Tough transition - Tropics to temperate

The tropical to temperate shift is difficult during the winter especially. Going from green to brown, warm to cold, often wet to dry, is a difficult transition psychologically. No wonder everyone just wants to say to heck with it, I'm going tropo. TPP hadn't worn socks or shoes since the 18th so they feel pretty funny. And everything in the rainforest is so green and here the green is gone mostly until next spring. This transition has been harder, deeper into the winter.  And it was easier when the participants were younger, but there you go.  It would be much harder on any native of the tropics to come to this part of the world where they would wonder how people actually live here.  In the dead of winter, TPP sometimes wonders this as well. Then he had a friend from Duluth, which isn't the end of the Earth, but you can see it if you stand on a car's fender. Anyone from so far south as Lincolnland shouldn't complain. So in part it is all perspective. And for us there was no jet-lag to deal with either just a shift from earlier to bed & up with the sun to see 'early birds'.

The Modern Marvel of Travel

Always ask the students what country in South American they would hit if the traveled straight south from Chi-town. It's a trick question, but most of them fall for it. (pause for your response) You miss S. American altogether. North and South America tend to be rotated clockwise so they fit better on a rectangular page, so that's the source of the misconception that S. America is directly south of us. In the Atlanta airport, they had a new mosaic set of tiles that took us awhile to figure out; it was a narrow slice of the Earth's surface at the latitude of Atlanta GA. We passed the geography test that most people didn't even notice.
From start to finish our trip from the upper midwest to a field station in north eastern Costa Rica took 10.5 hours. That is still pretty amazing even by today's standards. In the old days when the roads were worse and the route more circuitous, and you had to boat upriver to the field station, it could take 7-9 hrs to get here just from the San Jose airport. The weather was expected to be wet, but it's actually pretty hot and dry, and very, very humid. Hey, it's the tropics, and rain can be expected at any time really, so an umbrella is part of your kit that never leaves your side. The dinner was pretty good Costa Rican food, rice with nicely stewed lentils, fried fish (corvina?), some steamed green squash that wasn't chayote, cucumber and tomato pieces, and a small custard. And there wasn't much in the food department today, so everyone was pretty hungry. Got the usual safety talk: don't mess with big black ants, watch out for pit vipers, carry your umbrella and flashlight. A small gecko is barking, but this is an invasive species native to SE Asian. Some cicadas are piercing the night with their calls and a river of leaf cutter ants is moving along our sidewalk. A swarm of some other ants already forced 3 students our of their room, but by tomorrow it will probably be theirs again. Glad this year's group of students seems pretty relaxed about such things; one fellow from the past woke up screaming that ants were crawling all over him. They weren't but he was a basket case who thought nature was out to kill him.
The wi-fi has definitely improved. Along the road, saw lots of heart-of-palm and pineapple plantations, not so many bananas. Coffee grows on the other side of the mountains; cooler places. Hope that have some orange papaya for breakfast. And now for a decent sleep. 

Monday morning random bits

FIELD WORK - There's a full schedule of field work this week to harvest biomass from our permanent research plots. At least the weather looks good all week, and although rain is needed, now hope it waits until the "harvest" is in. Biggest problem is a sore back; got to find some of those young student backs to do the heavy bending.
FIRST FROST - Came close to having our first frosts Friday & Saturday nights, but not quite cold enough to really frost things. Very light frost on 2nd night close to the ground so late pole beans survived.
CUCUMBERS IN OCTOBER - TPP picked a cucumber on the 18th of October!  Never, ever had them so late in the year and the reason is that the vines always die of a bacterial blight much earlier in the year. The blight is vectored by cucumber beetles so once they show up your vines days are pretty much numbered. Insect covers help, but when flowering starts you have to let pollinators in. So what happened to the beetles this year? Similarly the Japanese beetles were a near no show and June "bugs" were also near no-shows. And cicadas were not plentiful either. Was all the rain early in the season to blame either by drowning pupae or assisting fungi like milky spore? 
BEST NEW RECIPE - Apple, avocado, blue cheese, & walnut salad! 
CANNA RHIZOMES - The Phactors dug out a bed of landscape cannas, tall ones with purple foliage. Too bad these are not edible plants because the crop of rhizomes they produce is amazing. Oh, wait, maybe they are edible.  Who knew?
TRAVEL PLANS - Got our travel plans today for a rainforest field trip to Costa Rica. TPP used to do this every year with a class of students in tow. Amazing how much less stressful it is when the students become someone else's responsibility. Hope the el Niño weather does not result in a real wet field trip although having some rain is basically a given. Record for one 9 day field trip was over 400 mm.
FACULTY MEETING TO DISCUSS EVALUATION DOCUMENTS - Faculty meetings of any type are bad, but when the faculty are discussing evaluation it becomes especially dreadful. TPP stopped reading his yearly evaluations long before his retirement and became a much happier person especially when the money involved was too little to really matter. This is not recommended behavior for my younger colleagues. 

Cure for winter blues - the tropics

It snowed today, the 13th of November, and rather early for these parts. It technically snowed yesterday too. The novelty of this form of precipitation has worn off already. Saw enough of it growing up in the snow belt of upstate New York to last several lifetimes. One of the great joys, and head aches, of TPP's academic career was developing and instructing a course in rainforest ecology, an out growth of his tropical field research. This year's class is busily getting all their gear packed for their field trip to Costa Rica over Thanksgiving break. While walking to campus in the gently falling snow, TPP was thinking maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad thing to have gone with the class this year.  What the ever-loving-hell is the problem? It's one of the reasons to retire. And yet, here is where TPP is.  Oh, yes, blew all the money on that month long field trip to Tuscany. Nice, but sometimes you just want the tropics. If you readers are curious, or equally desperate, the location from where this image was taken will be disclosed for the right price. You will not regret it. TPP didn't. 

Thoughts on travel

The Phactors like travel, but not traveling. To be clear travel is when you are at someplace that is not home; traveling is the act of getting to that someplace. Traveling has become drudgery, a necessary ordeal to get to some place different. Nothing about traveling is fun, and it is often quite stressful. Traveling home is more so because there is no anticipation of going someplace new. Airports must be the most inhumane, uninhabitable, uncomfortable, uninspiring, and ugly places that humans have ever designed for themselves. This is why our recent trip was planned to maximize the amount of time spent abroad so that the ratio of travel to traveling was high (15:1 days)!  This time the travel home was uneventful, and clearly a 7 hr layover in Rome is a non-event, something to prepare you for the discomfort and boredom of a 9 hr flight, although TPP will admit, The Grand Budapest Hotel was quite amusing so only 7 hrs of boredom. It makes for a long day and 24 hrs with little or no sleep is never fun and tends to make you into an exhausted grouch. And with the exception of an OK lunch in Rome and an OK burger and margarita at the Chicago airport while waiting for the shuttle bus home the food was terrible, a real downer after enjoying quite good Italian food for a month. Wonder who supplies their kibble? The shuttle bus terminal at O’Hare has all of the services (none) and charm one comes to associate with bus terminals here in the USA. BTW, not the case in Turkey where they know how to do bus travel (yes, even stewardesses!). So home again The Phactors are; the kitty-girls and the F1 are happy to see us back. 

Buongiorno

TPP has taken up a new residency for a month. Rent-a-mob, the inlaws, have already descended upon us. After two days of traffic, airports, airplanes, and in some cases, trains, some lost time, an epic grocery shopping stop to get some bread, some butter, some wine, just the necessities, a fun time teaching our GPS a new language, a quick lesson in the local scary driving style, lots of narrow, curvy, walled roads, a very late meal of carbonara, followed by a fatigued collapse into something remotely like sleep, TPP awakened to find himself somewhere in Tuscany, the paying guest of a count and countess. The point of this is to convince his academic counterpart that waking up surrounded by vineyards and olive trees is just as much fun, just as relaxing, just as renewing as preparing for the fall's onslaught of little academic savages to teach.  The therapy seems to be working. The view is from the long wooden kitchen table so recently occupied by the mob for some coffee, toast, and fruit. Most importantly, the only thing planned for today is to make some dinner, perhaps a nice puttanesca.

The luxury of driving

Not too many of you are old enough to remember when travel by air was quite nice, comfortable, convenient, decent food, good treatment.  Now it's inconvenient, you're treated like a terrorist (by now the FSA must have a remarkable collection of pocket knives), the food is non-existent, and you just hope for no major hassles.  So now rather than dreading a drive across 4-5 states, it sounds like a pretty good deal, especially because Kansas, Nebraska, and Montana are not in among those states.  Your nice little GPS unit keeps you updated, on track, and helps you find decent food and lodging; why the only thing it doesn't do is serve you drinks.  As long as you aren't in a big hurry one of the best things you can do is ditch the interstates where you play bumper cars with huge trucks, and take one of the old US or state routes.  You never know what you'll find along the way, whereas on the interstate you know exactly what you'll find, and it's boring.  A couple of our best day's travel in recent years resulted in driving across Colorado and New Hampster/Vermont on two-lane roads.  Rather than worry about how big your bottle of shampoo is, you can travel with your survival supplies and arrive with the promise of margaritas and salty snacks like the airlines used to have.  This is sort of a return to TPP's youth when his family traveled everywhere by car, and as a result he has visited all of the lower 48 states by car.  Then upon becoming an academic professional, the travel changed to air, and it was quite a luxury; you really thought you had made it.  Perhaps you will be surprised to learn that TPP did not fly on a plane until he was 25 years old.  Now travel by air is only done out of necessity, when time and distance are an issue.  When driving, TPP gets to practice his road side plant ID, done at 100 kph; much more interesting than clouds.  And not only that, but you can buy things and cart them home with you, like bottles of wine, or smoked sausage, or what not, that you could never ever get on a plane.  Even when you bring your own food, things may not work out well; an airline got quite perturbed when we were eating smoked Pacific salmon and cheese, quite aromatic in the close confines of the carbin and some of the food whimps were offended, or perhaps because we would not share.  So we'll be traveling in class, by driving, and won't miss air travel one bit.  Now if only the USA would fix their trains!    

Home again

The Phactor likes to travel, but hates traveling.  Going new and/or different places is great; getting there is a pain.  Unfortunately out trip home set a new travel record from southeastern most NC to its border with TN on rt 40;  It took eight and a half hours!  With no diddling around!  The problem was simply too many people in too many cars rendering our intra- and interstate road system wholly inadequate, then you compound that with hot weather, the attendant car breakdowns, poor driving habits, and short tempers, and you have near gridlock appearing at the slightest provocation that increased our usual trip by nearly 2 hours mostly spent standing still in traffic, and none of it was due to road construction.  It tried our patience and endurance.  On the good news front our cat-plant sitter did a great job and things looked well-watered and well-nourished, although something ate half our zucchini plants.  The plans for the garden moat and mine field must get completed if our wildlife friendly yard is going to stay that way.  

On the Road Again - Bad Lane Karma

As if interstate driving were not bad enough, and it's bad enough to give air travel at least a consideration even as it sinks lower than anyone thought possible. While airlines now starve you; interstate highways bore you with soulless chain food. Thank goodness for those few individual eclectic little places that manage to hang on, and the people who help you find them. Worst of all the Phactor's bad line karma, a curse of unknown origins, continues to haunt me on the interstates, so no matter what the cause of traffic backups, beyond the fact that there are too many vehicles and too little road, the lane in which my vehicle is traveling will be the slowest to navigate the problem whether lane reduction, construction, tolls, or a discarded gum wrapper. On today's nearly 600 mile trek, an odyssey undertaken every couple of years when the urge to see ocean or mountains becomes over whelming, it was more of the same. To help you notice this evil lane karma, there was a sort mobile place marker, a motorhome the size of Moby Dick driven by Herb and Thelma from some small town in Ohio, and they are proud enough to emblazon this on the back side of their gigantic traffic obstacle, and if you didn't notice the 1st time you passed them, you notice the 2nd and 3d times. Yes, this massively cumbersome and slow beast actually made better time through three traffic backups. The odds are clearly against it. And all of this furthers the legend of I-80/94 from Chicago to Gary, which no matter how much they build on it remains one of the worst stretches of highway in the world.