Weather prognostication - cold winter ahead

Some people put their trust in the Farmer's almanac, others look at woolly worms' wool, but the domestic cat may also have powers of weather prognostication.  After all here it is a rather cool Sept. 7th., and the kitty girls have decided that they need a blanket to nap on, so they found one.  Also notice how well their camouflaged coats work when they are in their natural environment.  They act like they know that cold weather if ahead. The Weather channel can't do any better.

A New Year and not much to say

TPP isn't big on predictions or resolutions, so not sure what to blog about when many people are doing these subjects.  Several projects are on the to do list.  A new garden path across the front to help the mail get through.  A concerted effort to clear out crappy saplings, establish a path, and initial plantings for our woodland garden.  Writing some essays for a new botany book. Doing some antique stucco house repair and fix the front step/stoop problem using the $$$ approach and adjusting the adjacent landscaping that had out grown its place anyways.  All these things will come to pass.  Oh, that job list sort of sounds like predictions.  It actually sounds like Mrs. Phactor will be on the job and keeping things moving along. 
Our calendar is such an arbitrary thing that placing any particular significance upon a day or date just seems quite silly. It mostly serves to let us keep track of how old we are relative to other people and things.  Our "young" cat is now a quite mature 6 yrs old, although she still acts silly and kittenish at times to our delight.
OK, here is a blogging resolution.  TPP will try to do better and present or explain more recent botanical research.  A effort to communicate science to more people.
TPP is looking to purchase a plum yew, the sprawling, spreading form.  Anyone seen a good nursery source that does online sales?  Also looking for a decent sized 4'-6' winter hardy variety of southern magnolia. Town planted one on a neighboring street just to tease TPP, and its doing quite well considering, so must have one for the collection.  

Correct Prediction Sort Of

Well, my prediction for the Stupor Bowl was off a bit although Green Bay did win. Yea! My prediction that the game would be less than stellar play was also spot on, but it was actually a pretty interesting game, not because it was so good, but because things kept happening that made the outcome uncertain. Of course all the pre-game garbage and the half-waste-of-time were avoided, and that helped maintain my interest alot. After seeing that a bleached blond pop diva was to sing the national anthem (bad timing on judging the actual start of the game), the Phactor remarked that they never get anyone who can actually sing to sing this rather difficult song. And sounds like this was a spot on prediction too. Can't actually bring myself to listen. Wonder who her favorite founding father is? All of them probably.

Predictions for 2011 – no retirement

For the eleventy-seventh time the Phytophactor has no plans to retire yet! Let me explain.
1. Age is not the issue. Although it seems to some that the Phactor has been around for long time, when you start college at a young age (17), complete 3 degrees in 9 years, it becomes possible to have had a long career and still be of a relatively young(ish) age. In particular although the body keeps reminding us of the mileage, the mind still feels quite energetic, if not downright juvenile at times, or is that creeping dementia? Oh, no. But at least if it gets bad you won’t really know.
2. Money is not the issue. It matters not if my retirement benefits equal a substantial percent of my working salary for three reasons: (1) unfortunately my salary is not all that impressive, (2) my career was not chosen for its financial rewards, and (3) more time allows me to stash more into my personal retirement accounts as a hedge on when (not if) the unfunded retirement fund administered ineptly, illegally, and unethically by our great and corrupt state goes belly up.
3. The job is not the issue. One definition of retirement is “removal or withdrawal from service”, to which the Phactor says, “What the .….?” Botany is more than a career or job, more an avocation than a vocation, such an inextricable component of my life that no line can be drawn between my work and play, between my professional and private life, and the day this botanist is “removed or withdrawn” from service will be his last day, period. One wonderful colleague so enjoyed attending fall meetings at the Missouri Botanical Garden (he’d never missed one) that he had his son arrange for an ambulance to deliver him and a private nurse to accompany him to one more meeting while nearly on his death bed. The Phactor is happy for all you people who did a job and earned your retirement. So please understand that some of us do not view what we do as a “job”. In spite of his occasional forays into despair about students who waste their opportunities to learn, he likes what he does. Besides it would be unseemly if the Phactor were to retire before his undergraduate mentor retires.
4. When you retire good old Cheap-skate U., a perennially underfunded, undersized institution has a tendency to want to use your office and research space to house some new, naïve, barely competent assistant professor, thus shoving decades of knowledge and knowhow out the door, along with my library. One legendary botanist acquired a library of such a volume and of so many volumes during his career that he actually bought the house next door and moved so he had room for all his books, an admirable course of action. The Phactor’s library doesn’t take up much more than 130 linear feet of shelf space, but he was educated while it was still the mark of a serious academic to have an impressive collection of books and journals, and now it’s just how many gigs of pdfs you have. Sigh. And my office is where I work; too many distractions around the house and estate. Never have understood these faculty who minimize their time on campus; fire ‘em and use THEIR space for new faculty.
6. The Phactor tends to get in trouble when he’s not busy and occupied. So as a matter of public service and safety, continuing to function as a botanist is a good thing. There should be a fund established for this purpose.
7. My current chair has begged me not to retire just yet. Now the Phactor has seen an impressive number of chairs come and go, on average about one every 4 years, and finally one actually thinks a botany is indispensible to biology, and who can argue with that. This does recognize that without the Phactor there would still be some botanists and some botany courses, but not enough to amount to a sequence, so until the employment picture improves somewhat yours truly may have some leverage!
8. A colleague in another discipline complained that he retired because he had been left behind. Well, whose fault is that? Sorry but one of the responsibilities of our profession is that you remain current, although it is true that young colleagues specializing in the topic du jour tend to consign more traditional areas to the garbage bin of academia and you can find yourself disciplinarily isolated. However, as a purveyor of what one might think of as more traditional botany, the Phactor makes it his responsibility to demonstrate the relevance and usefulness of knowing how to identify plants and name them correctly. This would be easier if they’d only leave families alone; now where did they put those maples?