Despair.com, eh?

Despair.com has always been one of my favorite places to kill a few minutes every few months checking out the latest ways to top off my half full optimists glass with despair for balance. These are perfectly appropriate for here, eh?

eh?? I couldn't agree more. Mostly this is just a bad holiday letter gone global and unseasonal. So why am I drawn to the format? Is my cynicism waning? Kinda doubt that. Maybe I enjoy documenting and creating and have delusions that I can be wittier than just cutting and pasting someone else's photography and pop humor,, but that will have to wait, definitely not happening for this post, eh?

Boy of Steel! Video at five!

Boy thwarts attack by man eating Mallorcan Pterosaurus!

Mindbending video captured of this amazing boy teaching his sister how to run right through steel!

It's all Garrigue to me

The Garrigue biome of the Mediterranean is a result of thousands of years of human activity. Between overgrazing, erosion and wood harvest all that remains is a community of the very hardy. Here you'll find poor rocky soil, long hot summer drought, salt spray, harsh winter winds and lots of goats. If you are a plant and want to live here you better have spines, be unpalatable or have great chemistry.


It is good to have spines here even if most of you is dead.


Many of the world's great aromatic plants come from here. This is wild Rosemary in bloom.

Plenty of spurges with caustic latex here too, and that is a nice fragrant fine toothed lavender around the spurge.


Looking down. Can you tell which way it is to the sea from here?

Here is a bloomin` onion. It found the best way to live here is under a rock.

Move up and away from the sea a bit and you find yourself in a pine-oak woodland, very similar to Chaparral, except with more goats.


Here is Jonathan in what I think is a sumac, so it is also probably toxic.

There is one more strategy that seems to work here: being very small and very sexy. With eyes honed from years of orchid seeking around Jena, Jonathan spotted both of these beauties.


They are both small almost leafless bee mimics. Male bees see these hotties and can't resist trying to copulate, but only get hit in the head with pollen for their effort. The flowers have to be so sexy that the bees fall for the charade at least twice to make a pollen transfer. They look pretty sexy to me, too.

Being on the Mediterranean in spring was a perfect break for this plant geek!

Nice Bellin'

Just my Luck

I'm the luckiest guy around. For me, a Land Rover with a kayak in front of my house to pick me up is a great sight to start a day.


Meet Holger (Kristi thinks he's a cutie), one of the field ecologists in the group who have a project site on the polish border. It is an old military site that is now a gated wildlife preserve. They are studying an endangered poplar species that lives on floodplain islands. Of course this sounded interesting to me, and he didn't mind a bit of cheap help and an extra driver.


The water is still high so the kayak is needed to ferry equipment to the island which is home to lots of deer, pigs and hares that wait until you just about step on them before they dart away.


There were 500 poplars on the island, many mapped, numbered and their sex already determined, but the beavers are taking more every year and without flooding there aren't any young trees.


This is ol' number 48, ain't she a beaut?


I find getting in the tree easier than wrestling a pole pruner.


We took a few hundred cuttings to start in the greenhouse, which will be used for caterpillar food. Feeding caterpillars cause the tree to release volatile signals that other trees and branches on the same tree are suspected to use to ready their caterpillar defenses.


Getting insect traps and volatile collection equipment, etc. into the trees is essential to the experiments this spring. I'm good with ropes, that is why I get to go along. Here we are practicing using the crossbow to shoot lines over branches. It would also be effective on unsavories. Since Poland joined the EU a year or so ago, anyone who has skills has left for the west, especially the women, so there is a disproportionate number of frustrated skinheads. We got dirty looks, but they didn't return with twenty friends a beat the crap out of us which is good, because the crossbow is a bit slow to fend off more than one.

Not a bad way to spend a day, eh?

Views from the trails

Jena is my kind of town. I could live here forever. OK, the people are a bit too German for forever, but the town fits me well. It does have a lot of green space with creeks, a river, great playgrounds for the kids and the hiking is very good.

One thing that I was really looking forward to was being without a car. At home we are completely dependent on cars. Walking distance to everything we need and good public transit were going to be a nice change of pace.


For me, walking to work has been a vacation of its own. If I took the fastest way to work, and pushed it a bit it's 25 minutes from apartment door to office door. But that is on a pretty busy street and not that nice of a walk so I avoid it unless I need to pick up milk or it is early Saturday morning. The road contours around on the side of the valley, with some city above it until it gets too steep and the forest starts. I've explored every nook and cranny of the cross streets looking for alternate routes, and have a couple of great ones. My standard when I need to make time is only about 10 minutes longer, and it is all on residential roads, less traveled paths and old abandoned parking lots. It has a bit more elevation change and a much better view.

But I haven't stopped there. Every time I think I have a route in mind, I find another possibility to explore and have almost never taken exactly the route I've taken before. The upper end so far is a 75 minute ridge walk. It starts at the house, goes across the neighborhood park, past a couple residential blocks, climbs straight up into the forest to the valley rim, contours the rim until you get to a great overlook, then drops down through meadows to the institute's back door.

Here's some of the views along my various ways to work.

German Food For Your Reading Pleasure

So this whole being a new Celiac trying to live in a foreign country is an interesting challenge and also kind of a pain in the arse.

My guts are totally f*cked and yet I still have to eat. Prepared foods and eating out is pretty much over. Whole foods and Home Cooking is not a bad draw. Really,, I am so thankful it isn't dairy I must avoid.


This is actually a fairly sparse cheese day in our little German fridge.

Those inventive Germans have found some way around their own law stating beer can only contain barley, hops and water. In addition they have come up with some pretty damn good brews from rice and sorghum. This is a nice medium dark rice beer I would have been proud of in my beer brewing days. Thanks to them I'm enjoying drinking a beer once and a while again, something I haven't done in years cause it always made me sick, DUH! This one sets me back almost 3 euros each so that part sucks.

Last weekend along come these little gems. I've always been a big fan of chocolate with a bit of puffed rice. The ability to translate German food labels isn't a skill I expected to need when I left home, but if I do say so myself, I excel. Necessity is the best classroom (after the bedroom of course). A quick scan of the ingredients and crispy M&Ms were on my "oh yeah" list. About 12 hours later I got that feeling of being punched in the stomach when you are not ready. It lasted almost three days and was accompanied by other pleasantries. Racking my brain trying to discover how I got glutened (new verb!) I finally reread the packaging a bit more thoroughly this time.

So I can read, but I'm not thorough enough. Starke is starch and can be from any grain and unless it says corn, rice or potato starch, I should avoid it even though it is often gluten-free. The next one on the list is Gerstenmalzextrakt aka barley malt extract. No ambiguity here. That is like a concentrated gluten party to my immune system. I'm on day 6 since being glutened and though I'm weak, I'm coming back and I'm smarter and more thorough!