Forced Fasts and Surgical Risks

By: | July 30, 2015

3876174163_a67420fef9_z
A week ago, I found out that the baby I’m carrying is breech. Instead of being head down, she is stubbornly head up, not such a good position for birthing. Since I am only a few weeks away from my due date, it’s unlikely she’ll flip on her own. And if she stays breech, I’ll likely have to have a C-section.

So yesterday morning I went to the hospital to have a doctor try and manhandle her into the correct position, a procedure called external cephalic version (or “version” for short). It’s a fancy name for a rather brutish procedure: A doctor clasps the baby’s head, a nurse grabs the baby’s butt, and then they try to thrust her into the right position. This works about half the time. And there are risks: The baby’s heart rate can fall, the umbilical cord can get squeezed, the placenta can tear, the amniotic sac can rupture. Once in a great while the doctor has to take the baby out right away. Continue reading →

How I Eat My Veggies

By: | July 29, 2015

A big old pile of green vegetablesI’ve done it.

I figured out how to eat vegetables.

Maybe everyone else figured this out a long time ago. But it took me until this year to figure out how to stuff myself with plant parts all summer long.

It’s a two-step process. One, a service. The second, a device on my refrigerator door. Continue reading →

Guest Post: On Being Pro-Frog

By: | July 28, 2015
frog 1
Northern Leopard frog in marsh on my land

When my first daughter started getting teased for her obsession with sharks I comforted her by lying that everyone had an animal they especially loved. When pressed I randomly choose frogs (I was hung over and just wanted quiet), which started a pro-frog avalanche: Walls filled with frog paintings, desks with frog playdoh figurines, and my birthday cakes with green and yellow frosting and frog-related presents.  It worked. Five years later I was decidedly pro frog. My Brooklyn apartment had three terrariums and each month I received both Reptile Magazine (under Dr. Jumpy Arnade) and a shipment of live crickets.

A year ago when I moved upstate, I hit frog jackpot. I hadn’t chosen my house based on its frog potential, but I couldn’t have done much better. It is on ten wet acres, has a small pond, and is surrounded by forest and wetlands. At night the house fills with the remarkably loud white noise of frogs sexing, punctuated by the sound of two bullfrogs in the pond sexing. After a rain my long driveway, lined by marshes, becomes a checkerboard of frogs hoping to sex.

My pond, besides being home to the two bullfrogs (since named Mario and Luigi), is filled with small frogs that live on the edges. On warmer nights I sprawl in the mud and bush, taking long exposures as they hunt beneath the moon. It has cost me a bevy of tick bites and my first case of Lyme disease.

This summer, until three week ago, was wet, and the noise at night especially loud. When the rain stopped, the noise also dropped, and my pool started filling with desperate frogs. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 25, 2015

Ant_SEM
July 20-24, 2015

A Saturday puzzler for your amusement: see if you can spot this week’s loose theme.

Abstruse Goose (and Ann)—each a superhero of LWON–lament that being a mad scientist (or a mad writer) is not as fun as it looks in the movies.

Helen has a number of brilliant ideas for Ant-Man sequels; we hope she remembers the little people of LWON during her Academy Awards speech. On the dung beetle as a superhero: “But now the thaw has come and everywhere there are piles of poo. What will the residents of Snowville do? The Dung Beetle to the rescue!”

In chronicling the ants in her Brooklyn apartment, guest Brooke Borel experiences the full range of human emotions, and time as a flat circle. On Thursday evening: “Make videos of lone ant struggling to pull smaller dog food chunk up the wall. Fist pump when it lifts dog food over small ledge at top of baseboard. Question life choices. Or at least today’s choices.”

I write about coyotes. Related to the theme: It turns out both coyotes and ants are showing up in strange places because of the drought in California.

And Jennifer creates a dream zoo of animals she would like to keep (but yes, she knows she can’t). On octopi: “I’d want these guys as my going-out buddies. We’d have wild times, indulging in all kinds of practical jokes and high jinx. And there would be lots of good hugging.” Oddly, there are no ants on her list.

 

**

Image: USGS Denver Microbeam Laboratory, via Wikimedia

 

I Wish I Could Have One

By: | July 24, 2015
shutterstock_38663680
OMG this saw whet owl. But it belongs in the forest, so I will leave it there.

If you’ve trolled the Internet any time in the last decade, you know that animals and their silly antics are very happening. And no wonder. For the most part the creatures we interact with are adorable and waggish, even if they can be annoying, childish, and smelly. Hell, they sound like husbands. What’s not to love?

Those precious looks and that infantile behavior get to us for good reason: Our brains are programmed to respond to “cuteness”—traits including big eyes (especially when close together), clumsiness, softness and roundness, tinyness, general helplessness—so we’ll keep taking care of our own babies even when they’re screaming and pooping and projectile vomiting simultaneously.  Continue reading →

New Arrivals Daily

By: | July 23, 2015

3481733186_6fdc9f9855_zThe park where I first saw the dog is a patch of green that’s separated from the mountains by several highways and several hills. There’s a coast guard station on one side, houses on the other, a mid-speed thoroughfare bordering its front.

Early one morning, when it was foggy and my eyes were foggy, too, I saw a woman standing at the edge of the grass. I stopped to watch the dog, to see what I was missing. Its ears were pointy, and it was looking back at the woman. Then I watched the woman walk over to a pair of park workers who were bagging the trash. “Have you called animal control about that?” she asked them.

That? I squinted again.

The workers both shrugged. “They put up some signs,” they said. I looked around. Sure enough, there were signs. Coyote in park, they said. Continue reading →

The Ant-Man Diary (Or really Ant-Woman, or actually Ant-Sterile-Female-Workers if we’re being technical about it, which we aren’t)

By: | July 22, 2015

Photo 7

Thursday, July 16, 2015. Interior of a Brooklyn apartment. Deadlines loom. Distractions distract. Timestamps are approximate because time is a flat circle.

4:54 p.m.
Go to the kitchen. Open cabinets. Close cabinets. What did you come in here for? Make tea.

4:55 p.m.
As the water boils, notice ants on the wall, the one across from the teapot. A line of them, maybe five, each a series of tiny black dots in triplicate. From where? The window?

4:55:30 p.m.
A larger dark mass struggles slowly up the wall. What? Lean closer. It is brown, smooth, manufactured. A nutrition pebble: a piece of dog food. Several ants work together to heave it up the sheer face. Marvel at their strength. Continue reading →