School's Out!

With out doubt, the biggest event in our household is that school has ended, well, at least for the kids. Mary is done at the end of this week. All in all, this past school year was good for all the kids. They all made great strides academically and socially. Emily wrapped up middle school and will be a freshman at Henderson High next year. Like most teenagers, we have great difficulty working any kind of emotional response out of her, but we have managed to discover two things that she is happy about; 1) Henderson High is only two blocks away so she will never have to ride a bus to school ever again, and 2) one of her electives next year is photography, which she is very excited about. Emily’s main summer will be a science-fiction writing camp that is held over at West Chester University. Emily still likes writing a lot and is looking forward to exploring some ideas that she has floating around in her head.

William wrapped up elementary school and will head off to middle school next year. Of our three kids, William probably had the most personal growth. He did great academically. His only downfall was a brief period of not following through with homework assignments. But the motivation of a trip to the beach and camping this summer, helped turn that around. Next year William will be in 6^th grade at Peirce Middle School. William’s big plan for the summer is a marine biology camp, which is also held at West Chester University. He is very excided about this camp because they will get to study live squids and other marine creatures.

Paddy finished up first grade. His big achievement for the year is that he reads like a champ! At the beginning of the year, he could read almost nothing. Now he picks up books like Diary of a Whippy Kid and plows through it. We aren’t sure what Paddy is going to do this summer. We have not committed him to a summer camp yet. He may go to an intensive swimming lesson session for a couple of weeks so he can get his “green” armband for the pool. If he gets that he can go down the big slide at the pool, which would be the most awesome thing in the world.

Me and the boys also plan to go visit Grandpa and Grandma in North Carolina for a couple of weeks as well. See some photos from the last couple of weeks here.

Russell

Art on North Franklin Street

Thanks to everyone to stopped by for our open house to show sculptures by Steve Garr and paintings by yours truly. Steve, Mary and I had a great time. If you were not able to make it yesterday, the works will be up for 4-6 weeks, or until we get tired of looking at it, or until we get another one of my friends to hang up their works on the wall, or until we get evicted. Check out photos of the installed works and of some of our visitor's from Saturday (I used the camera on Mary's iPhone, most of which came out too blurry to use). 

Congratulations Emily!

Emily started taking fencing lessons at the beginning of the school year. Last week she moved up to the intermediate level where she can start fencing against other opponents. Here she is going through her intermediate evaluation with her instructor in front of the rest of the club (and dad). Now Mom and Dad just need to make sure she doesn't use these new found skills on her brothers!

Plant Identification 101

There is no greater happiness in the known world better than coming home with a plant that you have absolutely no idea as to it’s identity, turning to the front of your 1042 page “Plants of Pennsylvania,” starting with first step on the technical key and 90 seconds later worked your way directly to the correct species. This happens to me about once out of every 32.7 plants I try to identify.

The rest of the attempts end up as an epic struggle with my Flora of Pennsylvania where I spend hours pecking my way through the key ending up on incorrect species after incorrect species. Often times, I can’t even figure out the correct family. At those times I usually refer to my botany book as “Road Block.” Which comes from the fact that the authors are Ann Rhoads and Timothy Block.

If you have never looked at a botanical tome you might think they were of another language and culture altogether. And for the most part, you would be right. These works usually start off with a dichotomous technical key to the families. If you are unfamiliar with a dichotomous key, they are a simple concept where you are presented with two options. You decided which option fits your situation and then move on to the next option. In business and management they are referred to as “decision trees.”

The first two lines of Road Block is this;

A. non-green epiphytes or parasites, or plants lacking normally expanded leaves and/or stems

A. green, not obviously parasites, stems and leaves present

Seems easy enough, right? Well after than all hell usually breaks loose. Sometimes the route to the right plant can have scores of options. One wrong turn and you are sent off to the incorrect part of the plant kingdom. Further, the specialized botanical language alone is enough to make a normal person not so normal. In fact, I have another book to assist me for that called Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary, because words like cleistogamous are not part of my every day lexicon. Cleistogamous, by the way, means a flower that never opens. Who knew?

To make matters more difficult, you must have a dissecting microscope to see many of the plant parts that are used in the keys. In this regard, I am lucky in that I happen to have one of those in the basement. Still with all this highly specialized and precise terminology and advanced optical technology, I can still often come up completely empty.

Not long ago, I came across a shrub at the Stroud Preserve that was unfamiliar to me. It had “wings” on the stems and green flowers. Both of these characteristics are fairly uncommon and conspicuous features and I figured that this plant would fall into the category of species that I quickly identify. I broke off a stem to bring back home to work through the key.

I was wrong. I spent hours trying to figure out to which stupid species this stupid plant belonged. In fact, I felt pretty good in calling it a “stupid shrub” because of the fact that “shrub” was really the only thing about the plant that I knew was a certainty.

I was obviously over looking something as I keyed it out. I checked every fork in the key to make sure that I wasn’t over looking something to no avail. I was clearly overlooking something. Frustrated, I walked away from it and moved on to something else. Later in the evening when I was sitting at my computer I figured why don’t I give Google a try. I typed in “shrub green flowers.” In less than a second, there were scores of images of winged euonymus (Euonymus alatus).

I still chose to refer to it as stupid shrub.

Russell

Kevin's Graduation

A few years ago, Mary’s brother Kevin decided to change bring his acting career to a close and begin a new career in nursing. He enrolled in an intense 18 month nursing program at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. When I say intense, I mean intense. We have barely seen hide nor hair of him the past two years. Highly unusual for someone who likes to be seen!

Yesterday, he graduated, with honors, from the program. He has already landed a job at the Jersey City Hospital just four blocks from his condo. Mary, Grandpa, and I joined Enrico in celebrating this massive achievement yesterday.

We are not the only ones to think Kevin has done good. CNN published an article about his journey yesterday! All those years of acting and he finally gets some major media attention for…leaving acting.

We are all very proud of Kevin and wish him well in his new career!

See photos of the graduation here.

Russell

The Kids

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update on what the kids have been up to so I thought I’d do that now.

First and foremost, they are very, very, very excited that there is only one full week of school left. Next week is the full week, then the last week in May they have one day off for an in-service day for the teachers, then the first week of June they have two full days, and three half days. The last day of school is June 8^th! They don’t know it yet, but after school lets out they go to work at the North Franklin Street work camp for the rest of the summer.

In the last post about the kids, Paddy was playing basketball and taking swimming lessons. Basketball season is over and he has now moved on to baseball. He is still doing swimming. He doesn’t seem to care much about which sport he is doing at any given time, just as long as he is doing it. The one constant is that he talks trash at all of them. Next week he is going on a class field trip to the Herr’s potato chip factory. He is very excited about that.

William, on the other hand avoids sports at all cost, especially if it requires communication with another human. His primary mission in life is to collect every fact about every animal that has ever lived on planet Earth, and remember it. At the rate that he is going he will done with that project by the start of the next school year. Yesterday (May 17) his school went on an all day field trip to Washington DC. When we arrived we mapped out the most direct route from the bus to the Museum of Natural History. We’d have William tell you about it but his head exploded. He was doing pretty good until he came upon the exhibit with a real giant squids (there were two, a male and a female!). Lets just say he is a pretty happy boy today. See photos from our trip here.

Emily is also pretty happy, for two reasons. First, we finally hooked up her hand-me-down iPhone. She now has a gizmo with a phone, email, text message, and internet that she can carry around with her. Second, and probably, the main reason she is so happy, we let her dye her hair. It is now black and purple. These were not freebies for her. To get them we asked her to pull up her grades, which she did. Next year, at Henderson High School she will be in all honor’s classes. We are very proud of her. She is also doing well in fencing. She will be moving up to the intermediate class soon and will be learning to fence with an epee (a type of sword).

See more photos of the kids over the last month or so here.

Happy Spring time!

Russell

My new back yard

When it comes to the location of our living quarters, Mary and I have always preferred homes that are in an urban setting where we are within walking or biking distance of everything. The tradeoff for this that I have to forgo a backyard that offers anything close to natural.

In Sequim, our back yard was very nice, we had a grape arbor that provided shade for our slate patio, grass for the kids to run around on, and room to plant things. It even had room for me to park my bikes (left). For me, my need for nature was met because Sequim was located at the north end of the largest unbroken wilderness area in the lower 48 states. I considered the Olympic Peninsula my "effective backyard" (above). By the same principle our front yard would have overlooked the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where one could see seal, sea lions, whales, and orcas on a regular basis. Not bad by any measure.

In moving to West Chester we liked the fact that Mary's family home was situated only a few blocks from downtown putting us within walking distance from most things that we need. Our back yard is less than half the size of our yard in Sequim, but fairly typical for a city lot here. It does, however, have all the required elements; shade, brick patio for the grill, grass, and a place to plant things (right).

Now we come to my need for things natural. Let us just leave it that southeastern Pennsylvania ain't anything like the north Olympic Peninsula. When we arrived in Western Washington back in 1992 and I saw Mount Rainier for the first time I said to Mary "you don't see shit like that in Philadelphia." This became my mantra every time I saw anything in the Pacific Northwest of overwhelming natural beauty. It is clear, now that I am back here, that I will have to redefine my idea of what is "natural" if I am to retain any level of sanity. So, I have come to accept that Chester County simply will not have landscapes that approach the idea of "natural" in the way that Washington State did.

To that end I have adopted the Stroud Reserve as my adopted backyard (left). Sure, it is not the Olympic Mountains, but at only 2.9 miles away from our home it will more than do. The reserve is 571 acres of mixed agricultural lands, upland hardwoods and riparian wetlands that mirror much of western Chester County is today. It also has a couple of acres of serpentine outcrop that makes for a very interesting native plant community.

Since the beginning of April, I have diverted much of my cycling energies into long walks around the reserve reacquainting myself with eastern flora and birdlife. For now, I'll let these photographs serve as a brief introduction to the reserve. Over the next weeks and months I'll post more about my observations at the reserve and thoughts about its ecology.

Russell