Lift Up Your Hearts!

Our router seems to be acting erratically again.  Last time the problem was the power supply, and I have a spare one to try now if necessary, though it's hard to believe this one would fail after just three months.  (Then again, I said that about our car battery recently.)

It's fine at the moment, but in the past 12 hours has twice done strange things like allowing just one half of a telephone "conversation," or allowing e-mail to be received and sent but not allowing web access.  To be on the safe side, I've set up the system to ring my cell phone if it doesn't establish contact via the regular phone.

Computers.  You can't live with them, and...it's hard to remember that we once lived without them.

Tropical Storm Barry brought us a night's worth of good, soaking rain, our first significant rain in many months and much needed.  The forecast was for rain all Saturday, too, but the radar looked reasonably clear in the morning so we paid another visit to Leu Gardens.

The effect of just one night's rain was amazing.  Already the plants had lifted their hearts to heaven, puttin out new growth and blossoms.  Except for a wedding party, I think most people were kept away by the forecast, because we had our own private garden for most of the time.

Later, despite a still-iffy forecast and a high wind and tornado watch, we biked the last leg of the West Orange Trail, from the Bo An Buddhist Center to Apopka and across the new bridge over Route 441.  We didn't have high expectations of a trail that goes through some of the more run-down parts of Apopka, but there was very little city biking and much of the trail was shaded by an oak canopy.  The sky was overcast and kept threatening to break into storm (courtesy of Tropical Storm Barry), but we stayed dry and enjoyed the relative coolness.  The headwind on the way back was sometimes hard to fight, however!

The trip was just over 13 miles and easy going in most places, but I was really glad to note that my problems from last week must have been un-recovered muscles rather than sand in the bicycle works, as I felt fine and had no trouble at all keeping up a good pace.  Muscles heal themselves, given time and good treatment, but bikes rarely do.

Before I write about today's bike ride, I have to clear the backlog and tell you about last weekend's.

The Cross Seminole Trail is not yet complete, and voters defeated the minuscule property tax increase that would have paid to purchase environmentally sensitive lands and built recreational trails, so we're not waiting for its completion to do what we can.

We parked at the Black Hammock Trailhead near 417 in Winter Springs, and headed east towards Oviedo.  The map shows the completed trail ending in the center of town, but the trail maps are often out of date and we were hoping more had been finished.  In that we were disappointed, as the trail ended without so much as a "Trail's End" sign.  After casting about for a continuation, we turned back, passed our starting point, and took the trail westward.

The trail has a couple of incomplete places in that direction, but thanks to our recent off-road adventure, we were not intimidated but plowed right through them.  Note that this was a mere week after we had unanimously determined to stick to paved bike paths....  But at least these were relatively short interludes with most of the trail paved.

The trail ends at Layer Elementary School (I thought I knew all the elementary schools in Seminole County; this must be new).  Before reaching the end, however, we passed through Central Winds Park and took time to park our bikes and enjoy the nature trail.  I can't pass a playground these days without thinking how much the grandkids woud enjoy it.

It was another good 18-mile ride, even though I discovered that either my body or my bike had not yet fully recovered from the previous week's exhaustion.  Riding, even on the flat, was a lot harder than it had been.  Maybe there's sand in the works....

I think I would have been fine if I'd just gone home and rested.  But there was a lot to do to prepare for having Memorial Day guests.  The worst was a long shopping trip that turned out to be a bit longer than planned.  After buying some plants at Home Depot, I decided to take them home before going to the grocery store, so they wouldn't bake in the hot car for so long.  (If it's not safe for kids and pets, it can't be good for plants, either.)

Click.

Click.

Yes, the car is in park.

Click, click, click. 

We just got a new battery in December!

Click.

Call Porter.

Oops.  He's outside pressure-washing the pool area and can't hear the phone.  Call his cell phone.  Intelligent man that he is, he doesn't wear his phone when near the pool and spraying high-velocity water around.  Call a neighbor, hoping she will yell over the fence and get his attention.  Not surprising, she's not home on a Saturday afternoon.

I could call AAA, but they usually take forever to arrive.  I'm only about a half hour's walk from home, so that's what I do.  It's a nice walk.

Porter sets aside the pressure washer long enough to come with me to Home Depot.  Yes, we have jumper cables.  Yes, we know how to use them.  Yes, our other car has its battery so deeply buried in the engine you can't attach jumper cables to it!

We go home, taking the suffering little plants with us.  Our neighbors have returned!  He has a truck wtih an accessible battery.  We all head back to Home Depot and the car jumps easily.

Drive to Batteries Plus, where they replace the battery for free, since they were the ones who sold it to us just five months ago.

Then, at last, I'm on my way to the part of the shopping.  Did I mention that I find shopping nearly as exhausting as off-road biking?  :)

Two weeks ago, after our exhausting off-road biking adventure, we paid a visit to Fort Christmas.  We went there several times when the girls were young, on our own and for Indian Princess outings.  But that was a long time ago.  The girls have grown a lot since then, and so has the fort.

They now have a large collection of old Florida houses, and we enjoyed a trip back in time as we wandered from one to another.  Bear in mind that Florida is a young state, even if it does have our country's oldest city.  Sometimes it seems more like the Wild West than the East Coast.

Here's a somewhat random assortment of pictures.  I love my digital camera.  (Thanks, Janet!)

The fort as we remembered it

Even the 50's count as historical here.  This house is only slightly smaller and actually has one more bedroom than the house where I spent the first nine years of my life.  I didn't think it small then!

 

Florida's equivalent of tapping maple trees for syrup.

 

Smokehouse from 1900.  Smoked meat hanging from the roof.  Did you ever wonder where smokescreens come from?

These pictures from the 1900 house are for my friend who works in a living history museum and has her own spinning wheel.

 

And this one from the 1915 house is for my other friend who is a master quilter—just in case she ever reads my blog....

From the 1870's—mosquito netting a must-have

From the 1927 house.  My mother grew up about 60 miles from here.  Even though her family kept a hotel, not a farm, I couldn't help thinking of her when we toured this one.

  

When you think cowboys and cattle drives, do you think Wild West?  Florida was the land of the open range until 1949.

  

If you look closely at this fur animal license from the 1930's, you'll learn a few things.  That the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission, which runs the camp Heather attended when she was nine, has been around a long time.  That nutrition probably wasn't the best for these pioneers and their children.  That this 33-year-old example of these tough, hard-working farmers, ranchers, and cowboys was only 4' 10" tall and weighted 85 pounds!

This ranch house came from what is now the Tosohatchee State Reserve, where we were biking earlier in the day.

  

Hey, wait a minute!  I grew up with that sink!

I find it amusing that President Bush gets blamed for anything that goes wrong, including hurricanes.  But even I am incensed about this one.  Whatever his personal opinion might be—if he's aware of the situation at all—he surely bears part of the blame for the following insanity, because the president is ultimately responsible for the actions of his administration.From the Wall Street Journal:

The Bush administration said it will fight a ruling allowing meatpackers to test their animals for mad-cow disease. The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1% of slaughtered cows for the disease. Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows. A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The Agriculture Department argues that widespread testing could lead to a false positive. Larger meat companies say if Creekstone tests its meat and advertises it as safe, they might be expected to perform the expensive test, too.

Huh?  Even a small-government advocate like me knows that one of the things government does best is enable higher standards than an unfettered free market can bear.

Suppose Company A and Company B both want to reduce their emmissions of pollutants.  If one takes on the added expense but the other doesn't, the second receives a decided market advantage over the first.  Even if they can agree to both reduce their emissions (without getting accused of illegal collusion), they are at risk from Company C which is not party to the agreement.

Enter governmental regulation:  If all companies in the industry are required to take on the expense, costs will rise, but more or less evenly.  (This is a very simplified analysis that doesn't take into account the problems of small businesses and other complicting factors, but you get the idea.)

So in this situaion I would expect to see the Department of Agriculture requiring more extensive testing to assure the safety of our food supply.  Instead, they are fighting a company that is voluntarily doing more for its customers than the USDA requires.  And why?

Because other meat companies might feel pressure to do more testing themselves?  This is a good thing!

Because widespread testing could lead to false positive results?  Well, yes, and I acknowledge that false positives can be a problem.  In any area.  By this logic we should abandon all mass screening from infant hearing checks to AIDS testing.  Somehow I don't think that's going to happen.

Perhaps we need a new test—one to screen members of the USDA for true concern for the safety of our nation's food.

Remember the story of the guy who got in trouble for (correctly) using the word "niggardly"?

Porter's boss once called him on the carpet for "using words I don't understand."

Now Missouri legislators are up in arms because their vocabularies failed them.  They passed a bill legalizing lay midwifery because they didn't realize what "tocology" means.

I suppose I ought to have some sympathy for them.  The legislation was attached to a popular health insurance bill, which was no doubt long and complicated, like most legal documents these days.  I fully admit that software companies could slip the most outrageous provisions into the EULA's I regularly "sign" after skimming, rather than closely analyzing, them.  On the other hand, knowing what legislation they are passing is their job, it's why they were elected, so if they don't personally know exactly what's in a bill, they had better have hired some trustworthy staff members to know and to keep them informed.

I happen to approve of the pro-midwifery legislation.  But if I didn't, and if these were my senators, I would not be directing my anger at Senator Loudon, who introduced the legislation and took advantage of his colleagues' ignorance, but at the ones who obviously aren't doing their jobs.

The most fun part of the story, however, is behind the scenes.  In yet another example of how the media routinely mess up the details even when they get the general story correct, use of the word "tocology" is credited to a homeschooled teen with a "college test prep guide."  Almost right, but the source of her knowledge of the word was good old A.Word.A.Day, to which my father, a great lover of words, instroduced many of us.  Here's what the girl herself has to say (from an A.W.A.D mailing):

My name is Sarah Greek, and I'm a homeschooled student in Mountain Grove,
Missouri, who just graduated from high school. I'm a subscriber of AWAD
and just read your latest email and its reference to 'tocological trickery'
with interest.  [see reference]

"If only they were reading AWAD"? We were. That's how this happened!

I live in Missouri, and have been working with Senator Loudon and
others on midwifery legislation all year. You might be interested to
know that I discovered the word 'tocological' as a result of your
daily emails. When we were working on midwifery legislation several
weeks ago, I remembered the word and informed Senator Loudon. We
inserted it into our amendment, resulting in the events that the news
article which you referenced narrates.

The whole situation, especially the word tocology, has been all over the
Missouri news this week. I spent the week in Jefferson City, and can
personally attest to the fact that the word tocology has been in the
mouths of nearly every politician all week. It's become the latest inside
joke in the Missouri Legislature. I've been called 'a tocological pain'.  :) 

Thanks to AWAD, midwifery is well on its way to becoming legal in
Missouri, and the whole state has added a new word to its vocabulary!

The purpose of Memorial Day is to honor those who have given their lives in our country's wars.  The advantage of a blog is that I can do that with a link, so this year I'm doing something different, and give the day a genealogical bent.

According to no less an authority than Wikipedia,

The southeastern United States celebrates Decoration Day as a day to decorate the graves of all family members, and it is not reserved for those who served in the military. The region observes Decoration Day the Sunday before Memorial Day.

Therefore I will metaphorically decorate the graves of all our family members who have gone before,

From my most ancient documented ancestor (so far)

Pepin d'Heristal (abt 635 - 16 Dec 714)
(You can follow the line back further from the link, but despite what I said above, I'm waiting to consult another authority than Wikipedia.)

To our beloved

Isaac Christopher Daley (21 Nov 2002 - 23 Nov 2002)

They say this hurricane season will be a busy one.  But for now we are enjoying the most wonderful May in my memory.  For weeks now the air conditioner has hardly ever turned on.  We are able to keep the windows open for most of the day, if we're careful to close them when the sun is shining directly in.  Those of you who were brought up in Florida know how unusual that is for any month after February!  The humidity is relatively low, as are the temperatures (today's high was only in the low 80's!), and best of all we have been enjoying delightful breezes!  Breezes are unusual here.  Mostly the air is so calm that clothes on a line stiffen into boards rather than attaining the gentle wind-graced softness we remember from our time up north.  It's as if Florida stores up all its wind, only to release it in big hurricane bursts.

But for now the weather is so delightful I had to write about it.  Now I'm going to leave the computer and rejoin Porter in the family room, where we are delighting in our books (Threads of Grey and Gold, and Lilith) and in the cool breeze that is wafting in the front windows and out the back door.

Among the more bizarre stories of the day, here's a study that claims to be able to predict your child's future SAT performance based on the relative lengths of his fingers.  Those whose ring fingers are longer compared with their index fingers are statistically likely to do better on the math portion, and those with the reverse situation to do better on the verbal.  This supposedly reflects prenatal testosterone/estrogen exposure.

It's a lot harder to measure finger length than I thought.  I finally settled on measuring from the knuckle, and it seems my ring finger is a bit longer than my index.  It's true, I did very well on the math portion of the SAT.  But I did even better on the verbal, so I must have measured wrong.  :)

The researchers plan to expand their studies into "other cognitive and behavioral issues, such as technophobia, career paths and possibly dyslexia."

My hearing is very good, probably better than that of many my age because I didn't ruin it in my teens with headphones and loud music.  But I still find that I can understand what people say better if I can see their faces.  Now I know why.

A Canadian study indicates that there is a signficant visual component of language understanding even amongst hearing people.  The four-month-old babies in the study were able to distinguish when adults in a silent video were speaking English and when they were speaking French.

The eight-month-old babies could do the same, but only if they were being raised in a bilingual French/English environment.

Just what parents didn't want to hear.  Apparently high-action video games can improve your eyesight.  (Rochester Review, May/June 2007)

Were it not for the probability of disturbing other library patrons, Li'l Writer Guy would be dancing a happy little jig.  Instead, he allows himself a pleased smile and a contented sigh before getting back to work.

You can see why in the Letters to the Editor section of the May/June issue of the University of Rochester's magazine, Rochester Review.  Unfortunately, you can't yet access via their online archives the issue to which I was responding.

One article in that issue detailed the search for a new logo for the University of Rochester.  I participated in a survey in which I expressed my opinon of various candidates, but I think the whole idea is silly.

Another article promoted the university's commitment to increasing the diversity of its faculty and of its medical center personnel, in order to better reflect the student and patient populations.

The March-April issue, with its articles on the great effort being put forth to improve both the University’s logo and its diversity, disturbs me a little. It makes me worry that the administration is concentrating on superficialities rather than foundations; on how things look, rather than how they are. There’s a possibility—though by no means a certainty—that all other things being equal, I’d feel more comfortable if my professor or my doctor were of my sex and ethnic background. But all other things are never equal. I want my teachers to be excellent in their fields, fair in their judgment, and able to lead their students to a knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject. As for my health care professionals, of primary importance is that they be highly skilled, followed by compassionate, open-minded, and respectful. That any of them look like me is way down on the list, if anywhere. Let’s go for excellence. If the University is known as a place of highest quality, it won’t matter what its faculty looks like—or its logo.

Blushing slightly, Li'l Writer Guy once again buries himself in his books.

Porter put the bikes on the back of the car again this morning, and we headed off to the Tosohatchee State Reserve near Christmas.  That's Christmas, Florida—we're still much nearer Memorial Day than Christmas.

We knew this would be a different kind of ride.  We knew it would be on unpaved trails through a wilderness area, and we thought we were prepared.  We had sunscreen and bug repellent, emergency bike kit (tube, CO₂ cartridge for inflating same, patches, wrench, and those little thingies for helping you put the tire back on the rim), water to drink, and cell phones.  Knowing we'd be in a game preserve, we also had a monocular and a camera.  We had a change of clothes and a picnic lunch waiting in the car for our return.

"Unpaved trails."  I was expecting something like the crushed-shell-and-sand trail at our local park.  Silly me.

Everything went pretty much according to expectations at first.  They do have an interesting honor system for the park entrance fee:  You put your money in an envelope, slip it through a slot, and don't forget to sign in so we know where to look if you get lost.  We drove a little along a very washboard-y road, and parked the car.  (Florida sand roads develop a series of "washboard" ridges that can shake loose anything not firmly attached:  exhaust pipes, dental fillings, whatever.)

It was after we parked that things began to go not quite as planned.  The trail was wide and inviting, but certainly not crushed-shell-and-sand.  This was more like riding over a not-too-well-maintained lawn.

Make that not maintained at all.  Both of us have all-purpose (cheap) bikes, so they were built to take the abuse.  My body may have originally been built to take it, too—but it hasn't been all that well maintained recently itself.  Although the trail was flat, it required the work of a signficant uphill grade, with no hope of a corresponding downhill.  The really fun parts were where we had to put on a good burst of speed to build up enough momentum to get us through the soggy, wet parts.  You don't want to come to a dead stop in the middle of a boggy place.

Little did I know that this was the good part of the trail.

This trail map gives you a rough idea of our route.  I say "rough" for two reasons:  (1) the map itself is not completely accurate, and (2) because of reason 1 I'm not exactly sure where we were some of the time.  Location A is where we parked. (Just a reminder—the pictures are preview links; click on them for the full view.)

The trails are not well marked.  That is an understatement.  As you can see, we veered off the trail and found ourselves on the other side of the park boundary. Too bad we couldn't stay there, because the going was significantly easier on that side.  But we knew we had to get back into the park, because we could now see the trail, just on the other side of the...barbed wire fence.  Porter wasn't going to let a little thing like that stop him.  He climbed over the fence, then took the bikes as I passed them to him.  I was not at all sure about climbing the fence, so he held two of the wires apart while I squeezed through.

There!  We were back where we should have been.  But doing what's right is not always the easier path....

The grassy trail had deteriorated into a humpy, clumpy much-torn-up (by deer, possibly, judging from the hoofprints) ordeal.  At some point, Porter intellgently and kindly suggested we swap bikes.  His is enough easier to ride to make it worth putting up with the fact that I can barely sit on the seat and reach the pedals.  I was having to ride standing up much of the time, anyway.  When I wasn't walking.  Yes, sometimes I gave up and got off the bike.  Walking allowed me to catch my breath and make progress at the same time.

In choir we've been rehearsing a song that includes the words, "I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me."  It's a lively, repetitive song that's a lot of fun to sing (think gospel meets barbershop quartet), which means it's the kind that gets stuck in your head and won't go away.  This one asserted itself about 4 a.m. and didn't stop until we were on our way home.  At first it drove me nuts, but soon it became a prayer....

We began to doubt again:  Were we on the right trail?  Or was this just a firebreak along the boundary line?  Surely the real trail couldn't be this bad.  I wish I had pictures to show you, but I was incapable at that point of thinking about my camera, and anyway no picture could do it justice.  No doubt for a mountain biker this would have been a walk in the park.  No, wait.  For me it was a walk.  A mountain biker would have ridden straight through.  Anyway, we later concluded we were probably on the right trail, because we saw several others that were equally bad.

After the longest four and a half miles (give or take a bit) of my life, during which we thought we were mostly on the right trail but still had our doubts, Porter found a path that connected with a road.  (Approximately location B on the map.)  I was totally exhausted but this brought me back to life.  Here was crushed-shell-and-sand!  Here I could ride!  Suddenly I felt great!  Porter asked if I'd rather take the road back to where we had parked, instead of continuing on our planned route, but the road had inspired me and I was ready to go on, as long as we stuck to the road.  The road and the trail were one for most of the remaining trip, anyway.  We switched back to our own bikes and were on our way again.

Deceptive road!  After about two minutes of delightful riding—still quite a bit harder than paved road, but worlds better than the trail—it became all sand again. The weather has been very dry, and the road is not well travelled.  This translates to loose sand.  My cousin was a lifeguard at Daytona Beach, and he used to train for his job by running on the beach—because running in loose sand is very hard work.  So is biking in loose sand.  Not only does it require a lot of power, but if you don't keep your front wheel completely straight, you immediately go into a screeching-halt skid.

I still didn't want to turn back.  We again traded bicycles.  Sometimes the road was better, especially in the middle where a few springs of grass had grown up.  Sometimes it was awful.  Sometimes I rode—ganbarimasu!—and sometimes I walked.  Porter managed to keep riding, stopping periodically to allow me to catch up.  Here is the resting point where I finally remembered that I had a camera.  (Location D on the map.)

One of the great things about riding in a game preserve is all the wildlife you can see.  And we did, if you count grasshoppers and butterflies.  Riding took so much concentration it was not possible to look around, so all I saw was what happened to be between me and the road.  Despite the park rules that say that all wildlife is protected, Porter did make up his own real-life video game by trying to run over the grasshoppers.  There were so many he was often successful.  When I was growing up I thought grasshoppers were cute.  Now that I've seen the devastation wrought by our giant Florida varieties, I feel differently.  I did manage to see a vulture, and Porter flushed a wild turkey, but other than that all our wildlife was insectival.

It was a long haul, but we finally made it to Long Bluff road (see map).  There the way really did get easier, as the road was more travelled.  There were still bad spots, but they were fewer, and every once in a while we got up to the dizzying speed of eight miles per hour!  Though it might have been exhaustion that made me dizzy.  :)  At some point Porter also took my backpack.  Neither his pack nor mine were at all heavy, but at that point I was taking all the help I could get.  This road would have been much less of a challenge had I not been so worn out by the first part of the trail.

I'm accustomed to having one bottle of water be sufficient or more so when we go riding.  This time we were at the halfway point on the trail when I realized I was much more than halfway through my water.  Comes from breathing so much with my mouth open (i.e. panting), I guess.  Most of the trails we've travelled have water sources along the way, but not, of course, this one.  So we both decided to be a little more conservative in our drinking.  At some point it was going well enough that we switched bikes once more.  I missed my more padded seat, and the extra seat-to-pedal distance on Porter's bike, combined with the bouncy road, was more than a bit uncomfortable for the, um, more delicate parts of my body.

Finally, we reached the "Praise the Lord!" point:  Power Line Road.  (Location C on the map.)  I could see that it was a much better path, and so did not mind taking a short detour (about six tenths of a mile round trip) to see the St. John's River.  This is where we met up with the first people (fishermen) we'd seen since the beginning, except for one truck that had passed us on the road.  We saw a few more cars before getting back to ours, but no one else on bike or foot.

Muddy, battered, but unbowed

Power Line Road stretched long between us and our car, but we were able to make a steady 7-8 mph most of the time, and the riding was easy enough we could look around and actually see some wildlife.  Birds, actually.  White herons and Great Blues and lots of smaller birds.  We heard a couple of alligator-shaped splashes nearby, but didn't see what made them and didn't feel like investigating.  Alligators can run faster than I could pedal at that point.

Scofflaws that we are, we enjoyed breaking the speed limit by bicycle, crossing two wooden bridges a good two or three miles per hour over the posted 5 mph limit.  We were significantly under the 30 ton weight limit, however.

There was one more bad stretch in the final mile, and I had to walk a bit more, having totally lost my momentum having to pull off the road to let a car pass.  But I finished the trip by bike, joyfully greeting Porter who had already opened the car and pulled out a cold drink.  We ate some grape tomatoes, but otherwise were in no mood for our picnic lunch—we just drank and drank.

It actually was a great trip.  A wonderful feeling of accomplishment.  We're both very glad we did it—though neither of us feels any need to do it again.

On the way home we had another great adventure, but that will have to wait for another post.

It was a scene worthy of one of those funniest-videos shows.  As I opened the front door this morning to take out the trash, I obviously interrupted something.  A lizard skittered frantically away from the door, no doubt afraid of me.  At the same time, a palmetto bug* skittered frantically towards me, into the house, no doubt relieved to escape the lizard.

I'm not all that fond of palmetto bugs outside the house, though I acknowledge that they, like vultures, have an important part to play in God's creation.  But I really don't care for them inside the house, so thus began the amusiing scenario.  I don't recall laughing at the time, but it would have been funny to an onlooker with a camera, who I'm very glad was only hypothetical.

I skittered frantically after the bug, whacking at him with my sneaker.  (It's a good thing we keep our shoes near the front door.)  Alas, I whacked at him, but not on him, or at least not with sufficient strength to penetrate his chitinous exoskeleton.  Through the hall he ran, then ducked into our bedroom.

No fair!  This pushed into the red zone my desire to catch him, as anyone knows who has ever been awakened in the middle of the night by a large insect investigating his belly button.  He ran under a suitcase.  I moved it; he wasn't there.  Ah ha!  He thinks he's found safety in the shadow of the treadmill support.  He's partly right, as there is no way for me to whack at him.  I carefully position the shoe over him and press down, then slowly, gingerly lift it up.  Zoom!  He's out again, unharmed.  There are disadvantages to soft, high-pile carpet, I'm learning.

Now I'm mad.  He's in the open now, and I may run more slowly for my size, but my legs are a lot longer than his.  Whack!  This time I know better than to assume he's dead.  I push down on the shoe really hard, though still with care; one wants to kill the beastie, not squeeze cockroach guts into the above-mentioned soft, high-pile carpet.

Once again, I tentatively raise a corner of the sneaker.  There's an antenna, and it's not moving....  Taking no chances, I grab a tissue from my pocket and use it to entomb the bug, then finish the job.  Bug thoroughly squished, and I mean thoroughly, else I would not have felt comfortable consigning him, paper tomb and all, to the trash bin.

Still, for sheer amusement value, this doesn't come close to an occasion several years ago, when similar circumstances led me to chase one of this guy's cousins under our kitchen cabinets.  I was lying on the floor, seeking him out with the help of a flashlight, when he suddenly re-emerged, zipping past my face, through the neck of my shirt, and into my bra.  He died for his presumption, but I'll leave imagining the scenario as an exercise for the reader.

---

*A palmetto bug is a large species of cockroach common here in the South.  It is thought to have come here from Africa, and may be a kind of karmic return for slavery, much as cigarettes and casinos are for our mistreatment of Native Americans.

On one of our recent bike rides, we came upon a dead armadillo.  Dead armadillos happen not infrequently in Florida.  They may be faster in crossing a road than turtles, but they will dawdle.  Worse, their startle reaction is to leap straight into the air, dooming them even when a car would otherwise pass harmlessly over them.

This one had apparently managed to crawl from the road to the nearby bicycle trail, but not before the vultures got wind of the event.  Porter was biking a little ahead of me, and I saw them beginning to circle as he approached.  A few had descended upon the poor beast by the time he rode by.  His presence more annoyed than scared them.  When I reached the scene there were at least a dozen blanketing the pavement, and I chose to veer off the trail and leave them to their vicitim.

Vultures are ugly birds, and their behavior was uglier:  fighting, shoving, greedily tearing the little armadillo apart.  By the time we came to that part of the train on our return trip, there was nothing left but a dark spot on the pavement.

And that's the point.  Carrion-eaters may be ugly, dirty things, but they are also God's creatures, and their work is important.  They are the garbage collectors of the natural world, and they, too, deserve the more lofty title of "sanitation engineers."  Maybe even more so, because they don't just cart the bodies off to the landfill; they are the ultimate recyclers.

I'd rather see a sandhill crane, or a woodpecker, or an egret on our rides any day.  But if there's a dead armadillo on the trail...Who you gonna call?