Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, August 21, 2020
Four Things
1. Two or three years ago, I told my daughter, who is now nine, about the first time I kissed her. I was in the operating room for the delivery, and a nurse had just placed her, swaddled and sleeping, on a small table.
She was so tiny that the only place big enough to plant a kiss was her forehead, so that's where I kissed her.
A few days after that, she kissed me good night on the forehead, and I returned her kiss, also on the forehead.
That has been how we say good night ever since.
2. On our last trip to the beach, a couple preparing to leave gave us a sand dollar that they'd found (pictured below).
Fortunately, they advised me to bleach it "sooner rather than later" to avoid odors. I'd seen a live one before, but did not realize this was necessary.
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| The sand dollar, before and after. (Image by the author. Permission is granted to copy.) |
The next day, she asked me, "Daddy, what's an elusive dream?"
4. I have mentioned here a couple of times that I have put my daughter's "sniper eyes" to good use in finding things. It's her "super power," as she likes to put it.
My son's super power is having a memory like a steel trap.
If I need to be reminded of something with him around, especially if I won't have a chance to remind myself in some other way reasonably soon, I'll ask him to help me. Just yesterday, he kept me from forgetting to fill their thermoses ahead of a tutoring session, where the water fountains are now off-limits.
Amusingly, he doesn't seem to think much of his own super power and will try spotting things he deems hard to find in an effort to supplant his older sister as the one with the super power of superior vision. Even more amusing, is that this bothers her.
-- CAV
2 comments:
You want to be careful about bleaching. Bleach can damage the bones (plates, in this case), which eventually become brittle and chalky. I prefer to forego using bleach when I collect dead things--setting bones in the sun works just fine, though you get a less brilliant white (which I prefer). The main thing is to get the organic material off, which can be done in a variety of ways. Boiling is traditional, but cold water works better for delicate things. Certain beetles work as well, if you're okay with having a colony of flesh-eating insects in your home. I've heard fire ants can work if you put the material in a wire mesh box (so you can extract it) and put it on the mound, but I haven't had luck with it--birds of prey keep stealing and eating my specimens. If you use insects you want to put the specimen in the freezer for a day or so after they're done, to kill anything still inside the specimen. The process is called maceration; if you're interested type "Maceration of bones" into Google (if you just type "maceration" you get a bunch of stuff on cooking).
You may want to put some sort of varnish on the sand dollar. I don't with skulls/bones, but those are significantly less fragile than sand dollars. I've heard that a 1:1 mixture of Elmer's glue and water works. I've also heard of people using spray-on varnishes of various kinds. It should help counteract the degradation from the bleach. There's some professional grade stuff museums use, but the price goes up significantly. Museums use stuff with known chemistry (makes it easy to identify during various tests) and easy to remove without damaging the specimen.
I apologize if this is too much information. I don't get to geek out about this very much, though, so I tend to get excited when I get the chance!
My superpower, if you want to call it that, is not being able to smell very well due to an unfortunate episode cleaning a chicken coop (ammonia is NOT your friend). The smell of rotting flesh is one that I'm particularly weak to. If someone tells me "There's something rotting here" I can sort of identify it, but after a second or two I can no longer detect it at all. In a normal profession this wouldn't come up very often, but vertebrate paleontology involves a lot of stripping flesh off roadkill to make comparison collections, so in my case it's actually came in handy more than once. Unfortunately my wife is the opposite--I swear she could smell the color of your shirt in a dark room. This has lead to some marital discord. That decreased significantly when we got a larger property.
Dinwar,
Thanks for the advice RE: varnishing the sand dollar. Interesting.
As far as maceration/sun bleaching go, I'm probably usually stuck with bleach on most beach trips.
This was at our in-laws' condo, which is really nice -- except for this purpose. My first impulse was to sun bleach -- after all, practically every other piece of a sand dollar I have ever found has been white without human intervention. But the balcony is so windy that losing the sand dollar would have been a virtual certainty had I tried sun-bleaching there.
But we are only a few hours away, so I might get to try the less harsh approach at home if the timing is right.
Gus
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