Boozhoo (hello), my name is Ken, I am a disabled Ojibwe artist from northern Wisconsin. I am writing this post because I am having a hard time making ends meet and any donations I could possibly receive at this time would be greatly appreciated. Recent events have left my bank account depleted, my cupboards bare, I’m unable to cover utility bills, and I have several out of state medical appointments in the very near future.
I do have PayPal, that is really the best way to donate at this time, the email I use for that is: baapimakwa@gmail.com, or you can click here.
I know I am not alone in this. I have a dog that needs more personal space than other dogs. He is a senior; he is suspicious of unfamiliar dogs and will lunge or snarl at them if they stare at him, or come too close too soon.
And yet every so often, an off-leash dog will come bounding up towards him (or even sometimes, an on-leash dog) and the owner will call out “HE’S FRIENDLY!” without checking with me first if it is OK for their dog to meet my dog.
There is this automatic assumption by most people that if their own dog is friendly, then everything is fine with the world. Who the heck cares what OTHER PEOPLE’s DOGS are feeling? The idea of consent does not seem to cross their minds at all.
My response is always usually “Please call your dog away. My dog is NOT friendly”. But sometimes I can’t say this fast enough. Or the other person ignores me.
My dog freaks out and turns into a murderous beast. To the other person with the “friendly dog”, we look like the bad guy. I wish I could simply say: “Please google SPACE ETIQUETTE FOR DOGS when you get home!”
I decided to make a pocket-sized pamphlet ( a la www.pocketmod.com) which measures 2.75″ x 4.5″ – small enough to fit in your treat bag or poop bag. You could hand this out to other dog owners and they could trash it or they could read it. No pressure.
The information in these pages is adapted from posters which you can view in greater detail via www.doggiedrawings.net/freeposters (Space Etiquette for Dogs, Does My Dog Love Other Dogs)
I am offering this booklet as a FREE DOWNLOAD. All you need is paper, a printer, and a pair of scissors. Select “Borderless” in your printer settings before you print.
Alrighty, I’ve told this story before, but it’s been about a year.
Now, understand that I am a camping and scouting veteran, a camp counselor, and an avid hiker; I know damn well what poison ivy looks like, along with every possible rhyme to remind a person.
Leaves of three let it be, red tint, it’s not difficult. I could spot the stuff from a mile away.
But this was a special occasion.
I was a brand new wildlife student, two years ago, facing for some reason my toughest challenge yet–Dendrology lab. We learned about 10-20 new trees every week in the field, and every week we were also tested on what we learned last class (along with their scientific names).
Memorizing Latin wasn’t an issue, but I was having notable trouble keeping up with identification (and we weren’t even into autumn yet, when the leaves are gone).
Now, when you’ve been doing something for years and years, it’s easy to sometimes overlook something odd, because you tend to fall into a habit of glancing and moving on, confident in your assessment, as long as the stakes aren’t enormous. So this is a field quiz, no big deal. My professor is relaxed. He’s an impressive dude with a lot of knowledge, and he could probably about identify a tree blindfolded using some sort of echolocation known only to foresters.
So when he glanced at a small but particularly interesting poison ivy plant, he didn’t notice something crucial, which was its uncharacteristic leaf.
See, we were just a few classes into the semester, so we only knew about two trees with a very specific type of leaf called a “mitten lobe,” and those were Sassafras and Box elder.
Sassafras can actually produce three different leaves, the middle one in the photo being the mitten lobe (x):
So this poison ivy plant was not only growing out of the ground like a sapling, instead of as a vine or small shrub like we were used to, but it also had a mitten lobe as one of its few leaves.
I’m not sure if it was a mutated plant, or what exactly was going on, but this is not a normal thing.
Our professor missed it, but we were all hyper-analyzing this tree, because we were new to identification. So of course we all saw the mitten lobe and thought, well it’s either sassafras or box elder!
So, there are a few ways to tell sassafras and box elder apart. One method–in retrospect, the recommended method–being the branch alignment, and the other being the distinctive smell and taste of sassafras (if you crush a leaf, it smells a lot like fruit loops).
And how are a bunch of new, gung-ho students halfway through a test and eyeball-deep in stress going to decide on the difference?
We’re going to stick the leaf in our mouths.
So we all grabbed a leaf and tore it apart to share with our classmates and stuck the pieces in our mouths. Understand when I say not a single student knew the mistake we were making, because they absolutely would have interrupted the test.
Our professor was distracted, and we were all chewing slowly, as if at a wine tasting, mulling over the taste of the leaf and our options. It didn’t taste like sassafras, or like anything, really.
Which I said. Which is when our professor turned to me in horror and said “Molly Anne, did you just eat that leaf?”
I told him yes, and he was SO Plainly Horrified that I’m not kidding when I say half of the class–the half that hadn’t partaken in our cursed salad–immediately realized what we had done and put their pencils to their test to write in “poison ivy.”
Anyway, once it dawned on us our terrible mistake, a few things happened:
My professor asked us how we managed this, and we basically kept repeating “THE MITTEN LOBE” over and over again.
I called my mom, and she immediately said “you’re not doing well in Dendrology, are you?”
She went to Poison control for advice, and I had to break the news to my classmates that we were likely to break out orally and anally.
After the quiz, I went home for the day, and my professor called me twice to make sure I was alright.
I had never gotten poison ivy before, so I held out hope my apparent immunity would hold up for me in my darkest hour.
Although I wasn’t the only leaf-eater, I was the loudest and most dramatic in the aftermath (I found it hilarious), so I became known as the Only Fallen Dendrology Student in the incident.
When it came up in a lecture later that week, one of my professors laughed, “that was you?”
I am pleased to report that I did not break out. However, a few of my classmates weren’t so lucky and said they got it badly in their throat.
A week later, once of my classes toured an herb farm, and I asked to taste every single plant we saw, even when told “sure….you can…but it’s disgusting.”
Someone in my class couldn’t believe my dedication and said, “didn’t you just eat poison ivy like a day ago?”
Yes, I did.
btw, it’s a common urban legend that eating poison ivy will result in a week of hell, and then you will gain immunity. this isn’t true. don’t fucking eat poison ivy.
my boyfriend talks in his sleep and I wish it was just cute gibberish but instead it’s TERRIFYING. so far, he has:
– grabbed me by the shoulder and put his hand over my mouth at 3am and pointed to the wall, whispering “do you see it? the barbed wire.”
– woken me up and muttered “he’s here” while staring at my bedroom door
– rolled over last night and said “you don’t know what’s out there. You don’t know what’s in the swamp.”
he’s taken like 20 years off my life.
on a less terrifying note, he once kissed me really gently and then said “have a great day at work baby” and pushed me onto the floor at 2am and immediately wrapped himself in all the covers
Bare trunks of dead coastal forests are being discovered up and down the mid-Atlantic coastline, killed by the advance of rising seas. The “ghost forests,” as scientists call them, offer eerie evidence of some of the world’s fastest rates of sea level rise.
Forests provide habitat and protect against global warming, but they’re declining worldwide because of land clearing, fires, disease and invasive species. The ghost forests show sea level rise can be yet another cause of deforestation.
Climate scientists like Walker, a PhD candidate at Rutgers University researching sea level rise, have begun investigating these dead forests, which are becoming common features along some coastal landscapes. The poison that kills the trees is salt, delivered to their roots by rising tides.
“As you have sea level rise, you get saltwater intrusion further upstream,” Walker said. The “visual impact” of the dead trees could be useful for “communicating sea level rise to the public,” she said — “which I find difficult a lot of the time.”
Stands of dead trees have been used by scientists for decades as evidence of past environmental tumult. When submerged in seas and lakes, dead trees have revealed to scientists the details of prehistoric changes in water levels.
Seas are rising worldwide because of the warming effects of greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels and farms. Several feet of sea level rise is projected this century as the pace of climate change accelerates. That rise will inundate infrastructure, homes and ecosystems. Efforts to switch to clean energy, protect forests and revamp farming and transportation could curb the inundations ahead.
The mid-Atlantic is sinking faster than nearly anywhere else. The Gulf Stream has been shifting northward, bringing warmer water to the region, accelerating sea level rise. Meanwhile, groundwater pumping and natural geological processes are causing lands to sink.
High tides rose here by several inches during a recent decade. That was more than three times faster than the average rate of sea level rise worldwide, simulating conditions expected globally during decades to come….
Similar forest diebacks have been documented in Canada and Louisiana and monitored in wildlife refuges in Maryland. The botanical corpses occasionally topple during storms, becoming crisscrossed logs, which are slowly buried beneath the muck of marshes. Those marshes can migrate inland as seas rise….
Preliminary findings from an analysis by Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) scientists suggests 100,000 acres of coastal forest may have died off around the edges of the Chesapeake Bay since the 1850s. Much of the dead forest has now been replaced by marshland, while former marsh areas are now open water. Overall, the changes are diminishing the ability of plants in the region to fight global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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