Odds and Ends, September 16, 2014

On Sunday the Friends of the Library sponsored a free music program at the Rensselaer Library. What was supposed to be the Hip Harp Trio became the Hip Harp Duo because one of the members of the trio could not make it.

 The two played a wide variety of music. The harpist teaches music at one of the Indianapolis high schools, and when she was younger spent a year as a musician on a cruise ship, an experience she seemed not to ever want to repeat. There was a respectable turnout for the performance of between 40 and 50 people.

Before I left town a few days ago, someone asked me what the big roll of tubing near the intersection of College and Grace was for. I still do not know.

 At SJC a new entrance to Raleigh Hall is almost finished.

 The city is still working on storm sewer connections on the intersection of Scott and Vine. At the substation on North Melville, workers from NIPSCO were connecting wires. The very long utility pole that I noticed more than a week ago really is quite a bit taller than its neighbors.

 We are headed for fall--or maybe we are already in fall. Some of the corn is almost mature.

I noticed a large preying mantis in my garden. He was wondering what I was doing when I pushed my camera in his face.

It is still over a month until Halloween, but on the east side of Rensselaer one house has decorations out.

Triops

I was away from Rensselaer for most of last week, enjoying adventures in babysitting. While I was out of town, I had the opportunity to see and catch some triops. They were living in a pool in western Utah that had filled with recent rain water and the locals said that they had not seen them for about ten years.

 The water was muddy so they were hard to see unless they were near the surface. But there were so many of them that they were easy to catch.

They are sometimes called tadpole shrimp.

The name triops refers to their three eyes.

The triops that we caught were active for a bit more than a day and then they died. Triops are sold as pets, so if you want your own, you can probably buy some. Hopefully you will have better luck with them than we did.

As the pool dries up, the triops will lay eggs that can survive extreme conditions for many years. Perhaps it will be another ten years before conditions are right for them to hatch and they will again fill the pond. (Here is a short video that tells more about this weird creature.)

It is good to be back in Rensselaer. When I left, it felt like July. When I got back it felt like November. What a difference a week can make.

Shall we talk about the birds and the beetles?

The barn swallows that have nested in my garage again this year now have babies that are able to fly. However, the parents remain fiercely protective and dive at anyone who comes near. They are both funny and annoying. Below is one of the babies. The parents do not sit still long enough to photograph.

Especially annoying is the mess they they make on the floor beneath the nest. However, they do eat bugs, so maybe there are fewer flies and mosquitoes because of them.

 I noticed some funny bugs on Joe Pye Weed.

 I was rather surprised that I was able to find them on the Internet. They have several common names, but only one scientific name, Chauliognathus pennsylvanicus. They are useful bugs beetles and do no damage.

After several weeks during which we have not gotten significant rain and yards and fields have dried out a bit, we got plenty on Thursday. My rain gauge said that we got about half an inch in the morning and about three in the late afternoon. It was enough to back up the sewer and make me take defensive action to protect my basement. (I am on the waiting list for the city to fix the problem, but I guess it will be a long wait.) The downtown weather station said we got almost half an inch in the morning and another two inches in the late afternoon. The airport station recorded only a bit more than two inches for the entire day.

Then to top it off, the storm that blew through from 3:00 to 4:30 on Friday morning dropped about another inch according to both official weather stations as well as my rain gauge. I need to dump my rain gauge; with 4.5 inches in it, it is almost full.

Curtains

On Saturday night the final curtain fell on the Carnegie Player's production of Once Upon a Mattress. I do not remember seeing the play before, and wondered why someone would base a play  on the very short story of The Princess and The Pea by Hans Christian Anderson. But the story is readily mockable* and that is what the play does. It was very well performed and the woman who played the princess did a marvelous job. I was sorry to see so many empty seats in the theater.

As is usually the case with the Carnegie Players' productions, the sets (there were only two) were marvelous. (For pictures, see here.)

It was also curtain time for thousands and thousands of little fish on Saturday or Sunday. Below is what Weston Lake looked like early on Monday morning. The flies were very happy. I deduced that the water had only very recently dried up because there were still a few tadpoles flopping around in the middle of all the dead fish.

Have you noticed that the days are getting a bit shorter? School will soon be starting, and that means that the doors will soon close at LaRue Pool. August 11 will be the last week day, but the pool will open, weather permitting, on the August 16-17 weekend. The sign at the pool suggested that it might possibly be open also on the 23-24 weekend, but the park superintendent did not say anything about that at the park board meeting on Monday night.

*Even I could not resist having some fun with the Princess and the Pea when I wrote my princess stories.

Nature, Parks, and Gardens

    Last week I was surprised to see a frog attached to a window. It did not seem to mind when I took a flash photo of it. It may be an eastern gray tree frog, which can change colors to some extent to match its background.

For the past few years I have been trying to get some prairie flowers growing along the street by my house. This year I got yellow coneflowers big enough to bloom--a lot of prairie perennials do not bloom the first year.  In the background are false sunflowers.

 I walked through the high school prairie area last week to see how their plants were doing and noticed that there was a lot of giant ragweed and wild carrot invading their fields. I thought that natural prairies were resistant to invasion by these interlopers, so I wonder if their planting is not balanced quite right.

I have been traveling a lot recently, one reason posting has been erratic. One place I stopped was at a Lebanon city park where they have a hill as an attraction. Such a simple thing yet kids enjoy it. Two boys were using the hill to launch kites while I was watching. They would run down the hill with their kites and that would get them up into the air. There are a lot of things kids can find to do with a hill.

 Another simple park feature that many communities are adding are splash pads. They can be quite small or fairly elaborate. Often they are activated by pressing a button and then they stay on for a few minutes. To continue playing, the button has to be pressed again. They are like fountains but people are encouraged to play in them instead of staying out of them.

The Rensselaer Republican had an article on July 14 about the RBI softball league's new home, a field that volunteers and parents built behind Bethany Free Church. I finally got out there to see what they had done.

 While I was on the east side of town I took a look at the raised bed gardens that CDC Resources had installed last year for their consumers. One of the beds was mostly beans and cucumbers and they were doing well. They were a bit surprised at how much cucumbers spread.

The raised bed gardens were constructed last year by the Teen Mission group. This year they laid the foundation stones for a small greenhouse. The foundation is visible above the garden.

If you want to do a cheap version of a raised bed garden, find some five gallon plastic buckets, cut off their bottoms, place them on the ground, and fill them with good soil. Plant whatever you want to plant and see what happens. My daughter-in-law tried sweet potatoes last year and was surprised by how much they yielded.

This evening I noticed a drilling machine next to Lincoln Street. My guess is that it is doing drilling cores to test for the foundation of the storm water treatment plant that the city is required to build. It has gone beyond the talking.

Do you know what a banner stone is? If you collect Indian artifacts, you certainly do, because banner stones are highly collectable. However, the purpose of these objects remains the subject of controversy. They almost certainly were associated with atlatls, the dominant weapon and hunting device prior to the bow and arrow. The banner stones were developed only in North America (though atlatls were used throughout the world). Rensselaer resident David Volken has had an article published in an archeology journal that argues that banner stones were not attached to the atlatl or spear thrower itself as many in the field believe, but to the dart or spear to give it more momentum and thus striking power.

People today think that we are much smarter than people in the past (after all, we have cell phones), but despite all of our technology, there are bits of lost technology that we are still struggling to understand and recover.

(The frog likes my window. It is back again tonight.)