Food: We tried tamarind for the first time today. Initially, I bought the tamarind pods to draw, but since tomatillos are perishable, I have to finish drawing them first, and my gaze kept sliding over to those weird, lumpy brown pods. The more I looked at them, the more curious I became, so I selected the plainest of the bunch (I meant to draw the others) and broke it in half. When I pulled the two halves apart, the interior, which was slimy, lumpy, brown and very reminiscent of waste rather than food. I was a little hesitant to put that in my mouth, but am so glad I did! It has a wonderfully sour, sweet, flavor, bettter than the sour candy. I talked the kids into trying it (they were also quite reluctant) and before long, only a couple of the pods were left...oops! I guess I'll have to buy more. There are large seeds embedded in the brown pulp, so we planted several pots of those, to see if we can get it to grow as a houseplant. The next food we'll be trying: mochi.

Movie Review: Twilight

I generally don't watch wildly popular movies, but my son and I have been devouring the book series by Stephanie Meyers (more on that later, after we finish the fourth book). I liked the first book well enough that watching the movie seemed worthwhile.
Predictably enough, I didn't like the movie half as well as the book.

The girl, Bella, is portrayed as intelligent and hardworking in the book series. In the movie, she seems pretty dippy. Her vocabulary is limited, and where she could have been bright and shy, she comes across as shy and dumb. Even though she's madly in love with Edward in the book, she comes across as merely needy in the movie; there was no fire, no passion. Edward was definitely creepy, but his hair, UGH!! I mean, does it have to stand up on end like that? His eyebrows were drawn in too heavily, making him look artificial. If his hair had been styled in a less alarming, attention grabbing (hardly what a closet vampire would want) style and his eyebrows had a more nearly natural thickness, he would have looked so much more convincing.

I'm not sure that these are faults of the actors, either. Many aspects of the movie were quite convincing- Bella's convulsions, for instance, and Edward's overly formal manner. James, Alice, and Jacob were all much as I had imagined, as were Carlisle, Esme, and Billy.

For all the hype and attention this movie got, I think a little more TLC on the presentation of the main characters would have made such a difference. As it was, it came across as less interesting and more sappy than the book was. Oh, one last comment- the music was absolutely perfect. I just think they needed to fire the makeup artist and whoever told Bella to act so dumb.

Synesthaesia

As promised: I certainly don't experience synesthaesia the way Daniel Tammet does, but I think I have traces of it. Examples:

When I was a child, I saw numbers as though they were arranged like a deck of cards extending infinitely into space. The positive numbers ascended slightly while the negative numbers descended. In other words, try to picture a number line where instead of a line with dots, you have numbers written on cards, the cards overlap, and they are on a continuous, infinite incline. The cards were transparent, I couldn't really see the card, just the numbers, which, by the way, were all transparent black. To add, I had to mentally move up the line, and the number that was the answer would be larger, bigger, sort of like a card pulled up out of a deck or from a hand of cards. The multiples of ten were bigger. When I counted aloud, my voice would build in expectation every time I neared a multiple of ten, like kids do when they're playing hide and seek and are nearing the count of twenty, only for me, it was every multiple of ten, not just twenty.

Time to me is a circle graph. Each year is a circle, and it is joined to the year before it on January first, so that all the years together are like a continuous spiral extending back to the time when I was born, at which point the spiral tapers down and becomes tiny before it vanishes. The end of it, where I will die, will be torn off roughly rather than tapering smoothly as the beginning did. Each circle or year progresses in a counter clockwise fashion. The seasons are deliniated by an X. The top quarter is winter, composed of December, January, and February. The left quarter is spring: March, April, and May. The bottom quarter is summer; June, July, August, while the right hand quarter is fall; September, October, November. Holidays and birthdays flash like little lights in the months as I visualize them. The spiral is compressed most of the time, except when I am thinking of a time or trying to remember when some event happened. Then the spiral stretches out and I work back progressively until I find the circle I need.

Time as in daily time is also a circle graph, but not what you might expect. I will have to draw it and post an image of it here for it to make sense. All 24 hours are in one circle, and they aren't evenly divided. This may be why I allocate time differently than other people. Some parts of the day feel much longer and more expansive to me than others even though I know that they are really all the same length.

I sometimes visualize scent.

And textures often have sounds to me, especially squeaky, disagreeable sounds. For example, cotton balls, frosted glass, and certain fabrics all feel horrible and sound excruciating to me.

In order to do math, I more or less have to visualize the numbers moving around, and I think this is why I have so much trouble with algebra, especially if I don't understand *why* the numbers are moving or when they can or can't move.

Drifting off the topic of synesthaesia now, certain sensory experiences are simply heavenly to me. Smelling a certain scent, seeing a certain shade of a color, feeling the wind blow against my face, hair, or body, the sound of the wind. I love wind. And I can't explain it at all, but the people who smell the best to me, smell like wind feels or looks.

I'm over it now. After explaining that I had PTSD to my teacher, he was more careful with me and I am coping much better with the class. It really wasn't his fault that being pinned to the ground by a large, strong man caused me to freak out and have flashbacks.

I just finished reading Born on a BLue Day by Daniel Tammet and found it pretty interesting. It was impossible for me not to compare my own experiences with his. I think that some of his traits/quirks/abilities/differences may have been caused by the epilepsy rather than the Asperger's....not that I am in any way qualified to say so one way or the other, but he more or less says so too.

In the context of synesthaesia, I have more to say, but not tonight.

I am still upset over that. Honestly, my entire week has been stained and distorted by it. I do want to clarify that I'm not upset over the physical pain, which was very temporary. I think it had more to do with the fact that a rather large, muscular man was physically restraining me.

And see, this is why I don't like big muscular guys. They're scary to me.

I don't know what to do about this yet. I can't simply drop the class. I don't know.

When people say that rape, molestation, physical abuse, neglect, etc, don't really have any long term effect, they don't know what the hell they're talking about. Or they're in denial. Or they're a perpetrator. Or all of the above. It seems really unfair sometimes that I have to spend so much time and exert so much effort to repair the damage done by truly rotten people while they just keep living like they always have, finding someone else to wreck. They get away with it. I have to clean up the mess they left behind. And then tolerate attitudes from clueless types who tell me to magically get over it in a single day (or minute).

I suppose the main consolation is knowing that I appreciate life more deeply because I know how lousy it could be.

Current mood: seriously pissed off. I just got out of self defense class. The instructor was teaching us moves to take down and subdue an attacker. He demonstrated these moves on each of us. Instinct took over and naturally, I struggled, tried to escape, resisted, etc. We were supposed to indicate submission by tapping the mat. Well, admitting pain to a person attacking me isn't my strong point. I tend to either try to get away, to conceal any demonstration of pain (bullies and abusers feed on the high of causing pain) or to zone out of my body and go numb to the pain entirely. In other words, I kept trying to get away, and when I couldn't, went to refuse pain-go numb mode, which usually mollifies an attacker, only the point here was to keep trying to subdue me until I begged for mercy. By the time it felt like my wrist would be injured, I followed orders and tapped, but by this time, serious amounts of adrenaline were coursing through me and I felt seriously pissed off. Need I say that this occurred several times? It took most of my remaining self control not to flip out.

I am shaking and I don't feel very good.

These little houses are incredibly cool! They look like something out of Tolkein's books.

I realized tonight that I have a greater affinity for scents than I do tastes. In a way, this is great, because you can smell all sorts of things that you can't taste, and can enjoy the scent of tastable things without having to buy, procure, or otherwise arrange to be able to taste them. On the other hand, smell is very ephermal, scent memories are haunting, and food is more convenient because you can carry it with you and *store* it.

The greyness is creeping like tendrils into my consciousness. But stealthily, steadily. And at the edge of my soul, I feel a nagging, a discomfort somehow.

I'm not happy with the pears. In fact, I hate them. Another student (who is an artist) gave me some tips on how to fix them, but I'm not optimistic.

I think that's the hardest thing about life. You go on your way, making mistakes, and you never get to erase them or to tear up the paper or shatter the badly formed pottery and make a new one. People talk about second chances, but this is an illusion, because it isn't a new canvas, it's the same one smeared with layers of old, despicable mistakes, and you can't paint something new and fresh, you can only add to what's already there. It's supremely frustrating.

People who know me well always say that I don't talk enough. I think I talk entirely too much. I think out loud. I don't censor my thoughts before I say them. They're disjointed. Or sometimes, I substitute entire words, unintentionally. Spoken language is a very difficult media.

Hope. People talk a lot about hope, as though it's some panacea for mankind. Frankly, I'm skeptical. I think hope is like the promise of a new beginning, more or less the same thing. Which is to say, it doesn't really exist. Hopeful promising things don't fall out of the sky and save our ass or bring new meaning to life and help evrything to make sense. What happens is that occasionally we get a slightly different color for our palette and we're so godawful excited about it that we feel liberated, until reality sets in again.

I think I need to cut my hair.

I did another colored pencil drawing...two pears. Will post it in a few days. I have a tremendously intimidating chemistry test coming up so don't expect it until after then.

I've been thinking about the coming spring and garden, and cold frames. I might post a rough sketch of the idea I have for that, too. Basically, I want to find a way to make a temporary cold frame that will enrich the soil where it's been, so that after the frame is moved, there is more or less a raised bed where it was, requirign no tilling. I've come to the conclusion, over the years, that double digging isn't all it's been cracked up to be. I think it disrupts the soil, the layers of organisms in the soil, and kills earthworms, which to me is a major issue. I hate killing earthworms. There isn't room in the house to start all the brassica and other cool crops indoors, so if I can put them outside and have only the nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, etc) and basil (can't forget the basil!) inside, that will really help.

Other than that, I don't have a lot to say. I've been dieting and have lost 7-9 # in the past two weeks, despite eating regularly, merely by counting calories, eschewing fat and excess carbs, and eating lots of fresh foods or low calorie soups, which are very filling. Exercise would be good, but my bicycle broke...badly. Will probably have to get another.

Wild ideas

An assortment and sampling of the ideas that run through my head:

• Cashmere goats. They are so much less work than dairy goats. I can't drink the milk anyway. Also, Cashmeres have no breed registry in the U.S., as they are not technically a breed, so the field is A. wide open and B. probably freer of the petty snobbery which is so rife in the dairy goat world and C. a good opportunity for developing my own breed standards and priorities , as opposed to doggedly following those which are laid out in the ADGA handbook.  I think the thing to do would be to buy a few does from imported (NZ) bloodlines and then use (also imported) semen to A.I. them. Why imported? Because, I've done some homework into this subject and am so far unimpressed by the quality of American stock. Most American stock is strongly influenced by Spanish, Boer, or Pygmy strains, because people want dual purpose (meat and fiber) animals as opposed to just high qaulity fiber, which is what I want. 
• Or, how about this: Cashmere dairy goats. In other words, fiber goats that also produce milk. Why not have one fiber and one dairy goat? Well, for one thing, non dairy breeds typically have much higher butterfat and protein percentages than dairy goats. Also, most people don't need gallons and gallons of milk per day, unless they're raising calves or pigs or are making cheese. They just want a little high quality milk, thus the popularity of the Nigerian Dwarf, a breed that makes my back ache when I think of working with them (they are tiny...and though I am short, I don't want animals I have to bend over to work with).  So...with this plan, get  a few nice very high quality dairy goats and A.I. them with imported Cashmere semen, and cross the lines, breed the F1s to more Cashmere semen, evaluate and cull, until a goat with nice fiber and decent milk production (1-2 quarts a day would be fine) is obtained. 
• Spotted knapweed. Why in the hell doesn't Monsanto genetically engineer a strain of spotted knapweed which has the Terminator technology? Areas with knapweed problems could then sow (yes, plant) this improved knapweed and it would cross with the existing (non-native invasive noxious weed) strains and when the two pollinated, the seed would all be sterile. Thus, over a series of years, no viable seed would be left, voila, no more knapweed. I think it must be because Monsanta would rather posion the country with 2,4D, round-up, and other poisons. Temporary and not-entirely effective solutions are a better money maker. 
• Pinus edulis and Pinus monophylla are two extremely slow growing trees which both produce delicious and edible seeds. I ordered some from this site and they are delicious. I decided I'd like to grow some of these wonderful trees. Well, guess what. It can take 60 years for them to reach 6 feet in height! In other words, mature productive trees are ancient and venerable. Now get this: aside from pine nuts, the other major uses for these two species are Christmas tree, timber (including rialroad ties) and pulp! Yeah, like paper pulp, something which could easily be produced with hemp (not the THC kind), or even better, recycled paper. But noooo....they have to cut down a beautiful pinon pine that took 300 years to grow so that people can have soft cushy toilet paper, even though that tree can make *food* year after year. Idiotic. Worse, the Xmas trees! The trees take a hundred years to attain the right height for Xmas trees, so yeah, whack'em down so that some spoiled family can have a nice tree for what, all of a month? Grrrrr...... I probably sound draconian, but this ought to be illegal. 
• Therefore, I have yet another idea. There are many species of trees, including a pine, which can be coppiced. Coppicing means that when you ct down a tree, it regrows from the sump, usually several shoots, and they grow a lot faster than the first growth, because they've got a mature and extensive root system feeding them. You can then cut down one of the second growths, and the other tops will be bigger, and you can continue to harvest them this way for centuries without ever killing the tree. I think this should be the only (or at least the primary) source of timber and cellulose. 

At school everyone calls me by my actual name. At first this felt really weird. Now it seems strange to be called Rebekah. Actually, the long form of my name feels excessively formal. Not sure I like that but don't quite know what to do about it. 

The sysbot test was today. I studied all three days of the weekend, even went on a field trip to see the trees in more detail and in different situations, etc, to get a solid feel for the big picture...studied notes, rewrote them and was quizzed, and read and reread the flora (Hitchcock's Flora of the Pacific Northwest). It seemed a little like overkill, but I had a feeling that the test would be challenging. Ah. It was. I am soooo glad I studied. I know I got several questions wrong, but it would have been quite the nightmare had I not gone all out. And next time, I will study even harder. The class is *fun*, but it is not  a cake walk. I can't gripe, though. Fact of the matter is that since I love the subject, studying for it is no pain at all. 

Next week: Math test. I think I am finally catching up on the math. 

Socially, am making more acquaintances. I am still not very good at small talk, despite a conscious effort in this direction. I don't have a lot of small things to talk about. For me, nearly any subject can lead into more depth or perspective or tangents, and people don't seem to like that. A lot of them want the small talk comments to be short little sound bites, but then what do you say? Another little sound bite? How do you know when to switch from one trivial topic to another? People get bored so easily. They have no attention span. 

Finally figured out how to post images. Hmmm. Also just noticed that blogger has a lot more options easily accesible than when I started this blog. I used to use html for everything from bulleted lists to italics (still do, actually), but it appears I don't really have to anymore...not that's it's been any great effort to use html. 

At any rate, the two pictures below are of some of my art from 2007; an artichoke and a cherry turnover. I'll have to ferret out some more and post that too. The orchids are blooming wildly and tempting me to take an hour or two to draw them...but, I have to finish my Pseudotsuga menziesii page in my botany notebook. I drew only half of the pinecone. This isn't making much sense. I suppose I'll have to post a page from that notebook in order to articulate what I mean. 

Oh, and I saw a male black-backed woodpecker while XX skiing yesterday! Also, a single Taxus brevifolia, Acer glabrum and a lot of diverse pseudotsuga (and other trees) under different conditions, which highlighted how variable the trees can look depending on their situation. Phenotypes and all that jazz. 

Strange Ruminations

I haven't had goats for a couple of years now, and it's been longer than that since I've shown them or had an active breeding program. At one time, I had aspired to be a dairy goat judge, not for the power or control or prestige, but because I really enjoyed evaluating the animals. The late great Harvey Considine, who I had the incredible honor of meeting and chatting with, thought I had a good eye for the work. He told me something I found funny at the time, that his father (I think?) who was also in livestock (although not dairy goats) had a habit or looking at people's feet, at the way they walked. Oddly enough, this habit has become mine. I think I pay more attention to human feet and general movement "on the move" (good dairy goat judges judge the animals while walking slowly, not when primped and posed artificially) than I do their faces.

Harvey was right...you can tell and learn a lot by watching people move and walk, and by observing their shoes and feet. Very obese people, for example, tend to have lower legs that splay out at the knees. I haven't decided yet whether this is because they need extra stability for the added mass, or if the added mass of the thighs forces the lower legs (and therefore the feet as well) outward. Watching them walk is painful...you know that their knees must hurt, and that the more those knees hurt, the less they'll want to move around and exercise, creating a vicious cycle. Very musclular men who work out a lot move their upper bodies differently and with less mobility than leaner men do, as though constrained. High heels tend to predispose women to take a sort of stomping, stabbing motion with their walk, which makes their rear ends more noticable, but in my opinion, deprives them of a certain grace and flow, too. I've also noticed that people (usually men) who take what seem to be carefully measured, precise, and intentional steps tend to be pretty methodical and well, precise. People with flat feet stand very differently than others, with their toes pointed out and an entirely different stance.

So I suppose it was only a matter of time before I noticed my own walk. It's my right foot/leg, the side that's shorter, the side whose hip bothers me more. That hip swings out at a different angle than the other one. It has more limited range of motion in some directions, but in a normal walk, I can feel it moving differently, swinging out farther. Since there's snow, I watch my prints. They're not symmetrical. That right foot hits the ground at a different angle, and the hip joint moves as it hits the ground, as I put weight on that foot. It's a decidedly disagreeable sensation even though it doesn't hurt most of the time. I guess that at this point, I could throw myself a little pity party because I'd like to run and romp and climb and jump like I used to and now these activites are very limited (and I pay for them later), but that seems pretty trite. What I'm concerned about is the possibility that whatever's making my hip joint move in this funky way is going to *really* limit my mobility later on. if I believed in a god, I would scream to him that I need to be able to enjoy *something* in life, and I don't want to live in a little cubicle, dammit. I need to breathe the fresh air and feel close to the trees and melt into the outdoors. I want to be climbing trees when I'm 70 or 80 years old.

Screw it. Forget god. I don't care if I lose both my legs, I'm not giving that up. I lost the goats, I've lost so much else...I am not losing the entire outdoors, too. Ugh, I'm ridiculous, who said I was going to lose my legs, anyway??

Maybe there isn't such a disparity bewteen botany and art. Many botanical books have extremely detailed, meticulous botanical art, not photographs, or art and photographs. Also, I think drawing plants (or anything else for that matter) is the best way to really know it. once you draw something, it's like it becomes a part of you, and in turn, a part of you has been invested in that drawing.

Ha, that's really funny. I have 444 posts (not counting this one). That's so perfect that it's tempting to quit posting. 4 is my favorite number.

More detritus from my mind:

I kept smelling something incredibly seductive and couldn't trace it as I am pretty much alone. I finally figured it out- the scent of trees and forest on my hands. Yeah, that's right, trees. On my own hands. I am so weird!!

Today I saw: coyote, weasel, and rabbit tracks, Pinus ponderosa, monticola and contorta, Abies grandis, Thuja plicata, Tsuga heterophylla, Pseudotsuga menziesii, Mahonia repens (I think it is repens), Larix occidentalis, Oplopanax horridus, Acer glabrum, and of course the usual verbascum, etc... The weasel tracks came from and went to small holes in the crust of the snow; apparently weasels tunnel underneath the snow crust, which is pretty cool. There were almost no birds, although I saw plenty of evidence of bird activity.

And I'm finding myself more interested than I ever thought I would be in conifers. I wish that I had acerage to grow, side by side, all the Abies, Picea, Pinus, etc species (each genus in groups, I mean). The cones are incredibly interesting and appealing. Before, they were squirrel food and fire starter. I would never have imagined that I could get enthused about the same trees I've been living near, splitting into firewood, playing under, working with, climbing....well, maybe. Maybe I was this way all along and didn't realize it. I think though, that there's a tendency to romanticize about non-native species of plants while failing to appreciate what we have growing in abundance and splendor all around us.

And I still can't decide if I'd rather be a dcotor or a botanist, or what sort of botanist I'd be. In spite of myself, I still yearn to paint the pinecones, the verbascum, the patterns of the twigs. I wish with all my heart that I could make a living that way, and I know better.

Nononononononononononononononono. No.

That is all. Never mind, move along.

(nonono)

Wild vs Domesticated- goat conformation

The comparison between wild and well bred domesticated animals (or plants or anything else that can be bred, for that matter) is interesting because humans typically set about enacting a breeding program on the premises of improving upon nature. There's more than a little hubris involved in imagining that humans can implement vast improvements, in a few years, over what nature has cruelly, ruthlessly, relentlessly done for millenia. Granted, humans have been working on goats for a long time, since 9,000 BC, but wild goats continued to exist and evolve at the same time, so nature still has the upper hand.

I first began to have doubts about human improvements on wild/native species when some Canada geese flew in near a pair of Toulouse geese I was keeping. The contrast was striking: The wild geese were streamlined, elegant, beautiful, and self sufficient while the Toulouse geese looked dumpy and absurd beside them. Wild animals are often smaller than their tame counterparts (unless humans think that mini versions of the species are cute), and in farm animals, this is said to be more efficient. I bought into this line of thinking for a long time (literally), but it's hard to avoid drawing the unflattering parallel between wild/tame animals and Hummers or SUVs and highly efficient little cars. I'm not certain that bigger is better; it can be a decided disadvantage. Bigger animals take longer to attain their mature size, which means that their total reproductive output will probably be less, or that they risk dying if impregnated during the same time frame in which the wild types would be impregnated. It takes more food and more investment from the mother (in utero and while nursing the offspring) to feed a huge offspring than it does a smaller one, while compounding the risk of birthing difficulties. It is far less risky and more advantageous for the dam to have two smaller offspring than one big one. If one should die for some reason, she won't have lost all of her reproductive investment for that year.

This is one area where I think domestic goat breeders are off the mark. Many respectable, highly esteemed breeders do not breed their doelings to kid at a year old. They wait, holding a dry yearling over the winter, and breed her when she is 1.5 years old, to kid as a yearling. The dry yearlings tend to get fat and to deposit the fat around their internal organs, causing reproductive problems, and if they happen to escape impregnantion during their second fall, they are unlikely to be fertile for the third fall- too fat. The line of reasoning behind this practice is that the doelings are full grown yet and need to mature fully before being bred. My experience has been that if the doelings are adequately fed and protected somewhat from aggression by older does, they do well, kid without complications, and continue to grow. As for size, I hate to wear out the goat-car analogy, but it's true: efficiency is better than brute size. I have seen very large milkers that gave less than 4-5 lbs per day, and smaller does half their size that were producing 6-8 lbs per day as yearlings. The main difference between the two was that the efficient does put their feed into maintenence (which was minimal) and output (which was good thanks to the efficiency), whereas the bigger does had a lot more maintenence and didn't always put that extra food they ate into the milking pail (in the form of milk, I mean). I have seen occasional examples of does that were huge and milked extremely well, but I've seen more that laid their extra food onto their ribs in the form of fat. Let's not get into the nasty, gory sagas of assisting the birth of a 13-14 # kid. Size definitely has its downside.

Feet: This is an area where dairy goats really suffer. Breeders tend to overlook the feet, but if you have 200# of animal being supported by four little goat hooves....it's a real recipe for trouble, especially when you add the extra weight of milk production, pregnancy, and food. Wild goats don't have this problem. If their feet break down, they don't last long and probably won't reproduce much.

Hardiness and mothering: these are traits which are being actively bred out by breeders, particularly with the advent of the CAEV virus.

Body proportions: Wild goats have a midsection which is proportionate to the rest of the body. Very well bred dairy goats do not. The ideal dairy goat will have a large, deep, well sprung barrel so that she looks as though she is pregnant all the time. Her back, from withers to hips, should be long. All the bones in her body should be long. I have come to prefer this ideal myself, but I wonder whether supporting the weight of a huge, deep belly takes a toll on the longer backs, and of course, how it all relates to the feet.

Shoulders, or the "uphill look": Well bred dairy goats are supposed to be noticably higher in the shoulders, or withers, than the hips. Deer and antelopes are higher in the hips. Some species of wild goats are slightly higher in the hips or level from withers to hips, while a few, including the mountain goat (which is actually an entirely different genus and not really a goat) are higher at the shoulders. It is very hard to acheive the ideal combination of high, tightly connected shoulders (you're not supposed to be able to see the tops of the shoulder blades move when the animal walks) *and* chest width. The rationale behind the uphill look is that the reproductive organs will drain better after birthing. I am calling B.S. on this unless someone can provide me with proof to the contrary. Deer have no trouble draining, and their rumps are quite a bit higher than their shoulders.

Udders: I wrote about foreudders a long time ago here. To recap it all briefly, I'm not sure that a "glued on" (very, very tightly attached) udder is ideal. When the kids butt it to nurse, it can't swing out of the way, so is more likely to get bruised and to develop mastitis. This seems to be more of a problem with close, tight foreudders. I do think that strong rear udders are advantageous as they provide most of the support in the udder suspension system that holds up the weight of all that milk. Which brings me to my last point....

Milk production: Is it really such a hot idea to breed to extreme production? To breed for goats that produce so much milk that they're at risk of developing hypocalcemia? Who milk so heavily that they cannnot consume enough food to replace what they're producing, so that they become thin and emaciated by midsummer?

I'm beginning to think that math can be fun, like a sudoku puzzle (with more variety). The only thing is, you don't get graded on sudoku puzzles, and in sudoku, there is sometimes more than one correct solution, whereas in math, there generally is not.

SysBot is going to be a blast! Lots of fun work.

Chemistry looks like it will be challenging but interesting.

I don't have a lot to say about the other classes here. Honestly, I'm tired today. One thing I am beginning to realize relating to college is that I am far more comptent and "abled" than I had previously thought. I also wonder at times whether I would be classified as having Asperger's if I'd had the advantage of a less traumatic and disruptive life. The majority of issues seem to relate more to anxiety and feeling intimidated by people and situations than typical spectrumite problems. Which isn't to say that there aren't issues which are spectrum related, but on reflection, it seems to me that normal people have a lot of social issues that I do not have.

Example- who said what about who at the baby shower? Who will have what place at Franny's wedding? Whose turn it is to invite Jan and Fred over to dinner, and are they taking advantage of us by feeding us spaghetti every time we dine at their house whereas we feed them better food? These are things that really do not not affect me; I waste no time at all worrying about them, but I have observed them as issues for other people with active social lives. More: June calls me every day when I am cleaning! What can I do? Summer wants to do something this weekend, but I don't want to...but I should. I want to have a party, but the two people I like best hate each other!

As I age, I find that my children are more and more precious to me, that really, children are a primary main purpose in life, unless we have none, in which case we devise other sorts of children (intellectual, surrogates, mentees, pets, etc). Lacking something of this nature, or motivation towards this end, people degenerate. They focus too strongly (yes, an aspie said this!) on some area of their life. Life becomes "all about me" (yes, I've heard people say this). They become addicted to drugs, work, drink, or a cause. They can be productive, sure...but I don't think they're filling their true purpose in life.

And don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying everyone needs to procreate physically. What I mean is that as humans, the needs to parent *something* is a central and essential component of our makeup. I'm also not saying that having a partner is unimportant, but I am beginning to feel that the primary purpose in having a partner, after the initial exhiliration has subsided a bit, is to have a partner for the purpose of parenting that child, idea, or mission. Similarly, on observation, I think the strongest partnerships are those which have a strong purpose, which may be why celebrities break up so frequently if their life is centered on self and hedonism.

I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. I haven't thought through all the angles yet.

Birds seen today:

Pileated woodpecker, female
Flicker
A big flock of Bohemian waxwings, flying in to feed on Sorbus (Mountain ash).
Pine Siskins
House finches
female Downy woodpecker (so cute!!)
Black capped chickadees
Chestnut backed chickadees

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I confess a weakness for the woodpeckers, especially flickers. Eagles are cool, but after seeing the you-tube video of a golden eagle ripping helpless, bleating baby goats off the side of a cliff face, to their deaths, I just don't feel quite the same about them any more. Yes, I do realize that this isn't very objective of me.