In honor of a bunch of my friends being served iris rhizomes instead of daylily bulbs at a skills event and puking their guts out all night, here is a friendly reminder about wild edibles:
Do not eat any wild edibles that are at all new to you or you are even a little uncertain about without double and triple checking the ID with a trusted, professional resource. ABSOLUTELY DO NOT feed wild edibles to anyone else that you haven't repeatedly IDed and eaten yourself with no problems.
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most of us have heard of the red car game. you’re on a road trip, you’re bored, you start looking for red cars to do something.
and then they’re everywhere. you notice them nearly every few minutes.
there aren’t suddenly more red cars now, of course. you were seeing them already, but you weren’t noticing. you weren’t looking.
I am noticing things.
there is a plant I notice everywhere now, a small bushy plant in suburbs, along streets, by shops on the highways. dwarf umbrella bush is what the internet tells me when I look for it’s name. I did this because I wanted to know why,
every time I ever saw it, every place,
it was always dying.
always the leaves turning yellow, the branches small and scraggly. inside out - nitrogen deficiency. their soil drained.
I am noticing how many of these landscaping plants are yellowing, how small and sickly they look in just a few years. I am noticing how often the grass outside the house is replaced when it once again turns brown and dry, how the type never changes and the cycle starts again. I am noticing how the unmowed, unkempt spaces on lakesides and roadsides look more alive than this. how the preserve I grew up next to was miles of “messy” unmanicured nature and the ground was covered in leaves instead of grass and there was life.
I am noticing the birds that come by the lake. there was a flash of blue wings and red chest - eastern bluebird, male, relatively common. I had never seen one before. there is a family of ducks that appear every spring; i cannot say if it’s successive generations or different ducks, but I can always look forward to ducklings. there are little brown birds with white heads whose names I do not know - are they some kind of piper? why don’t I already know?
why is it so hard to learn about my native plants (accurately, that is)? why are so many gardening sites littered with people who think a plants value is based on how pretty or useful it is to them, who think a tree shedding leaves is “messy”?
why is knowing about the world we live in so… odd? why is it a hobby and not vital knowledge? I learned about polar equations. I taught myself about mycorrhizal networks and species of insects.
(did you know there are shiny green bees? a special species of wasp pollinating figs? that white flowers bloom at night for moths? do you know? have you looked?)
I cannot look at a lawn and see life anymore. it is a wasteland, devoid of life, dying slowly itself. everywhere is grass, grass, doused in water that runs over into storm drains, soaked in fertilizer and pesticides and a hundred other poisons and sending one clear message:
this is a place of death. life is not welcome here.
I do not think I could live in a city. too loud, yes, too busy, yes, too many people, yes, but the plants would bother me. a tree allotted only a convenient square, surrounded by dead stone and metal.
a forest cleared for this, for burning asphalt streets and racing cars and shops whose bathrooms are “for paying customers only”.
this is a place of death. life is not welcome here.
and now I am noticing.
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Some pictures of my darling girl 💜
Today has been long.
The waiting for it to be time was the worst. I cried so much and hurt and it was so hard to shove that away to not stress her out more. This cat pulled out her tail hair when I was stressed.
Unfriendly was concerned she'd be hungry and didn't want her to be hungry on top of everything, so he syringe fed her a little dinner last night and breakfast today. (🥹) She didn't really resist and did swallow her food.
She still had the ability to not wet herself. When I put her in her litter at 2 and the 4:30, she peed. She pooped a little last night but I had to hold her up.
This morning she did grip my finger with her left front paw a bit, but she was mostly checked out. I just got the tiniest flash of her.
When we got there, I realized I could have planned the cremation to be today and the clinic paperwork is what triggered that thought. The receptionist thought the place I had been using didn't offer viewing the cremation anymore but thankfully she was wrong. I was able to call them and give them the heads up to do a same-day cremation after the process was done.
The process was less alarming than Loki's but more than Diva's. Gigabyte possibly had nerve degeneration that was affecting her breathing and swallowing. The sedative made it so she had to open her mouth to breathe, which was not something I was expecting. Her muscle wasting probably affected her and being too sleepy probably strained her. She also had post-death exhalation that was new to me. Both Diva and Loki just looked like they just left peacefully.
They did a paw print and fur clip at her clinic and wrapped her and put her in a nice zipped body bag for us to take her. So surreal and yet also not. So we did.
The funeral director was the same man who also did both Diva and Loki's cremations. The viewing room has some seating. You can have a prayer read or not. She was laid on a table in front of us with some toys, covered with a blanket. He placed her in and I gave the nod for when it could start. You don't see anything .
I needed to see her placed. I needed to know she was starting her transformation from kitty to ashes. It sounds odd maybe, but that's what started with Loki and has continued. We picked her ashes up 3 hours later.
We wandered. Got breakfast. Got stuff at Lowe's and then picked her up.
And now she's home. There was other irrelevant stuff while we waited and after, but she's home.
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dean winchester is a character that God designed to be on riverdale. he's like an animal removed from its natural habitat and deprived of the nutrients it needs to grow. because no one understands that while they are from planet earth he is from Movie World where everything is a reference to everything else and everything is abstracted into genre fiction. but if he tried making 1 of the Dumb little references he whispers to himself on Riverdale jughead would be like aha a subtle nod to the 1982 film poltergeist, allow me to counter with a total non sequitur about david lynch. and dean would be like how did you do that.
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Guys math is just literal wizard shit. Like the way they can transmute numbers and invoke higher dimensions and conjure imaginary entities to elegantly solve a seemingly impossible problem…
It’s like “ha ha! I have constructed the impenetrable sphere! It is literally impossible to defeat it by brute force!” And then another guy is like :) and draws a funny shape and suddenly the whole sphere turns into a line and the wizard just goes around it and you’re like whaaaat. “Ah ha, but if I merely tesselate this periodic tiles like so…” and then it turns out a puzzle that has stumped scholars for ages is not only instantly resolved but opened up entire new worlds of research in the process.
This post brought to you by YouTube videos explaining math and physics concepts about things like the recently discovered aperiodic monotile
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