LIMINAL LIVING #37: 9 SEPT TO 15 SEPT 2024

Animals, Birds, Books, Collector Garden, Community, Edible Gardening, Flowers, Harvest, Insects & Arachnids, Language/Etymology, Liminal Life, Pollinators, Seeing/Sensing, Sound & Music, Today I Learned, Wilderness and Woods

LIMINAL LIVING #37: 9 SEPT TO 15 SEPT 2024

September 15, 2024

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)

Weather

The week started in the 60°Fs and ended in the high 70°Fs. High temperatures ranged from 78.6°F to 66.7°F, with an average of 73.1°F. Lows ranged from 45.1°F to 56.8°F, averaging 51.5°F. We got absolutely no rain this week. It’s dry in the garden and I had to water the remaining veggies a couple of times.

Beginnings/Firsts

We walked a trail we hadn’t walked for a couple of years on Friday with a friend. It has a little library now.

We used the large Solo Stove for the first time on Thursday night to make s’mores.

Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi)

some wild things seen in garden and around town this week

large grey dagger moth cat (Acronicta insita)

birds (19 species, in garden, on trail, and around town)

farewell, geese!

Wandering

We went to Boston again for an MGH appointment on Tuesday, spending the whole day on the bus or in the city. We walked to the New England Aquarium where we spent a little more than an hour, then to the French restaurant we like near the hospital for lunch outside on their little deck, and finally the appt. at 3 p.m. and then home again by 7. (I had over 15,000 steps for that day.) Other walks were in-town on Monday and Sunday, and in the woods on Friday morning with a friend visiting from Florida.

New England Aquarium

Boston and greenway

trail walk

in town walks

Curiosity & Discoveries

Today I Learned: In this article, Falling Down a Rabbit Hole in Real Life by Katharine Gammon in Nautilus, I learned there is an area of the brain associated with “viewing body parts”: “Evidence suggests that lesions in the brain produced by a stroke or brain bleeding are the second most common cause of the syndrome [after migraine]. So Friedrich and his colleagues mapped the lesions found in 37 people who had experienced the syndrome and then examined existing fMRI data about which brain networks most commonly connect to the locations of the lesions. They found that over 85 percent of the lesion locations shared connections to two specific hubs in the brain: the right extrastriate body area, known to be involved in viewing body parts, and the inferior parietal cortex, known to be involved in judgments of scale and size. The research was published this summer in the journal Annals of Neurology.”

And from a Google search that led me to a PubMed article, I learned that “The extrastriate body area (EBA) is a body-selective focal region located in the lateral occipito-temporal cortex that responds strongly to images of human bodies and body parts in comparison with other classes of stimuli. Whether EBA contributes also to the body recognition of self versus others remains in debate.”

I also found out that a much larger proportion of the population has experienced this Alice-in-Wonderland phenomenon than I would have guessed, up to 20% of people who get migraines and up to 30% of all adolescents.

Also, I learned something about my colour perception (from https://ismy.blue/).

Creating

…

Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)

Body/Mind: Worked out three times (3 hours) this week. Walked more than 10,000 steps on 6 days (more than 11,000 on 4 days, and more than 15,000 on one). I attended Dharma Sunday this week for 2 hours via Zoom, with Lama Willa talking about the concept of refugia, in terms of population biology and looking at Buddhist teaching on “seeking refuge” through that lens.

Gardening/Yard (besides those in in Wild Things, above)

walking in garden with friend

Nesting

Cleaning/Maintenance: My husband pulled the dishwasher apart on Monday and cleaned it; black debris (from where?) has been starting to stain it and the occasional dark speck shows up on dishes and plates, gross. I got things ready in the guest bedroom and bath (cleaned the bathroom) on Tues. and Wed. My husband made the dump/recycling trip on Wed. I did clothes laundry on Sunday.

Food: Best meal was at Ma Maison in Boston on Tuesday,

but we also ate well while our friend was visiting from Thurs-Sat., including a corn relish-bean salad I made (with cilantro from our garden), that orzo-chickpea salad with grilled Old Bay shrimp, fresh local corn on the cob, and a kale and summer squash frittata (both the kale and squash grown locally, from farmstand, and basil from our garden), along with the sourdough bread, peach scones, and peach bread we had made previously. And either our or our friends’ cucumbers. Plus ‘smores over the Solo Stove fire on Thursday night.

I also made that bucatini, corn, arugula, and herbs dish one night, and I had a veggie burger with arugula on another night. On Friday, my Florida friend and I had lunch outside at a restaurant with another friend (CF) …. mmm, truffle fries!

Supplies: The Kizik shoes I ordered a couple of weeks ago arrived on Saturday and were the wrong colour! And they’re now out of the colour I ordered! Argh. I messed around with the Amazon subscribe & save again, before our Sept. order is shipped. Ten more KN95 masks are on the way with our WellBefore subscription.

Sleeping & Dreaming

l averaged 7 hours 46 mins of sleep per night this week, with a high of 8-1/2 hours and a low of just about 6 hours. My sleep score ranged from 78 to 90, averaging 84.9. I got exactly 14 hours of REM sleep this week and 9 hours and 1 minute of deep sleep. Dreams aplenty. We’re sleeping with the window open and the fan on.

Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching

NEW WORD: prusten. According to Wikipedia, prusten is “a form of communicative behaviour exhibited by some members of the family Felidae [tigers, leopards, and jaguars are mentioned]. Prusten is also referred to as chuffing or chuffle. It is described as a short, low intensity, non-threatening vocalization. … [It’s] social in nature, and may be produced for a variety of purposes. … It is used to signal friendly intent to the other animal, and is generally reciprocated by other felids. It may also signify happiness, as content leopards tend to be more vocal and produce prusten more frequently.”

BOOKS: I finished reading two novels this week: the latest by Kathy Reichs in her forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan series, Fire and Bones (2024); Tempe is working this time in and around D.C., mostly in Foggy Bottom, where a Victorian house is set on fire killing four people and bringing her, via a friend of her daughter’s, from S.C. to help with the case. The writing is a little clunky, with “had she but known” comments at the end of several chapters and tutorials on the gangster history of Foggy Bottom sprinkled throughout, but the denouement is satisfying; and Sandwich (2024), a sweet novel and a pleasant summer read by Catherine Newman, set on Cape Cod. If you’re looking for a book about a happy family – anxious but fun mother, relaxed father who avoids conflict, wise and amusing (and anxious) adult gay daughter, nice adult son and his smart girlfriend, and the nice if sometimes un-PC aging parents of the mother – where nothing bad happens, friction is minimal, and indeed close, loving, and sometimes carefully navigated relationships are on display throughout, this is the book for you. Yes, Rocky, the mother, from whose viewpoint the story is told, has secrets, a range of human emotions, some ambivalent feelings, and a lot of thoughts and feelings on being a woman in a woman’s body, but nothing super dramatic.

An amusing and poignant excerpt from Sandwich

OTHER READING

I’ve often heard that few animals truly hibernate and came across this this week:

(Lots more on chipmunks in particular at Hiker’s Notebook.)

LISTENING

Some of what I’ve heard this week (mostly, it’s been NPR)

Connections & Community

Local Support: I voted in the state primary on Tuesday morning. Bought produce at local farmstand on Wednesday and Sunday and we picked up Too Good To Go from local bakery on Thursday. Ate outside at local restaurant with friends on Friday. Ate at local Boston restaurant on Tuesday.

Relationships: Our good friend (CW) visited from Florida this week on her whirlwind tour of Boston, NH, and ME, arriving Thursday and leaving Saturday; we ate, walked in the woods, and caught up on things, and we had lunch together for two hours on Friday outside at a local restaurant with another friend (CF).

Sent my youngest nephew a birthday card (in the mail! to him at college!) on Monday and Venmo’d him cash on his actual birthday, Thursday. Watered friends’ (E&SD) outdoor containers (and harvested a few cucumbers from their garden, yum) while they’re away in England for a week. While voting on Tues., conversed a bit with three friends (LL, LM, JT) who were working the polls. A friend (LM) picked up an item for me from the regional co-op this week. After we took our visiting friend to the airport on Sat. morning, we stopped on the way home to visit with friends (B&DF) who recently moved to a new condo in Hooksett, so my husband could see their new space. Permaculture met online on Thursday morning with 5 of us. I skipped Salon this week.

Donations: Donated to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation in memory of a college friend’s granddaughter on Tues.

Endings/Harvest

My husband dehydrated the very last of the peaches on Monday, found hiding in the dorm fridge after we thought they were all gone. I harvested parsley, cilantro, basil, a cuke and a jalapeño, and various kinds of tomatoes this week from our garden.