A Tiny Heartbeat

It's late, and I'm still working too many shifts.

But I thought I'd share a little story.

A few days ago, I rescued a fledgling robin from my cat. We have a cage with a specialized light that we use when we find injured birds or sparrows, should we ever get around to breeding them. I found his nest, but it was too high to put him back. He was uninjured; stunned from the fall and the kitten batting at him, but he was fine. I kept him for a night, and then I had to release him back into the wild. The SPCA wouldn't take him because he was healthy. I'm still super nervous for him; I have four outdoor cats, all of them hunters. I ended up releasing him into a bush by his nest, in hopes that his parents would be able to find him and would be able to keep feeding him until he learnt to fly a little higher. (He could do little flutters about a foot in distance.)

But during those 24 hours, he escaped twice. The first time I had to catch him with my bare hands, and holding this small, fragile bird in my hands as his wings lightly fluttered was amazing. I could feel his heartbeat. He didn't struggle, and I felt that for a moment we shared something. It was like I was holding a tiny miracle of nature and it made me pause and think about the beauty and fragility of life.

The second time, we seemed to have an accord, and he fluttered into my hand and perched there comfortably.

I'll never know if he lived or died, and I know that in the scheme of things a baby robin doesn't have that much importance, but I still can't think of him as anything but special. He made me pause and think about the relationship between mankind and nature, and about how this tiny beautiful thing that I held in my hands was so fragile and innocent and how I compared to it. I came out the bad guy, but still. It was an almost holy moment.

I have parrots and birds, but holding something wild...it was different. And yeah. I don't know how to describe it. Only that holding him, watching him, having him willingly perch on me, was amazing and incredible and awesome.

I hope he's okay. Cause little songbirds like him make the world a more beautiful and awesome place.

And I'm tired. And done my ramble.
Night All.

Tired? You betcha.

Work has been killer the past two weeks. I'm working 8 shifts this week, and I worked 8 last week and I kinda just want to curl up in my bed for a while with a good book, and just block out the rest of the world. It's been stormy out, which makes me sleepy and want to be somewhere warm even more. On top of that, I'm trying to finish my latest novel while endlessly rewriting my first one. Woot.

Alright.

So because I'm tired, I'm just going to show a little national pride.



Canada=Awesome.
Woooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Womans Best Friend.

For those who know me, they know I love cooking. It's one of my favourite hobbies.
And what goes hand in hand with cooking? Eating.

And today, I'ma talk about something I wish I could make, but love to eat.




That's right, chocolate.

But I don't have a lot of time to right about it today, unfortunately. I have a lot to do, and a very busy weekend work-wise. (It's Mothers Day. The one day people decide to show appreciation for their mothers by taking them out on the busiest day of the year where the food will be rushed and the service sub-standard. Do I sound cynical? It's because I am.)

I'ma be brief.

Chocolate is made primarily from the cacao bean from the cacao tree, originally found in brazil and venezuala, but now found all over the sub-tropics. The pods are left in the sun to ferment, and then the beans are removed and roasted at 250-350 degrees for varying lengths of time dependant on the bean. After that, the outer shell of the beans are removed and sold as animal feed. The inner nib is crushed to extract cocoa butter. A thick paste, this stage is called cocoa liqeur, but there isn't any actual alcohol in it. To make cocoa powder, a heavy press is used to extract all but 15-25% of the cocoa butter. If making baking chocolate, the chocolate liquer is molded and hardened.

Cacao Beans



Depending on what type of chocolate you want (flavoured, white, dark, milk) more ingredients are added to the cocoat butter; milk, sugar, flavouring, vanilla, delicious. After the mixing, the chocolate is refined, molded, and packed away for later eating.

The Chocolate Molding Process. Oh, Yummy.

Chocolate has a long and extensive history;

I highly suggest you check it out. The history of chocolate is an interesting one.

Why is chocolate awesome?
Because it's filled with delicious. It can have many different fillings that are also filled with delicious. Chocolate is something that is a comfort food for me and others world-wide. It melts in your mouth (sometimes with bubbles!) and is bloody wonderful. Not only that, but it releases the chemical seratonin and other endorphins within the brain, quite literally cheering you up. And it makes sex sexier.

What do you think?


Clearly, Chocolatiers are pimpin'

Say Hello to My Little Friend the Cactus

Today, I will write about a spiky little friend of mine.

My dad and I have a thing with cacti. (Cactuses? Cactupi?). I buy him them whenever we’ve had a fight, or just when I want to tell him ‘I love you’ without actually verbalizing it. I have a few cacti he’s given me as well. My favourite one is named for my old boss back when I worked at a diner. He was a thorny, cantankerous old Greek man. Haha. She joked. But no, really. I collect them. Even now, as I type this from the safety of my sun-bench, I am watching one I’ve named Mariel. I have a habit of naming inanimate objects.



The cactus is a member of the plant family Cactaceae. They are, with one sole exception, native to the America’s. They are an unusual plant in that they thrive in dry, arid regions. (That means desert, though they can also be found in the rainforest, savanna’s, and mountains. weird.) There are over 2,000 species of cacti, with various shapes and forms.

Say hello to the nice Saguaro cactus, everyone.

A perennial plant, they can grow as trees, vines and bushes and come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some of them will be no bigger than your thumb, while others, such as the mighty saguaro, can grow up to be 15 metres. They generally have no leaves, or greatly reduced leaves (many of which are microscopic…neato!), and many have a covering of thorns, which again differs with the variety. The thorns are not only used as a form of self-protection against being devoured or damaged by local or passing fauna, it is a highly effective method of preserving water and thwarting that evil process known as precipitation, in a process known as transpiration through shading the plant.

The life of a cactus is interesting; it has a long dormancy and a short growing season. They have a largely spread out system of shallow roots that respond within two hours after a heavy rain that can trigger an enormous growth spurt in a short time. A full-grown saguaro cactus can absorb up to 3,000 litres of water in ten days. (No wonder the desert is dry…the cacti are stealing all the water. Evil bandit cactuses!) Many cacti will flower after a rain, or after a certain age with the flowers ranging from very small up unto 30 cm in diameter in bright and eye-catching colours. Some cactus flowers stand for several days, others die in just one day. Some cactus flowers open only at the sunset, others only in the daylight. Cacti are pollinated by insects and hummingbirds. Some red cactus flowers spread a stenchy rotten meat scent, attracting insects. They can live anywhere from 25 years, to 300
.

flowering cactus.
But what if there is no rain? Cacti suck up their moisture through their extensive root systems, and in the desert there is plentiful dews that fall at night. But one of the most amazing thing about the cactus is that it can suck up moisture through its skin, through small areoles (NIPPLES!?) that open and close. Desert night fogs allow for a little more moisture to be sucked into the cactus. But because this is a low-water diet, many cactuses have a round, thick shape so that they can better store water.

Mostly they are used as ornamental plants, with others being used as food, foraging, fruit, and other uses. I know of an artist who used to make paper of cactuses. They can also be used as a fence if materials and cost is an issue. Some of the bear fruit, such as the prickly pear and the dragonfruit. (Alright, I did NOT know that came from a cactus. I have to eat some now.) Peyote, long used as a vision-inducing psychoactive agent by the Native American Peoples, is a cactus. Many common cacti that you can buy at any garden centre also contain mescaline. The trunk of some cacti is used to make a type of Argentinian drum called bombo leguero. The wood of some cactus species is used for making walls, roofs and as reinforcement wood. The fruits of Cereus repandus from Peru are called cactus apple or tuna and are prickless. Syrup can be made from cactus fruits.

I don’t know about you, but I find cacti to be amazing. These are plants that have evolved over millions of years in order to survive in a harsh and unforgiving landscape. A lot of times, we don’t think of plants of as evolving, or self-defensive, but then we have the cactus, that reminds us that plants are changing at the same rate as everything else. They are incredibly adaptive, and still manage to be beautiful. It’s just awesome.
What do you think?


'Sup?

I'm Back! And so Are They.

yeah...I was gone for a month. What of it? :P Work was suffocating, and I was finally nagged back into doing this.
Back to doing these daily.

Now, for today's topic (and a celebratory song about my return from one of my favourite childhood movies) re; the video below.



Yes, that's right. We're talking dinosaurs. The movie clip you saw is from the movie We're Back! Plotline includes the following; dinosaurs brought forward in time and made good by dino-cereal, sausages, a bubble producing wish maker, a howls-flying-castle machine, apes, an evil circus run by a guy named ScrewEye, competitive brothers, an absentminded museum director. All of it wrapped up in sweet pre-adolescent romance.

Really.

Now, anyone can tell you (especially my boyfriend BlueEyes) that I have an obsession with dinosaurs. I've watched every documentary, every show, and a million internet/book things. I collect dinosaur movies obsessively. I even used to have some dinosaur coprolite hanging around. That's fossilized feces, folks.

Also, I had a psychic tell me in a past-past life that I was an allosaurus. Which explains my temper.

More specifically today we're going to be talking about Dakota, one of my favourite dinosaurs of all time. Why this specific dinosaur? Why pick a Hadrosaur, one of the most common dinosaur skeletons ever found? Easy.

Dakota is one of the rarest dinosaur finds; a mummy. If that's not freaking awesome, I don't know what is. One of three dinosaurs mummies ever found, Dakota was discovered by 16 year old wanna-be paleontologist Tyler Lyson on his family farm in, you guessed it, Dakota. The body had survived sun, scavengers, weather and time, until it mineralized and survived millions of years. Upon acquiring his degree, he went back and excavated it, and the discovery was announced in 2007.


This is less-dead version of Dakota the Hadrosaur

Hadrosaurs were 8 tonne duck-billed dinosaurs that lived in the Late Cretaceous period. A common snack for t-rex, they were herbivores that stretched across Europe, North America, and Asia. Hadrosaurs were divided into many subgroups, the most popualr being the maiasaur, or the 'Good Mother Lizard'. Ducky from the land before time was also a hadrasaur; more specifically a parasaurolophus.




Most dinosaurs are known from their fragmented and scattered bones, so this kind of unheard-of-amazing-completely-complete-skin-organs-and-soft-tisse discovery rocked the science world and updated a lot of knowledge concerning hadrosaurs and the dinosaur world. Considered the most complete dinosaur find since 1908, it was the largest skin-imprint ever found and can tell us a lot about the movement, size, and speed of the dinosaur. Scientists even had to alter how they look at a hadrosaur; they walk differently then we first believed them to do.

I'm pretty sure that the mummy of a dinosaur is epic, and needs to explanation to why it is here on this blog. It's. A. Dinosaur. Mummy. Who DIDN'T play with dinosaur toys when they were a kid!?

If you want to learn more about the process of mummification, and the discovery and unearthing of a dinosaur mummy there are many articles on the web, as well as many documentaries. Here are some ones of interest that I highly suggest you check out.

Here's one about Dakota's autopsy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJZaOsnf5nI&NR=1

This one is entitled 'Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy'. While it doesn't talk about Dakota, it does speak of her contemporary, a juvenile male duck-billed dinosuar mummy named Leonardo. It's pretty fascinating stuff, and I suggest you look over it. He was found with his organs intact. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6weSeCsZLD8 <- Part 1.



Here are some of the autopsy reports of Dakota.

Until, next time.

-Bananahead.