News From Hawkhill Acres

Those of you who are still wearing the tinfoil hats I recommended in an earlier post may want to keep them on if you’re planning to go night-skiing in the Bangor City Forest. The rest of you after-dark schussers might want to borrow your kid’s bike helmet.  As reported in the Bangor Daily News article  “Owls Attack: Warnings Posted In City Forest”, Great Horned Owls aren’t going to put up with folks invading their territory.

My question is, “What are people doing, skiing with headlamps on in the dark?” Skiing in the daytime is one thing. But after dark? And, apparently, they’re also walking, jogging, running and biking after dark also. Sheesh! When do the nocturnal animals get a break?

I’ve run into a couple of territorial owls since I moved to Maine twenty years ago. One was a Great Gray Owl that swooped down on me in broad daylight when I was walking through a pine grove near a swamp on our rural property. I never heard it coming until it was right in front of my face and if I hadn’t ducked, its talons would have scratched my eyes. I was some unsettled, I’ll tell you, and left the grove at a run.

A short time later, on the edge of that same swamp, the geek and I ran into a mother bear with cubs. They were blatting at her and she was blatting at them and Geekdaddy and I were blatting at each other to get the hell out of there. It was some exciting for a few minutes.

Another time, on that same piece of property, I walked around a large tree and came face to face with a young moose and her mother. Like most young critters, Baby Moose was very curious and approached me, which didn’t go over very well with Ma Moose, who snorted and pawed the ground. We spent a very tense five minutes with me trying to edge away so that I wouldn’t be between the baby moose and its mom, and the young moose trying to circle me so it could sniff me.I finally got away by backing slowly out of the area, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a female moose was observed by my neighbor knocking down my mailbox a couple of days later.

Many of us who live in Maine learn the hard way that civilization is pretty thin once you get beyond the city limits. Or, in the case of Bangor, even inside the city limits. When I first stumbled upon the city forest, I thought it was such a neat idea, having a forest inside a city. Now, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea at all. Cities and forests are two very different things and maybe they should be in two different places.  Or, maybe they should be closed at night, so that the wildlife can go wild for a few hours without people shining lights at them and skiing through their front yards.

(If you’d like to know what I was thinking two February’s ago, read this post from 2.22.07))

Are you always a day late and a dollar short? Do you often find yourself wondering what happened to a couple of weekdays or a weekend that you must have lived through but can’t recall? I’m not talking about “Lost Weekend” kind of lost weekends here; not the ones that drowned under a sea of Seagrams. I’m talking about the times that someone says, “Wow! Thursday already!” and you’ve spent all morning doing Tuesday.

This kind of thing has been happening to me a lot lately. Looking out from the weekend, I see two doctor’s appointments on Monday, a trip to the library on Friday and lots of empty, home-based hours in-between. Plenty of time to work on my websites, get my proofreading done, think up some scintillating blog posts and help my kids learn.

Heck, there might even be a little time in there for a spot of housework. That would be a good thing. We’re either going to have to vacuum the dustbunnies or catalogue them and offer them on ebay as collectibles. And there’s only so long you can write “TEST SITE! DO NOT REMOVE THIS DUST!” on furniture before visitors catch on, although apparently everyone in the house believes it, because no one ever dusts.

So, I’m kicking back on Sunday with a good book and a glass of Cabernet and then all of a sudden, it’s Thursday, the mortgage is two days overdue, there are piles of dirty clothes all over the basement, we’ve missed a dental appointment that I forgot to put on the calendar and my daughter is a size bigger and can’t fit into any of her clothes that I bought her just… Well, actually, I guess it was fall, when we last did a mall-crawl, although it’s such a traumatic experience for me that the afterimage is imprinted on my credit cards for months.

TMJ has struck again. (That would be Temporal Manipular Join Syndrome, where my sense of Time doesn’t mesh with actual Time.) It doesn’t help that I’m one of those down-to-earth types who lives in the “Now”, like all the self-help gurus tell us we should. Right. That makes sense if you’re never going to plan anything or recall pleasant memories or imagine your future. Living in the “Now” isn’t really helpful for learning from one’s mistakes either or anticipating the consequences of present actions.

True, paying attention to what we’re doing “right now” is a really good idea, especially if what we’re doing now involves chainsaws, cooking candy, bathing cats or voting for President. But human minds never really focus totally on what they’re doing to the exclusion of everything else, no matter how long their users meditate on a candle flame or listen to white noise. You can bet your bottom dharma that some of the meditator’s attention is in the past and/or the future, thinking about what they’ve done or what they’re going to do.

Nope, this Time thing is a real poser. Einstein almost had it figured out, but then it went all bendy on him. And Hawking is still working on it and may be close to tying it all together. At least, I believe he’s answered the question of whether energy escapes from a Black Hole, and that will certainly help. I haven’t yet found a practical application for it in my own life, although I’m working on applying it to lost socks, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Who am I to belittle anything Hawking comes up with, no matter how impractical it seems. The man is probably the smartest man on the planet and, by the way, tell me HE lives in the “Now”, hmm? I don’t think so.

Well, the clock says it’s lunchtime, although I’m sure that I looked at it twenty minutes ago and it was right after breakfast. The kids have probably segued from The History Channel to Cartoon Network and, no doubt the dog’s water bowl has dust in it and the cat’s litter box is crusted over. I’d better go make some lunch and then try to accomplish at least a couple more things on my list. I’m not doing too badly; I have almost everything checked off, except for three or four things that I’m sure I’ll have done by tonight. And then I can move on to the next list in the pile from January. Or maybe I’ll tackle something easier and work on a Unified Field Theory instead. Now, where did I put my String?

(This is one of my favorite posts. It was one of those times when I didn’t really write so much as channeled thoughts from the warped soul of someone who was killed in their unschooled kid’s science experiment explosion. I wrote it back in April of 2007, but it’s just as relevant now as it was then.)

Other home schoolers’ blogs make me feel like such a slacker. Like Ava, who is a translator. Her husband, Carl, is a biologist who specializes in diseases of plants. This year, they’re educating their three kids via field trips to the Louvre and strolls along the Champs-Elysees, because she’s translating books from Arabic to French and he’s fighting grape blight or blot or rot or something. Anyway, whatever it is, it makes the wine bitter and undrinkable, so he’s my man. Sometimes, life is a Cabernet, non?

They’re both so intelligent that they have to drink three glasses of wine and take a Benadryl to talk to ordinary people like me. On Thanksgiving this year, I assume they hit the Beaujolais and then composed a “what our kids are doing in home school” post as they digested their dinde roti and sauce de myrtille. Sandwiched in between photos of French street scenes with tiny figures that might have been them or might have been almost anyone, including pigeons, were lists of what their kids were up to. I swear they only do it to make unschoolers like me feel inadequate.

My kids are very artistic, but they’ve never shown any interest in art history or anyone else’s art. Their kids are making a copy of the Empress Theodora and her retinue, a mosaic which appears on the south wall of the apse at San Vitale. Life-sized. In their hotel room. With pieces they manufacture themselves by breaking bottles, ashtrays, ceramic soap dishes and cough lozenges. (The picture of it is kind of dark, but I believe I can just make out the Smith Brothers logo on one of the red robes.)

My kids go to the library and get books about Pokemon, the latest fantasy novel, Barbie and fairies. Their kids write books like “Deforestation and its Impact on Biodiversity, Habitat loss, Trade and Endangered Species.” With footnotes. In Latin. I’m only up to page 568, but I can tell you, we won’t be getting any mahogany furniture anytime soon.

We visit museums and spend more time arguing about whether the blinds are made out of aluminum or plastic than we do looking at the exhibits. Their kids are docents at three museums and a private collection of Faberge Eggs. Imperial Eggs.The eight missing ones.

We have a Black Lab and three cats. They have a Giant Gambian Pouched Rat, a Komodo Dragon, several hedgehogs and a platypus. Laying eggs. It’s their science fair project at the homeschooler’s science fair. We don’t attend ours, ever since the unfortunate incident with the manure vs chemical fertilizer experiment. Who knew it had to be aged?

We play Mario Tennis. They play polo with real ponies and several members of royalty. We spend hours wading in tide pools, but never remember to bring our marine biology book, so all we can identify are crabs and those brown wiggly things with all the legs. Sandworms? Clamworms? Well, they’re ugly as sin and can give you a painful pinch, we know that. They often do research for the Cousteau Society. In a shark cage. With the door open.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little here, but honestly, this is what it feels like sometimes, when I read all the blog posts about museums toured, concerts attended, instruments mastered, classics read, projects completed, esoteric knowledge acquired and businesses in operation. Doesn’t anyone else just hang out with each other most of the time? Visit with friends? Read for pleasure? Make things just for the heck of it, not because they’re projects or educational? Consider Jeopardy or Good Eats or If Walls Could Talk highly educational? Doesn’t anyone take a walk without a field guide?

Sure, we get a lot of non-fiction out of the library every week and my kids are both very creative, but we’re pikers compared to what seems to be the norm in the homeschooling blogosphere. I have this recurring nightmare that my kids are going to turn 18 and sue me for not making them learn more. Oh wait, didn’t I just read that a 10 year old homeschooler did that? And represented himself. In a Class Action Suit. Tough luck, Ava and Carl.