To initiate spring officially, Jill and I went hunting for frogs this week. Jill is frog-crazy and wants lots of them in our backyard. Mind you, ours is a closed habitat—a narrow city yard enclosed by brick walls. Goldfish have thrived in our little pond, as have tadpoles and snails, but frogs have been more of a challenge. They are delicate creatures, you should know. With the exception of bullfrogs. We had lots of bullfrogs a couple years ago and they were eating everything, including each other. So we had to gather them up and deposit them in a nearby lake.

Because frogs are low on the food chain, and because their delicate skin exposes them to everything that might be in water, they are a “harbinger” species—among the first animals to signal when things are going wrong in the environment. The bad news is that frog populations worldwide are declining. Apparently, a lot is going wrong with the environment. Agricultural runoff, which includes pesticides, fertilizers and pig, cow, and chicken shit (from corporate farms), is killing them. If it doesn’t kill them, it mutates them. Now, scientists are finding an increasing number of frogs that exhibit both male and female traits (body parts), as well as frogs that have, say, five legs or two heads. This makes mating difficult, as you can imagine.

The plight of the frog is so dire that it has disappeared in some parts of the world. Let me repeat that: there are some parts of the world where frogs once lived in abundance, and helped feed the ecosystem, and now those areas are frogless. Which means that almost all animal life disappears from that area too. Some scientists are rushing to save the most endangered frogs the only way they know how, by capturing some and keeping them in a safe haven, usually a lab, just as they would preserve rare plants in a hothouse. Obviously this is a stop-gap measure.

Jill and I didn’t know it but we happened to be searching for frogs on Tuesday, April 28 – the first, international Save the Frogs Day.  Here’s what the organization says:

Remember that only a small proportion of our public is aware that frogs are disappearing, and that amphibian conservation efforts will not be successful until amphibian declines are common knowledge: think of how long it has taken for any political action on global warming to occur! Politicians rarely act until the public demands action. Our goal is to make the amphibian extinction crisis common knowledge by 2010: help make it happen!

As soon as the rains come, and they’ve been coming in abundance here in Maryland lately, tadpoles start appearing in lakes, ponds, and puddles. Jill and I are most interested in the puddles, where it is unlikely that bullfrogs will lay their eggs. Deep ruts on or near dirt roads –often created by the wheel-gouges of farm or construction vehicles–are the ideal habitats for quick-maturing tadpoles like those of the gentle leopard frog, which must mature in a single season or else perish in cold weather. The bullfrog, by contrast, takes about 3 years to mature. It needs a permanent body of water in which to breed. So Jill and I scout out the puddles.

Deep puddles (up to a foot deep) are interesting habitats because they’re not big enough to attract larger animals and so are often overlooked by most of the food chain, including the ever-voracious heron. We have located one puddle habitat that gets runoff from a forest hill, near the Jones Falls River—just a mile from our house. It used to be bigger but recent construction has covered over most of it. Still, when we approached it this week, two frogs hit the water. We suspect these are green frogs. But we found no tadpoles, which means it’s too early in the season. By the end of May we should find them in abundance.

So far, only one small green frog—Lucy—has shown itself in our backyard pond. Before winter hit, Lucy had a companion, but it looks like he didn’t make it. However, a few tadpoles made it through. If we get leopards, they will go into the garden for their adult life and return to the water only to spawn. Jill won’t be satisfied until we have about ten tads and a few small adults this season. So we have some hunting to do.

Some things you can do to help the frogs:
Avoid using pesticides.
Stop buying bottled water (the plastic bottles alone are a huge drain on the environment)
Drive slower to avoid running over frogs – they have a right to the roadways too.
Eat less meat, which will help diminish the destruction of amphibian habitats.
Use rechargeable batteries (to reduce toxic waste)
Vote for environmental protection.
Oh, yeah: don’t eat frog legs.

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I dropped my digital camera this week and now it’s stuck in “error message” mode. It’s a pricey piece of machinery — so pricey that I can’t afford NOT to have it fixed, even though I might be able to buy a reasonably good replacement for the same amount the repair would cost me. Though I really like taking photos, I don’t know much about cameras, which is why I bought this ultra-automatic one. But it doesn’t do everything I want a camera to do. It’s slow between shots, for example, which prevents me from capturing the flight of a bird or the sudden gesture of a friend.

When I bought the camera, I should have done more research. I’ve noticed that, as the so-called digital revolution has brought us cheaper and more surprising technology, it has also brought a numbing array of variations in consumer electronics. It used to be that all cameras pretty much did the same thing the same way. One camera wasn’t much faster, say, than another. Now that everything is electronic and digital, you have to be careful about what you buy because the variations from product to product can make a big difference.

Nowhere is this variation more daunting than in the purchase of a cell phone. I like the idea of a cell phone. That is, I like being able to phone from almost anywhere. But I don’t like the idea of being (literally) at the beck and call of anybody and everybody. Which is why I seldom use a cell phone. But when I need one (traveling, for example), I really need one. Otherwise, I throw it into my knapsack and forget about it, rarely turning it on. Recent advances in smart phone technology, however, have changed my mind about the place of cell phones in my life.

Smart phones, as you know, are micro-computers that allow you access to the internet nearly anywhere: riding a train, standing atop a mountain, waiting in line at the grocery store. The choice is yours. And that’s precisely what it’s about – choice. Also independence. I travel enough that I’m at the mercy of hotel internet charges, which can run as much as $20 a day. If you want your laptop to work, you pay the fee. However, if I owned a smart phone, I would be liberated from that burden. Same thing when I’m traveling in the car. As it is, if I need to check email when car-traveling, I have to find a public library or wi-fi cafe, pull out my laptop computer, then plug in. A smart phone would relieve me of this burden too.

Mind you, I remember the days when most of us would make fun of those with Blackberries, one of the first smart phones. Blackberries were emblematic of the enslaved office drone – or the obsessive who could not leave work alone. But that was when the computer was mostly a business machine and pocket communication was mostly for business. The internet has matured so much that it is now the nexus of information, entertainment, and communication for a large group of people (certainly everyone I know). It simply can’t be ignored, and why would you want to ignore it?
Now smart phones pull up You Tube videos and clever games (that keep children quiet on long airplane trips) and social-networking messages (read my blog. The internet is a blast.

And it’s mostly free. Except for the access—somebody’s got to pay for the electricity and maintenance of receivers and transponders. Which is where the smart phone comes in. Do an online search for cell phones and you will come up with hundreds. Smart phones are at the high end but they’re so various, it’s confusing. Consider the I-phone, for example. It’s a cool machine. But it’s a “locked” phone, meaning you can use it only with one carrier, AT&T. And, if you buy the phone from AT&T at its irresistible discounted price (about $200 less than retail), you’re locked into a 2-year contract with AT&T. Also, the I-Phone doesn’t have a video camera. Most smart phones do. Which raises a question: should the smart phone be the Swiss Army Knife of communication media?

Virtually all phones now come with digital cameras, as if phone users were irrepressible photo bugs. I suspect that the camera came to be associated with phones because phone-manufacturers wanted to make the cell phone indespensible. The more gadgets they stuck inside the phone, the more indespensible the phone became. Or so it seemed. This year, the Queen Bee of all smart phones is the eagerly awaited and soon-to-be-released Nokia N97, which will cost about $1000 and contain everything but a coffee maker in a package not much larger than a big candy bar.

I want an unlocked smart phone that has a fairly wide screen (2.5” or more), has touch-screen technology, and also a qwerty keyboard (a miniature full keyboard that mimics the one on every computer). I’m pretty sure I won’t use it every day, since I have really good PC work stations both at home and at work. But when I’m elsewhere and need internet access, I don’t want to go begging or searching for it.

Still, I haven’t figured out what I’ll do with my new phone’s digital camera—which won’t be as good as the camera I’m repairing—or the phone’s video cam (my camera has a better one) or the MP3 player, which I have in separate tidy machine. Oh, and my new phone will come with an FM receiver. And a GPS locater, which will plot your every move on a map of the world. There might be a can opener in there too; I’ll have to check.

Here’s a website dedicated to cell-phone news: switched.com

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When I glanced in the mirror last night, I was startled to see that my face looked sunburned. I haven’t been outside much and it’s been raining in Baltimore for a week. I decided it might be my blood pressure because Jill and I had just watched a French thriller called “Tell No One” and it nearly gave me a headache, it was so
intense. Was my heart about to blow? Mind you, my family on my mother’s side is riddled with heart disease. Virtually every one of her nine siblings has died, or nearly died, of heart attacks. In fact, my cousin (yes, on my mother’s side) just had a heart attack (and survives). But no, not I: my heart is steady. As it turns out, the red of my face was brick dust.

I’ve spent the last three days and nights inside the chimney of our kitchen fireplace, where I’ve been drilling brick and scraping my knuckles and bumping my head and cursing very loudly as I’ve attempted to install a ventilation system for our new range. It’s a difficult, dirty job. Just when I think I’m done with difficult, dirty jobs on our old house, I find another. The thing is, I never know exactly how hard the job is going to be beforehand because every job is a new adventure. This one, for example, is a one-of-kind challenge: set up a ducting system and a heavy-duty fan to exhaust smoke etc. from the kitchen to the out-of-doors — through a forty-foot chimney.

I mean, it makes sense: there’s the chimney, built for smoke and exhaust of all kinds. But did you know that chimney technology was NEVER effective? Until recently (i.e., the late nineteenth century) chimneys looked good but never really did the job. They were terribly inefficient for heating, often dangerous, and good mainly for sucking warm air out of and, at the same time, sending too much smoke into your house. They remain a terrible energy drain, which is why you have to seal them well when you’re not using them. The original stove in our kitchen stood in the fireplace, a pipe angled into the flue to take the smoke. The soot I encountered during my chimney adventure was probably about 80 years old, circa 1925, when the original stove was replaced by a small gas range (which was still in the house when we took it over). I got so sooty, I looked like a miner.

The flue (the space where the smoke goes up) of our chimney is about 14 ½ inches across. I can squeeze my body – sideways – into this space but I can’t turn around. If I want my hands above my head, I have to enter the flue with my hands above my head. Fortunately, I’m not claustrophobic But, as I angled and shifted and squirmed and pushed my way into that tight space, I could see how anybody might panic if left there too long. I worked with a light behind me but, because it was behind me, I often blocked its illumination. Really, I needed a miner’s helmet.

You might think this is more trouble than it’s worth . . . until your kitchen is full of smoke, which ours often is. But what kind of fan is going to push smoke up a 40-foot-tall chimney? A big fan. A fan so big, the salesman told me over the phone, I’d want a muffler for it. Hmmm. A muffler. I liked the sound of that. So I ordered the big fan and its muffler and all kinds of galvanized sheet metal ducting. The fan muffler arrived in a box the size of a waist-high refrigerator. And it was heavy, about 40 pounds. To my dismay, I discovered that it was too big to fit up into the chimney.

So I sent it back. Note: before ordering something from a hardware supplier, check to make sure they don’t charge a “restocking fee.” I discovered that I’d be charged 30% of the original cost to send the muffler back. Over the phone, I argued it down to 15%. Your local professional supplier (i.e.., not Home Depot or Lowes, but one that deals directly with contractors) will do the same or won’t take returns at all– which was what happened when I tried to return another piece of ducting. Suffice it to say, I spent some time getting my ducting together.

Whenever I’m faced with an installation I’ve never done before, I mull it over for days, even weeks, trying to picture how it might go. It’s like considering a puzzle. I’ll put it off and put it off and, then, finally I’ll do it and won’t stop until it’s done, sometimes staying up all night to see it through. Which was what I did in this case. Here’s one piece of the puzzle: I had to get a ten-inch duct to transition into a five-inch duct. You can get these adapters called “reducers,” which will transition down at three inch increments: ten to seven inches, seven to five inches. So I got two of those.

There were other complications. I had lots of new electricity to install: the motor, which I wired to a regulator so that I could vary the fan speed; four lights, and an outlet. When I flipped on the power, it tripped the breaker, which meant I had a short somewhere. Mind you, everything was installed – the fan was attached to the brick up inside the chimney and all of the ducting attached to the motor and all of that covered over with the light panels. If I discovered that the fan motor was defective, I’d have to pull everything out. Note: always check that the appliance works before you install it.

Before I started pulling things out, however, I checked the most likely culprit – the recycled light switch I had installed. Maybe it was defective (something about it didn’t look right). I discovered that it was indeed defective. Whew. Note: when things go wrong, always look first at the simplest explanation.

If you’ve got yourself a big, new kitchen range, here’s the formula for getting the right fan: for every 10,000 BTUs your stove-top generates (your manual will tell you), you will need a fan that can suck 100 Cubic Feet per Minute (CFM). Our stove-top generates 80,000 BTUS. So we’re supposed to get an 800 CFM fan. That’s a fan nearly as big as a beach ball. But that’s assuming you’re going to keep all six burners blazing—as you might in a restaurant. So I cut back to a 600 CFM fan. Which still a big fan.

So the job is done. The fan is in. It’s so powerful it takes several seconds before it gets up to full speed and, when fully cranked, it isn’t quite as loud as a jetliner taking off. We’ll have to keep the cats away from it lest they get sucked out of the house.

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Fragments

College speak: “sex-iled” means you must leave your dorm room while your roommate has sex.

Homeless speak: Jill works with the homeless. She was surprised to learn that they refer to abandoned houses, where they squat, as “abandominiums.” Who’d have thought they would be so ironically humorous?

On a t-shirt I saw recently: “Sex without love is just exercise.”

A note taped above the sink in the common area of my office: “Please be very careful where you put the knife!” I’ve never seen the knife and I have no idea where it might be.

Announcement heard recently at BWI airport – in the accent of an Eastern European: “Attention airport patron. Passenger leaving a hat please report to the information deck.”

Exercise ad seen on the internet: “Get totally ripped with our effective muscle confusion system.” Imagine a regimen of double-talk and silly movements that confound the childlike muscles of your stomach until they plead, Okay, okay, just tell me what you want.

I don’t know if I made this up or saw it on a bumper sticker (it’s not on the internet): “I wish my girlfriend was as dirty as my truck.” I know what it’s supposed to mean, but it doesn’t mean what it says.

Years ago, I saw this sign outside a military surplus store, hundreds of miles from water: “Life rafts sold here.”

Cosmetic ad: “The beauty of youth without surgery.” As if there could be a correlation between the two.

On a vending machine: “Dimes accumulate.” It almost sounds like a warning. .

On a button: “(MY) GOD IS AWESOME!” As if faith were a competition.

What a friend-of-a-friend’s boyfriend used to say to her on a regular basis: “You always ruin everything.” And still she married the guy.

A red neon sign in a store window I saw recently: “HUMAN HAIR.” Next door, another neon sign announced, “LAKE TROUT.”

An email I received today from Miss Noeme, a stranger:

Hi Dear,

How are you today i hope that every things is OK with you as it is my great pleasure to contact you in having communication with you, please i wish you will have the desire with me so that we can get to know each other better and see what happened in future.i will be very happy if you can write me through my email for easiest communication and to know all about each other, and also give you my pictures and details about me, here is my email address ///// i will be waiting to hear from you as i wish you all the best for your day.

Your new friend
Miss Naome

I don’t know how she got my e-address. Honest, I never cruise the porn sites. But, lately, I have been receiving an unusual number of solicitations from semi-literate Nigerian scammers.

Now that we’re melting the ice caps, we should acquaint ourselves with some terms. “Iceberg” refers only to chunks of ice larger than 15 feet across. “Bergy bit” describes one smaller than that. “Growler” describes an ice floe that’s six feet across or just large enough to be a hazard. A “stealth iceberg” is one that rises no taller than six feet above the water, making it very difficult to see until you’re almost right on it. And a “calf” is a piece of iceberg that has sheared off, as in icebergs “calving” little ones.

Does this kind of thing happen any more? In 1956, when my mother was stranded by a snow storm in Chicago, the ticket agent at the train station took her home. She ate fish sticks and French fries with the man and his wife and their baby in their little city apartment. Later, my mother wrote to them and, for years, they exchanged letters and cards.

Recently, Jill met a man whose wounded stomach split open while he was home alone. His intestines started spilling out, so he wrapped his mid-section with Duct tape. The nurses at the hospital were impressed by his quick thinking. And here we have yet another example of the remarkable versatility of Duct tape.

When Walt Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric!’ he was more right than he knew. Every human body produces a magnetic field of (about) 60-hertz alternating current. It vibrates sixty times per second. Some of us are more electric than others. Jill is so electric that she burns out the battery in her wrist watch at three times the rate a normal person would.

A note of the prospects for peace: The Argentine Ant migrated to southern Europe in the 1920s. In its home habitat it is very aggressive and thoroughly intolerant of other ant families or colonies and will fight to the death. But in Europe, because their numbers were limited, it happened that the most aggressive killed each other and the more pacific and cooperative flourished. Eventually, as the ant population burgeoned, these cooperative ants mingled freely, giving rise ultimately to super colonies that stretch over 600 miles. We’re talking millions of billions of ants. They are otherwise quite unremarkable, small black ants.

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