a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Month: January 2015

When It Shines Everyone Naps

There are nothing but sun worshippers at a man and his hoe®. Living in the Pacific Northwest, there are times you doubt that a thing like the sun even exists. It’s hard to believe in things you never see. So when the sun comes out, you just have to bow down in amazement that such a marvelous thing crosses the blue sky.

Nothing beats taking a long nap in the warm sun. The best naps I’ve ever taken are with the sun beating down on me. The bright rays seem to penetrate to your inner core, cleansing every cell. You wake up feeling like you’ve slept a thousand years. I think the chickens feel the same way. Did you know chickens yawn too? Maybe that should be the distinction we make when we divide beings into sentient and nonsentient ones. If they yawn, they get the special treatment, otherwise … ???

Even the guard dogs nap in the sun. The great thing about living this far north, is that the sun is never cruel. Even in the middle of summer, it’s warmth is gentle, not the blowtorch blaze of a southern sun.

January 12, 2015
More Signs of Spring

A sure sign of spring are small pullet eggs. The hens which hatched last spring are starting to lay eggs. Some may even become mothers this year. Below are some of the chicks from last May. Perhaps these eggs were laid by the chicks below, now that they are grown up. It does make you wonder what goes through a young hen’s mind the first time she lays an egg. “Woe! What was that, and what am I supposed to do with it?” Or what do they say when they chat with their sister after laying their first egg? “Rachel, you won’t believe what popped out of my but!”

January 11, 2015
The Beauty Within

Delve into the mechanism of insulin, and you encounter the incredible beauty of protein molecules. They aren’t really these colors. The colors represent the different components of the molecules, but the fantastic shapes are real. It’s like your children took LSD and went crazy with your box of ribbons. The whole stuff of life is this fascinating dance of elaborate dancers, dancing through our bodies, performing all the intricate chemistry that keeps us alive. That’s a glucokinase molecule. There is as much beauty flowing through your blood as there is in any museum of modern art.

This fascinating protein is dipeptidyl peptidase-4 which is associated with immune regulation.

This beauty is insulin.

This is glucokinase hexokinase 4.

January 11, 2015
On Stacking Wood

While stacking wood the other day, I spotted a moss garden growing on top of a log. This is a great place to live if you like it green and damp like I do. Set out a stump or a rock, and within a year, you’ll have a beautiful moss garden. Torture for me would be having to live in a desert or dry climate. If the trees aren’t lush with moss, I’ll visit but I don’t want to live there.

It can be hard photographing moss gardens with dogs nudging your hands and trying to bite your camera. This is Echo who became diabetic after a bout of pancreatitis before Christmas. Since then it’s been an adventure finding the right dose of insulin to keep his blood glucose level stable.

Which led me to delve into the many mysteries of insulin. Researching how your pancreas knows how much glucose is in your blood, and when to release insulin into your blood stream, turns up diagrams such as this from articles with titles like Glucose sensing in the pancreatic beta cell: a computational systems analysis.

And slogging through sentences like this:

Glucose equilibrates across the plasma membrane and is phosphorylated by glucokinase to glucose 6-phosphate, which initiates glycolysis. Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) converts a portion of pyruvate to lactate. Pyruvate produced by glycolysis preferentially enters the mitochondria and is metabolized in the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, which then yields reducing equivalents in the form of NADH and FADH2.

It’s all fascinating stuff, with researchers still teasing apart the puzzle as to how it all works, with much of their research being done with rodent cells. Simplified, beta cells in your pancreas under go a chemical process when glucose levels rise in your blood, and release insulin they produce into your blood stream. When your glucose level drops, the beta cells close up and stop releasing insulin. But that is a gross simplification of a process that involves many chemicals and numerous intricate steps.

January 10, 2015
Where a Lynx Used to Roam

I knew they were logging this forest on my way to the post office, but today the shock of seeing nearly the entire forest gone made me stop and … well what do you do when you come face to face with such devastation?

A few summers ago, I was bicycling by this forest when a large male lynx crossed the road in front of me. He was walking at a leisurely pace, and when he saw me, he didn’t dash off. He just kept walking across the road as if he’d seen me many times before. He walked up a bank to the edge of the woods, and turned around to look at me.

I’d never seen a lynx in the neighborhood, and had to stop and look at it. It calmly stared back at me. Maybe he was sizing me up, wondering if he could make a meal out of me. Perhaps he was calculating how many freezer bags of meat my carcass would fill. After looking at me for a while, it turned and disappeared into this very forest. I guess I didn’t look good enough to eat.

The area that was logged is a 40 acre parcel. It’s puzzling how this works. We’ve got this odd legal system where forests and all the creatures that live in it have no rights. A human who owns the land can come in at any moment and cut everything down. What happens to all the birds who slept in all those trees? What happens to all the animals who had homes there? Where do they go? What about the value of the oxygen the trees produced and the carbon dioxide they were extracting out of the air and storing, the rain water they were capturing and slowly releasing? People are allowed to cut down a forest and not take any of that into account?

Our sense of ownership and responsibility is so short-sighted. Molecular evidence suggests that the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees (Pan) diverged 4–8 million years ago. Which means we can trace our ancestors back some 200,000 to 400,000 generations. Given that there were so many generations before us, there are likely to be hundreds of thousands or millions of generations of humans to come. Yet, what are we leaving future generations, if we keep treating our planet the way we do? Don’t we owe it to them to make sure our planet stays the wonderful blue and green gem that it is?

There are various estimates as to when the sun will expand and swallow the earth, or burn up all its hydrogen and turn cold, but it seems that we have four to seven billion years to go before that happens. Even a billion years is some 50,000,000 generations of humans yet to come. What sort of planet are we leaving for them? All those generations of humans yet to come, and the rest of life on this planet, well, you add them all up and they surely have a more substantial claim on this planet than just a single generation of humans does. And yet, when you go to clear a forest of forty acres, none of that counts. It seems so bizarre.

January 9, 2015