Better Know a Watershed

The old man was out at a supermarket close to our house on Christmas eve morning and saw this animal skitter towards him as he was exiting the car. His first thought was, "Is that a cat?" It was moving fast, ducking under cars and had now veered to a row a bushes to the back of the parking lot. "Man," the old man wondered, "that is some kind of ugly cat!" It was, he discovered after taking a closer look before it jumped into the hedge, actually an otter. We had a good, head-scratching laugh about it when he got home and he surmised the otter was probably young, judging from its size. But where did it come from, I wondered. We talked about various streams and creeks that run through our part of town, and agreed that it must have been the creek that runs behind the supermarket where he was. Later that day, however, he checked the creek and discovered that there was no water in it.

This got me thinking about our water supply and the sources of water for other living things in our area. Above is a map of the Oklawaha watershed which our fair city is a part of. Here is the EPA fact sheet that this image came from. It has all sorts of important information about your water supply. Purdue University also has a cool site called Know Your Watershed which is jam packed with watershed info and a good place to start because they've got a lot of links, like the EPA's Surf Your Watershed and basic information like what the heck a watershed is in the first place (despite what one librarian believes, it is not a place to keep your lawnmower and rake).

Undies I Just Made

Finally finished this pair of underwear for my friend, "P." Her partner is a John Deere fan and I said I would make her a pair of glow-in-the-dark John Deere underwear. Well, that was a year ago. But, with some idle time before Christmas day dinner with the folks and friends, I managed to drag out the half-way finished pair and did em' up with some of the fabulous new elastic I bought at Lace Heaven (they are cheap and have an amazing collection). The John Deere shirt is supposed to be glow-in-the-dark, but I'm wondering if there wasn't a bit of a misunderstanding between actual "glow" or just "day-glo." My apologies for the poor quality of the picture -- one of these days I'll get around to getting a flash unit for the digital camera. I am going to start a gallery of my underwears and you can see the original post about underwear made from t-shirts here.

Bread Wheel of Life

Appropriated this from Nancy Nall. She says in her post, "It doesn’t exactly say 'sleep in heavenly peace,' but it works for me." Me too.

Here is some more background on the ubiquitous bread wheel of Fort Wayne, Indiana. A history of sorts can also be found here.

Christmas eve ponderings

Taking a brief break after dinner with the old man's folks before we go back over to sleep and behold the gift onslaught for DJ in the morning. But, that's not what I wanted to write about. This Christmas has put me in a singularly pensive mood, so it's probably a good thing that we're surrounded by family and friends to lighten me up.
While we sat at the dinner table after enjoying a lovely casserole, Steve Irwin's name came up after a four-month or so gap (maybe because the casserole had surimi?). We all marveled at the life and spectacular death of the Crocadile Hunter. You may remember the old man wrote an observance of sorts about Irwin. With this round of collective head shaking the old man's old man said something to the effect that, "the best thing Irwin could have done to help animals was to stay away from them." I disagree. Say what you will, but he did bring the plight of many species around the world to the attention of the largely somnambulant mainstream and got kids interested in, if not saving many species largely overlooked, at least preserving them to pester at a later date.
At my father-in-law's suggestion I am including a new label for "Requiem for a Hunterweight" -- "pure foolishness," and wish to include a link here to another stingray attack. This was brought to my attention months ago when it happened in October, and I forgot about it until this evening when discussing Irwin. With Irwin it was kind of understandable that he would get stabbed by a stingray after poking it and prodding it endlessly, but with the one that happened to the US dude it seemed a little too random. Or was it? Copy-cat stingray attacks?
I'll probably edit this after the holiday but am posting it now. Thank you, Steve Irwin, for entertaining us and enlightening us. Now to Delicious G's casa for homemade egg nog and other Christmas cheer. Joyeux Noel.

Little Brown Dress

This is kind of a cross between performance art and experiment in accidental environmentalism. Alex Martin made this brown dress (see artist's representation to the left) and then wore it for a whole year as the first of two "Intentional Wardrobe" projects. You can read about them here.
I like this site because Martin freely shares her dress pattern and gives would-be brown dress wearers a little 101 on dressmaking. She makes it seem simple and easy and, by gosh, even I could figure out how to make one from the instructions.
If you take the time (if you have the time, natch) making clothes for yourself and others is a great way to spend it.

Thanks to "B" (once again) for giving me the 4-1-1 on a cool concept.

Ideal Bite ME!

Here's a "blog" entry about "green" ski resorts. I commented here, but this is what I said:

"Ski resorts are a bad idea on the whole because they need to clear-cut many acres of trees in order to create ski slopes and majestic mountain-top lodges. They use up too many natural resources to give rich people a place to play."

Did I totally top the "humane" veal comment for crankiest treehugger?

Of course I was too chicken to give them my real name. These guys have been getting rave reviews on many different blogs and other eco-friendly websites, so am I the only one who thinks they're completely annoying? Maybe I'm just jealous. No, they're really annoying. I'm sure they would be fun to hang out with to do yoga while drinking wine or going to the local rodeo bar.