Squirrelkin, Squidgum, Squidjum, and Soap Foam

The Castile girl and I have been having disagreements about what to call and how to spell different ideations of the babies.

Last night and this morning the little squirrels are up to about 10cc total of their milk replacer which is about half Esbilac and half heavy cream.  A combined total: one takes about 6 cc and the other about 4cc.  Then the next feeding the one which took 6cc takes 4cc and visa versa.

Rather than a syringe, I have found that a glass 1 ml pipette works best for feeding.  Last night and this morning I used a 2ml pipette for the first frantic dose.

 

 

The smaller one with a broken upper front leg one now has a rubber tubing splint  wrapped with masking tape and with the elbow joint also taped so the arm can not slide out.  That baby is not as happy; pain, probably.

They are housed in a tissue box in the large cage the three flying squirrels used this winter.

A stray antler, a 2.5 inch diameter log chunk, a dry washcloth they use as a latrine,  a couple pieces of dog food, a raspberry and a dab of peanut butter on a spoon complete their abode.

They are fed about 6 times per day and have noticeably gained weight, though I did not weigh them upon arrival and have not yet done so: making their food, feeding them and then cleaning them and the tools up is absorbing plenty of time.

This morning at about 3AM I was washing pipettes.

For a few months we have been using a home made soap solution in a Bath and Bodyworks dispenser that makes soap foam: an ounce or less of a mix of Bronner Eucalyptus Castile soap  , a Tea Tree oil soap  ,  and water, sometimes with a little food coloring for fun.  Those soaps were forms of delayed gratification impulse purchases on my part.  But they have been useful and a very little goes a very long way in the soap foam distribution method.   The Castile soap foam solution cleans the milk fat from the inside of the glass much better than dish washing detergent.  It works well for cleaning eye glasses, too. And, it was first made in Spanish Castile from olive oil and plant ashes.

Anyway, as cleaning progressed,  I recalled that much of my adult life has been spent feeding milk or other food to young creatures.  My MS thesis research involved different strategies of milk replacer delivery and weaning to orphan lambs. That was over 25 years ago.  There have been  more lambs, along with kittens, squirrels, birds, and of course children since then.  It is still fulfilling for me as much as for them.

Season Change

Each day on the walk there is something from Father God as a blessing: a feather, the small round half-shells of wild cherry pits which something opened (how?) for the nut meat,  an unusual insect – or a pair of them, another wing from a dragonfly, small wings from a grey moth left by the bird that ate the moth, a turquoise larva being attacked by ants, a beech leaf with its center layer eaten by a worm so it seems it contains a grey and black road map.

Lately each morning has also indicated that summer is coming to a close; this morning it was the two large patches of soil that had been scraped mostly clean of vegetation by the front hooves of a buck.  Kind of early for that, I thought.  But maybe not.

Then the fact that our eldest child, now a 20-yr-old young man, moved many of his material goods into his first apartment Friday.  He has not come back since.  But he better because otherwise clothes mountain in the basement  will be removed to a thrift store Monday.

The blueberries are past their peak, the red raspberries are coming on, the corn is ripe.  I need to plant lettuce and beets and other greens for the fall. And the rain.  Yesterday only about .25 hundredths of an inch.  But it is pouring out now.

Fair Results

Reese was by far the youngest calf at the small 4-H fair.  But she was well-cared for.  The girl came home with second place for herdsmanship.

 

It was her first time showing an animal.She got third.  There were three animals in the class.

 

Yet even though she was the smallest, Reese was one of the loveliest.  She received Reserve Grand Champion for her conformation.

Clarisse

Clarisse came to us about two weeks ago: a 70-day Boar goat kid.  She has neurological and mechanical difficulties.  She probably will not live the summer.

She is incredibly sweet and gentle.  She has a palsy and great difficulty keeping food down.

Why did we take her?  The girl wanted her.  We can take care of her well.  And maybe there is something to learn.

 

Thoughts on Alexander McQueen

At the Met we went to visit Savage Beauty, the exhibit of clothing from Alexander McQueen’s collections over the years.

The high level of skill and technique in the sewing, tailoring,  and use of various textiles was inspiring.  Lots of beauty.  Lots of perversity.  Lots of silk tulle.

McQueen clearly loved God’s Creation. And he recognized the results of sin. Yet he did not see himself as subordinate to or working with the Creator. From much of his body of work it seems he neither acknowledged that the world was God’s  nor that it is created. Fed through his mind’s eye like a camel through a needle, McQueen’s creations came out similar to that camel: broken reflections born of an unregenerate love; beauty covered with gore, bloody and twisted, at times almost unrecognizable.

His last collection was a marine-themed futuristic full-circle riff on Darwinian what-if’s:what if global warming happens, what if the seas rise, what if we evolve to live in those seas.

You know those old monster/horror flicks?  The ones where it seems obvious in retrospect that mixing nuclear bomb tests with ant nests, or dinosaurs, or tomatoes, was not such a good idea?  There is always foreshadowing in those movies; indications that all is not as it seems or that something more is happening than is evident.  The characters involved in the plot don’t see the hints, but we, the watchers from outside, do.

Where did writers get the idea of foreshadowing?  Dickens and script writers did not come up with it ex nihilo.  They got it from where we all get all our ideas: from creation itself.  The old rerun “Attack of the Killer Migraine” played here last night.  Did I catch the foreshadowing?  Nope.  Though in hindsight it clearly was there. It was not that my glasses were dirty that I had trouble seeing all yesterday.  Those nasty moles on my brother’s back?  dum-dum-DUM.   They hinted that something else was going on.  I think Mr. McQueen didn’t see the foreshadowing either, until close to the time he chose to end his life.

The disconnect between his years of training followed by the ongoing thoughtful effort to imagine, design, and produce unique, beautiful, excellently tailored clothing collections and a worldview of random destructive happenstance must have worn down his psyche.  When one devotes one’s life to creating lovely intelligent work at some point it becomes clear that nothing “just happens”.  How difficult to maintain competing world views!

McQueen, it has been reported, had a line from Helen’s soliloquy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream tattooed on his right arm : “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”

CS Lewis’ poem As The Ruin Falls  may be of use in explanation.

“I talk of love –a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek–
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.”

He saw his self-imprisonment.  He saw his lack. He came to the chasm.  Did he finally see the clues all around him about the bridge God made in Christ and chose immolation instead of submission to the head Creator?  Or did he miss the foreshadowing speaking to him from all the created world and despair?  Or did he want his own will to be done, rather than God’s,  and got it?

The Original Invite

Randi was right-there was a lamb.  We found an invitation.  It took me a while to figure out how to show the whole thing at an appropriate size.  The lamb was there because Jay was a shepherd and I was an animal scientist doing research with sheep (lambs, really).  That is how we met.

The invite is essentially a postcard.  But it was mailed in an envelope.  It was in black and white.  I still like it as an invite idea.

25 Years Ago Today

This the photo used on our wedding invitation 25 years ago.

And here we are with our wedding party:

Up in Skaneateles today we ran into another couple.  Jay knows the husband from Scouts.  Guess what they were doing there?  Same thing as us: celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.  And the wife’s name is the same as mine and the husband’s begins with a “J” and they live in the town closest to us.  What are the chances of that?