat smaller than the Zion/Grand Canyon sort of beauty, but nonetheless this was a treat. Frankly, I’m of the sort that prefers smaller scale beauty, which is why I get more excited about a little stream in southwest Wisconsin than I do about the Mississippi.

Buckhorn Wash Pictographs

The San Rafael Swell (locals pronounce it “San Ra-FEL”) is a wonderful upwelling of rock that covers a chunk of central Utah. You get a geological smorgasbord, as you can find dinosaur bones from the Jurassic a few miles from trilobites and mollusks that are hundreds of millions of years older. The trickle of water that runs through the canyons is no larger than a small trout stream but given the timetable it had, it did an admirable job of cutting a spectacular swath through a billion years of rock history. Wading in the chalky San Rafael River was a treat after a day of hiking in the hot sun.

I highly recommend this place to two or three people. The rest of you need to stay away, if you please.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover