Aaron and I decided that his parents’ visit with us in Canaan Valley would be a perfect opportunity to try out the Aaron’s big lens for detailed nature photography. At a nearby marsh, nature cooperated beautifully, and we were inundated with goldfinches, green herons, cedar waxwings, bobolinks, bluebirds, what we believe was a northern harrier, and a variety of colorful butterflies.

Ecology lesson #1: the males are typically more colorful than the females (a striking example here with the goldfinches)

If you’re petrified of getting old, hanging out for a day with Aaron’s parents should cure that.  Aaron’s dad is turning 80 next May, but was totally down for the 3.5-mile hike to the Freeland Road wildlife refuge, and up for the walk to feed the ponies later in the evening.  Aaron’s mom did a tough 4+ mile hike the next day through the Sodds with us, navigating those rocky trails with billy goat aplomb.  When they weren’t adventuring, they were trying to sell us on joining them on upcoming winter ski trips to Colorado, Oregon, and Austria.

Freeland Road

Aaron’s notion of herons is based on the elongated Great blue heron that’s common in the DC area. The comparatively diminutive green heron blew Aaron’s concept of a heron right out of the water.

Is the cedar waxwing a badass bird or what?

As seen above with the goldfinches, the female birds are much harder to identify than the brilliantly colored males. We were utterly stumped by this female boblink and had to get a life line from expert naturalist Fred Nelson for this ID.

We think this is a Great Spangled Fritillary butterfly. But mainly we just wanted to say that name.

These butterflies were much smaller than the Fritillary above (the flowers they’re on aren’t much bigger than dimes).  I’m afraid we’re not so good at the butterfly IDs yet.

Welcome to the Sodds

Leda pre-diet

The domesticated cat is an absolute miracle of evolution.  Cats in the wild are fully solitary creatures (except the outlier lion).  Tigers, leopards, bobcats, lynxes, cougars, jaguars, the Middle Eastern wildcat from which domestic cats are believed to be descended…..all these lead solitary existences once they leave their litter-mates.

Leda getting the belly rub

So while it makes complete sense that dogs, which naturally are highly sociable animals that frequently live in packs (wolves, African wild dogs, etc.), would adapt themselves well to living with humans, there’s nothing in a cat’s behavioral history that would suggests it could ever make a good pet.

Leda helping Aaron program

Instead cats were historically kept for their main function as mouse-catchers.  In fact, in the Middle Ages in Europe cats were persecuted for their perceived association with witches.  There’s a theory that the persecution of cats indirectly facilitated the spread of the Black Plague (Yersinia pestis spread via fleas carried by rats) due to the strong temporal association with cat eradications, but the spatial association within Europe appears to be weak.

Leda offering her chin for scratchies

Cats of course have long been held in high esteem in Egypt, where they earned bonus points for killing cobras as well as vermin.  Egypt still has some of the largest cat populations in the world.

Leda conspiring

Cats certainly are perfectly capable of a solitary existence if a social opportunity is not available.  But as our dear Leda here demonstrates, cats are flexible, adaptable creatures who can form very strong bonds with humans when they select to.  The key is to socialize cats to humans while they are still in the malleable kitten stage.  The more human handling they have in their first eight weeks, the more likely they are to be comfortable around humans — both familiar and unfamiliar.

A young Leda intrigued by the toilet bowl

As Joey C and Brit Z can attest, Leda is a highly affectionate creature.  She greets me at the door when I come home from work, she loves laps and cuddles.  There’s only one human Leda doesn’t care for: she is deathly afraid of Bob.

Leda’s BFF Cricket

Umstead….that sounds familiar

When I was a child I would tell people I wanted to be a veterinarian when I grew up.  I would then return to smothering my face in my cat’s belly, or cantering around the house jumping over intentionally placed obstacles, making sure I corrected my leads in the corners.  My interest in animals persisted through high school, and when I got to Stanford my freshman year, I had decided that I wanted to be a wildlife veterinarian, something that would combine my loves of creatures, science and medicine, and adventure in the woods.  Stanford didn’t work out, and transferring to Amherst College for my sophomore year was the best decision I’ve ever made.  But Amherst was a decidedly non-professional school.  There were no Business, Law, or Medical schools, not even an Engineering program, which were all deemed too career-track.  Amherst was about philosophy and broad liberal arts learning, focusing on how to think rather than learning a trade.  English was the most popular major.  I loved Amherst, I took classes in Art, Art History, Religion, Creative Writing, Biology, Jurisprudence, Russian Literature, it was all cranially expansive and exciting.  I thought about going pre-Med (I was a Biology-Russian double major anyway), but the pre-Med kids didn’t seem like my ilk.  The pre-Med kids were the ones who quibbled about how their exams were graded and seemed driven by resume-building.  They were the triathletes of the academic world.  Other than pre-Med, there wasn’t much career-building support at Amherst, and there certainly wasn’t a pre-Vet track.  I had no idea there were requirements for veterinary school, and was far too wrapped up in philosophical questions to bother with such practical details.

Although I agree with Amherst’s high-minded philosophy in concept, most of Amherst’s graduating seniors are utterly unprepared for the real world and have so little clue what they’re going to do with their knowledge of Kant and Herodotus that the majority fall into Wall Street and finance by default.  I thankfully avoided that fate, and am so fortunate to have slithered my way back to the natural sciences and gotten my PhD in biology.  I won’t go into the whole circuitous route from Amherst to the NIH, but here’s a brief synopsis: after Amherst I worked for a Diabetes newsletter, then I backpacked around Southeast Asia with a high school friend for six months, and then I got a job at RAND Corporation doing consulting work in the field of global health.  Then I made what I consider the second best decision of my life in getting my PhD at Penn State with Eddie Holmes, and then I took a post-doc at the NIH.

But as I toured NC State’s animal hospital, watching veterinarians perform an angioplasty on a dog, I had this immensely gratifying sense that I had finally ended up where I belonged.  I was 36 hours into my marathon interview as a candidate for the Infectious Disease cluster hire at the NC State veterinary college, which was all going splendidly.  And I had this feeling of relief that I would have been a terrible veterinarian: I would have hated dealing with sick, hurting animals, watching them suffer.  I’m not nearly practical-minded and details-oriented enough to operate in a hospital, where policies have to be  meticulously adhered to.  But as I conversed with the veterinarians I realized that we all played our own roles: they were good with scalpels; I was good at thinking about the big questions, things like the spatial dynamics of the pathogens they were encountering (was canine influenza endemic in North Carolina, or were they simply seeing spillovers from other areas?).  I wasn’t supposed to be a vet after all — all those endless requirements for admission did a good job of weeding out people like me who have difficulty with too many rules and would never be able to follow procedure in a clinical setting.  Rather, I had arrived at the College of Veterinary Medicine through my own circuitous route, and had experiences and skills that would complement the activities in the clinic.  I could never have planned it this way, but things seemed to have a way of sorting themselves out.

To clear my head the morning of Day 2 of interviews, I put on my running shoes and ventured beyond the Comfort Inn.  I quickly encountered a whole network of trails through the woods, first through Schenck Forest and ultimately landing at a huge park called Umstead.  I had to hurry back for my breakfast interview, but I trotted back with a relief that Raleigh had a nice set of forests near the veterinary college.  This might work, I considered.

The West Virginia ponies are back!  No, no more Chompers.  Timberline Stables has new management, and a whole new crop of ponies.  But they’ve caught on quickly to the carrot game.  The time when Chompers nibbled on Aaron’s ski seems to have had an indelible effect on Aaron’s confidence in horses’ ability to distinguish between carrots and, say, fingers.  So he leaves the carrot delivery to me.

This is our longest stay in West Virginia to date — 10 days.  We took our laptops and worked from the Chophouse M-F, taking a mid-day break each day to go out for an expedition.  My IT band has still been squirrelly since HS40, so I’ve been doing an ‘activity’ of running and walking.  I go through cycles where I take my running more or less seriously, and summer tends to be a time when I let my hair down and back off.  The woods are full of activity — woodpeckers in chase, swarms of tadpoles, bees bumping over wildflowers — not a bad time at all to slow it down and pay closer attention to what’s around you.  Aaron seems to have been stung by one of those bees, and has been on a mileage tear — no doubt a good sign that he’s finally kicking the last of the Lyme.  It seems to be a particularly bad tick summer, and several of my friends from State College have already been treated for Lyme.  One of the really nice things about West Virginia is the lack of ticks here.  It’s the only place you can run through the tall grasses without a feeling in the back of your mind that tiny fangs are sinking into your flesh.

There are some perfect trails for newbie mountain bikers out here — jeep roads, grassy double-track, and singletrack that are just tough enough to challenge you without making you want to get off your bike and walk.  I’ve even been scanning Craigslist for lady’s mountain bike prospects — quite a large number of people out there with nice bikes trying to offload them.

I’ve also been experimenting with the Hoka trail shoe as additional protection for my fibroma.  Overall, my verdict is that I’d rather not to have to wear them (I’ve always preferred minimalist gear — the old definition of ‘minimalist’, before it meant ‘vibrams’), but given the fibroma problem it’s definitely a safer and more cushioned way to go.  Because of the IT band, I haven’t had a chance to really test them flying down hills, but so far the results are auspicious.  Missteps seem to be less punishing.

I have the Lurray Triathlon Aug 16, and the Pony Run in Montana the week after that, so at some point I have to be able to start running regularly again.  But neither of them are events I’m taking very seriously, and I know better than to rush an IT band.  I’d rather be healthy and under-trained than in shape but hurting.  I signed up for the Women’s Half Marathon lottery, but there’s a side of me that’s a bit fatigued of that event.  Not that I don’t love it to pieces — I would still go and volunteer.  But last year I thought I was moving to Minnesota and imagined it was going to be my last WHM hurrah, at least for a while.  I’m glad I’m still in DC (I would have been miserably cold in Minneapolis), but I feel like I’ve kind of punched out at that race, and psychologically I’m ready to let the WHM go for a bit.  Maybe it’s just hard for me to get psyched for a fast race when I have so many lingering issues — my fibroma, IT band, hamstring, low weight.  It’s hard to get in a racing mindset.  I’ll see which way my gut is going come decision time, but these days I’m far more concerned with whether the ponies get their evening carrots than whether I break another record.

‘Hello, Weight Watchers.’

‘Hi, I have a question.  Can you sign up for Weight Watchers to gain weight?’

‘Um, I’m not sure.’

‘I mean, watching your weight could refer to gaining or losing pounds, right?  It’s not called Weight Losers.’

‘You know, I’ve been on this job eight years, and this question has never come up.’

‘It would be the same principles: setting goals, being disciplined, paying more attention to what you eat, being more organized about food.’

‘Let me ask my manager.’

My mom had recently lost 10 pounds using Weight Watchers and never felt better.  I was inspired by her determination to take control of her diet.  And I was humbled by  my Highland Sky experience, where my utter depletion proved that my lazy skeetering at the boundary of healthy weight can kick me in the butt if something suddenly goes awry.   Maybe if I’d had a little more cushion (literally) to begin with I would have been better able to handle the sudden depletion from the sickness.

‘No, Weight Watchers is only for losing weight.  I’m sorry.’

Foiled.

I slumped.

No one wanted to the poor marmot!

I’ve been making noises for a year now about Getting my Act Together and getting back to the magical 120.  Below 120 I become injury prone, emotionally volatile (I sobbed at the end of Rio — the parrot was flying!), and I sleep poorly because I have to get up and get snacks in the night.  But for all my noises for all these months, I’ve only slipped further down the scale.  I haven’t been committed.  In fairness, my mission has been thwarted by a stretch of tooth sensitivity, which limited my intake of sweets (even OJ) and cut off a large source of calories.

But this Summer:

Change is Gonna Come.  No more slacking, just more snacking. Operation More Marmot has begun!  

Stay tuned for the prizes and incentives for meeting monthly goals (I haven’t come up with them yet, but I will).  I don’t need no stinkin’ Weight Watchers.  I don’t need no stinkin’ internet (because 99% of things you find on the internet related to human weight are terrifying).  My cat Leda has hit her goal weight of 10 pounds.  With the full inspiration of the Kitty, but by the end of the Summer of 2014…..

-I will not cry during cartoon parrot movies

-I will not fit into the suit I bought last August that was an absurdly low size and I was convinced was a waste of money because I thought I was just in a weird temporary low point but I desperately needed a suit that looked fit my current shape for my Glasgow and Minnesota interviews, so I bought it anyway.

-I will not have to eat a prophylactic snack before bedtime.