My Blog

My house has a lot of wierd stuff in it.

I’m a naturalist, by profession and by passion. Three jobs, with no desk or storage at any of them.  Sooooo… there’s a lot of wierd stuff in my house!

For example:

In my bedroom: As of this morning, I’ve got a little 2 gallon tank in my windowsill with monarch caterpillars munching away on milkweed leaves.  I’m hoping they will turn into monarch butterflies. (My daughter adores butterflies…"buffeyes", she calls them).

In my closet, top shelf, I have a box of mounted insects/arachnids I’ve borrowed from a friend of mine who’s got thousands of them. Cool insects!!!! I use them for a class.

I’ve got feathers strewn on my desk by the monitor.. haven’t quite gotten around to putting them in the envelope yet…

I’ve got about 200 pictures of various mammals, mounted on construction paper and laminated, in various places in my room. They should all be in one pile, but again, my daughter loves to look at them. So they get all unsorted. Again. and again. But hey.. she’s not even 2 yet, and she knows alot of them already! That’s my girl!

In the sala I’ve got a pot of live carnivorous plants… with liverworts! (I just learned about liverworts….) I’ve also got a small terrarium, with 4 different plant phyla in it. And pillbugs. and a worm or two. There used to be 2 petri dishes there as well, with "waterbears" I was trying to culture. Didn’t work. >groan< .

Speaking of worms, in my basement, I’ve got a worm composting bin… hundreds of hungry little redworms eat up my veggie scraps. I feed them, they give me wonderful fertilizer for my plants and my not-so-great vegetable garden. In the kitchen is a plastic bin labeled "worm food"… for the veggie scraps! 

I also keep all mesh bags- like what oranges or onion sets come in.. great for the peanut butter mix I set out for the catbird! There is also a container of nectar in the freezer, next to the handfeeding formula powder for baby birds, which in turn is next to the puppy milk. Which is next to the kitten milk.

What else…In my bookshelf, pretty much all you will find are various field guides, text-books, histories, etc.  There is a macaw tail feather stuck between two books. (It’s too big for the envelope!) I’ve got a pile of rocks on the end of one shelf… igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary… that I’ve collected in various places. Oooh.. and a teeeny tiny little trilobite fossil I found all by myself!  And a mechanical bat that really flies-albeit in circles-  when suspended by a string from the ceiling.  I love it! (I adore bats!) I’ve got a headlamp for when I lead night-hikes. And a star chart (which I have no idea how to use).

A week ago, I had an injured young flicker (a woodpecker species) in a box next to my bed. I was going to shuttle it down the next morning to the rehabber, but it’s injuries were too severe. It died during the night. Over the years, that box has contained baby rabbits, a baby vole, several birds-from chimney swifts to grackles to robins to sparrows and finches- and a few baby squirrels.  Most make it… some don’t. My husband has resigned himself to the possibility of sharing the bedroom during baby season!

All this… and the school year hasn’t even started yet! THEN..you might find… mushrooms, moldy bread (fungi!), skulls, bones, sponges, coral, moss cushions, DNA models, whatever subject I’d be teaching soon… I’ll have various doo-dads on my desk..and on the table..and on the floor.. and in the car….both cars….. 

I’m sure all this seems a bit excentric to someone who doesn’t know me. But those who do, realize it is all geared towards teaching people to find wonder in Creation.

I won’t even start on what you might find in my backpack….

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.