Ceiling Lizard Is Watching You...

I love living in the sub-tropics.

Last night I turned on the bathroom light and noticed a strange shadow. The light is a three-panel fluorescent fixture built into a drop ceiling over the sink. (Very 80s.) The shadow was about four inches long with a tail and four legs. Somehow, one of the ubiquitous mini lizards that inhabit the place had gotten itself up into the light space. (Actually, it must have come down into the fixture from the attic/crawl space, but I can't figure out how it did that, either.) These lizards are adorable. They live in the lanai room, which is half open to the world, and in the front entryway as well as all through the garden. Their main occupations are puffing out their throat sacs (which are surprisingly large and delicate for the size of the animals--transparent with a visibly red vein system), and doing herky-jerky little lizard push-ups with their front legs.

I didn't want to make a lot of noise at that hour, so I left him there overnight. This morning he was still there so I started poking at the panels covering the lights with stick end of a plunger. I pushed up one panel until it got hung up on the frame and then started bopping the one the lizard was on until he couldn't stand it any longer and jumped. It took several tries but eventually he fell through the crack and landed in a wicker soap basket on the toilet tank. From there he leapt onto a nice big round natural sponge on the side of the tub. I was able to pick up the sponge and walk out of the bathroom before he panicked. Then he ran up my arm.

He froze halfway up. I felt little lizard feet on my skin and immediately regressed to eight years old. "Cool!" I thought. "I wonder if I can keep him?"

Adult me said, "No," so I carried him on my arm very slowly to the front door where he saw daylight and jumped for it. I did notice before he left that his tail was already bobbed from some previous misadventure.

Mom, meanwhile, never noticed the lizard or his shadow, neither did she hear me banging away at the light fixture. I had to tell her about it twice and then she allowed as something like that had happened twenty years ago, too, and Dad took care of it.

I Want To Believe

I "saw" the Space Shuttle launch last week. I didn't go up to Cape Canaveral this time, and just as well since the launch was delayed again, but the launch was still visible--158 miles away (as the crow flies)!!! It took less than five minutes. A tower of thick white smoke, a vertical cylindrical cumulus cloud, shot up into the breaking dawn with a point of intense yellow-white light atop it. The light seemed to come back down again, an optical illusion, as the shuttle curved off to the northeast away from where my brother and I were standing on the front lawn. We "saw" the booster rockets fall away in a flash of light that stayed behind and below the main show.

It was all very depressing.

Why?

Because by the end of this year, the shuttles will be retired and the nation that put men on the moon will no longer have any manned launch capacity at all. We will ride into low earth orbit as passengers on Russian ships. Because we won't be able to do it ourselves. We're too busy holding Tea Parties and celebrating Confederate History months, objecting to evolution, embracing anti-scientific non-rationalism and gutting our own economy while lashing out militarily around the world.

This is what a civilization in decline looks like.

I really want to believe the president when he says we will go to Mars and an asteroid. Maybe we will. Maybe we can do it in spite of not having the cutting edge technology, and the launch capability and the trained teams, both ground and orbital. Just because his predecessors promised the Moon and Mars and the rest while cutting NASA's capabilities doesn't mean his flat NASA budget portends the same.

Maybe private companies will take over the lunar program. Just because the railroad companies required federal land grants before they built transcontinental lines, just because the airlines required federal airmail subsidies before they would fly coast-to-coast, just becasue no one but the federal government would or could build the interstate highways and national air traffic control systems, doesn't mean private companies won't jump to fly to the space station and the moon without any immediate visible payoff for them.

I want to believe. Really, I do. In the long run, private enterprize in space is the way to go. In the long run. I'm just not sure we have that kind of time, anymore.

Snowbird Migration Patterns

Saw an article in the News Press the other day. Yes, the paper here is still pretty good. All the old people around here, set in their ways as they are, keep supporting it. The only bad part is they still support the horrendous legacy comics, especially on Sunday. Anyway...

The article got me to thinking if there were any other places where such a large per centage of the population regularly up and moved away for such long periods. People who vacation for a couple of weeks (at the beach, in the mountains, skiing, wherever) aren't going to accumulate enough stuff to donate. The people who come here come from all over so the places they come from don't experience that same concentration of migrants. Here, this is a big enough deal that the Post Office handles the collection.

If you've heard of anything like this elsewhere, please let me know.

The Return of the GIPS*

Must be a Christian holiday coming up, the *Giant Inflatable Pagan Symbols are back. This time there's a seven foot tall pink inflatable rabbit with faux wicker basket at the head of a neighbor's driveway and a clutch of two foot long pastel eggs further down the street. Not nearly the menagerie from last time around, but then Easter is not nearly as commercialized as Christmas. Still, I don't get the logic of promoting symbols of the Old Religion's spring festival in Christian observances. It makes much more sense to celebrate a real Seder for the Last Supper. If it's "for the kids," I don't think infantilizing religion is a good idea, although it does explain the appalling lack of theological understanding expressed by many adherents (especially the more politically active ones).

I did buy a half dozen Cadbury Creme Eggs to share around.

The Red Pencil of Death

Found Mom's obituary the other day.

She wrote it herself (not too long ago from the handwriting) and stuffed it in the drawer of a small sideboard just outside the kitchen where the hall from the dining room begins. It's in with some old silver, flower arranging doodads, other household odds and ends and a poem (not her own) about not missing her when she's gone.

In the meantime, she did give me a slight scare last week. She keeps regular hours, going to bed between 10 and 10:30 and waking between 7:30 and 8. Last week she decided to "work in the garden," the flower-planted walk from the house to the driveway, and spent an hour sweeping dirt from the paving stones after my brother had been weed pulling. The next day she was exhausted, sat around all day, and went to bed at 9. The following morning at 8:30 her door was still closed. I listened at it, heard nothing, and decided to go for my walk as usual.

It's interesting how easily we can contemplate, and even accept, our own death, but not those of the ones we love and how we're still surprized by their acceptence of their deaths. I recall my father's mother saying a number of times she was ready to go but she was in a nursing home, had had several severe strokes and was old (to my mind). Then I realize that Mom is already five years past her own mother's lifespan and only two months shy of passing Grandma Rosinus.

Anyway, the obit covers most of the basics but really does not do her justice. I think I shall edit it and, when the time comes, post it here. I'll do a draft and sit with her and go over the details. Obituaries being a major moneymaker for the newspapers, when I'm done it will be too big (expensive) to submit to the News Press.

Oh, and when I got home, she was up getting her coffee and everything has been fine since.

Politics--and Warfare--As Usual

I wanted to write about something other than birds this time. I wanted to write about the amazingly traditional Southern politics of this little planned bedroom community where one of the city councilmen was just removed by the governor (The governor! Where else does a governor have the right to remove a local politician? This must be a legacy of Reconstruction.) because, as a contractor (every third person in town is a contractor) he allegedly cheated several clients out of their deposits and payments to the tune of a half mil or so, although he was upright enough to report it to the police when someone (a local citizen and wannabe contractor of an entirely different sort) offered to whack the plaintiffs on his behalf, and where the son of the chief of police just pled guilty to running a real estate Ponzi scheme along with a couple of friends (although as far as I can tell from the state of the housing market here, second only to Las Vegas for foreclosures, half the town must have been in on it), and where the mayor and a crony of his on the city council stand accused of running for office only so they could get their lawsuit against the city (something to do with contracting) moved along by being in position to move it along themselves (and, of course, they'd never ask the city to take a dive on that one), and where the council is trying to figure out how to bill utility costs to people who are not connected to any services and to vacant lots, and where the police just ran an undercover sting operation at a middle school fair to bust underage smokers.

That's what I wanted to write about.

But then I went out for my morning walk and witnessed a magnificent battle royal between a dozen and a half crows and three hawks. It was visible for a quarter mile and audible for three times that. The hawks hung on steady, like bombers in formation, as the crows swooped, circled and dove, claws out and beaks agape. At one point, a hawk and crow grappled (no idea who grabbed who first) and fell from the sky, a twisting ball of splayed feathers. They disappeared behind a tree before hitting the ground but when I got there I saw no evidence of a crash so I assume they broke before impact. The crows scored a tactical victory and the hawks retreated with as much dignity as they could muster. On my return the crows were settling in on the power line, their equivalent of the officers' club no doubt, where I could hear them discussing strategy, congratulating each other and loudly expounding their personal tales of derring-do which I have no doubt will only continue to expand in the retelling.

Personal note for Andrea: Python* season opened yesterday and runs through the middle of April. $26 for a license, free training is available for novices and there is no bag limit. Two extension agents caught a 15-footer and had it on the news a couple days ago.

*Includes Burmese-, Indian- and African rock pythons, green anacondas and Nile monitor lizards(!).

Things That Move...

Startled a buzzard the other day. I was taking my morning constitutional and had to detour across the street because this suburbanite was getting his pool pumped out at 8 a.m. and the pool pumpers had run a hose (we're talking 5-6 inch diameter flexible accordion hose here) from the backyard out to the street where they were recreating the original pool only 3 inches deep and a lot wider. As I moved along the shoreline, a dark shape jumped from the grass and launched itself in that long, slow, shallow awkward ascent typical of large birds, bombers and jumbo jets. It was a good hundred feet down the road before it was able to clear the roofline of a stucco ranch and disappear on the other side. Ungainly, with a long neck, so not a hawk despite the five foot wingspan. I'd seen vultures feeding on roadkill on previous trips (they'll step aside to let a car pass, but won't abandon their prize). I didn't see anything for it to feed on but I didn't exactly search the grass either.

Speaking of vultures, it's a little unnerving to be walking along, noting the occasional hawk/vulture float overhead and disappear, wonder where they disappear to, turn around and realize you're being followed by two dozen of the things. A couple days ago I looked straight up after losing track of a couple of them and found myself at the bottom of a swirling vortex of raptors/scavengers at least 500 feet high. Must have been thirty of them. Toto at the base of a bird tornado. Now I know how Tippi Hedren felt.

Speaking of big ungainly birds, I drove up to the mythical town of Cocoa Beach (geezer reference) to watch the last night-time launch of the space shuttle. Ever since the moon landings we have been slowly cutting back our goals, dreams and capabilities with regard to manned space flight to the point where we can barely get 200 miles above the surface of the planet with rickety technology we will now retire not having any replacement in hand. Needless to say, NASA did not disappoint: five minutes before blast-off they cancelled the launch leaving tens of thousands of us stranded on the beach out in the cold (literally). It succeeded as metaphor, if nothing else.

It took over five hours for traffic to clear out enough to drive home. I took back roads pretty much the whole way, around the north of Lake Okeechobee, a pleasant, flat drive through subtropical forest, farm fields and cattle pastures with occasional clumps of small identical standardized 1940s-era plastered-cinder-block ranch houses each with a broken front window, kitchen appliance in the front yard, and late model vehicle (SUV or truck) in the dirt driveway. Probably built for migrant labor originally, there'd be a half-dozen of them at one spot and then miles before the next bunch. Nothing that could be called a town for forty miles in any direction.

Speaking of the ragged edge of civilization, my eldest nephew called the other day. He's being sent to Iraq. To guard prisoners. Which is perfect military logic because not only is he in the Navy, he spent the first half of his career in Hawaii as a nuclear tech on a submarine and the second half in Charelston, SC teaching nuke tech. I say we send all of our people with nuclear skills and knowledge to Middle Eastern war zones. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway, he starts 90 days of either Army or Marine combat training next month and then Baghdad for nine months. The younger nephew is probably jealous. He's been to the Gulf a couple of times but never been off his ship (that I know of).