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This whole "climate change" thing

Often, when people find out I'm a biologist, they'll say "oh, can I ask you a question?" I dread hearing this, since the next thing out of their mouths either concerns global warming or evolution. I won't even touch on the latter other than to say that I have a quote of Darwin's on my wall. Now, in regards to global warming, I'm going to refer to it as global climate change in the post in order to reduce confusion on the issue.

What it is: global climate change just means that the patterns of climate are shifting. It implies no blame nor predicts how the patterns are changing. In my mind, this is pretty indisputable: there's definitely a shift in rain patterns, both temporally and in location of rain. This has happened in the past (read: dust bowl, ice ages, etc), and it's happening again. Just because it happened in the past doesn't mean it isn't something we shouldn't worry about. Changes in rain can alter crops, flooding, and forests.

The other issue is one of blame. This is complicated, and I frankly don't know much about it. Honestly, I've conceded the issue to climate scientists, and I trust them to be honest. As far as I know, the consensus from climate scientists is that humans do influence the global climate. Sure, there is always an environmental component that we can't control, but we are also influencing the climate. Guess what else influences the climate? Pretty much everything on the planet, including trees and other animals. So even if we're not the sole cause, we should still reflect and examine our role in influencing the planet. We all live here together, and there is nowhere else to go, so it's on all of us to take care of the planet.

In my mind, this needs to be a teamwork thing. It's not "us against them." It's not just first world countries or third world countries; we all have to work together to reduce our impact. And there's tons of ways to do so. I frequently mention little changes here on this blog, and we need to look to our government and businesses to implement large-scale changes.

Even if global climate change ends up to not be caused by humans, I still think there's benefits to be had when we examine how we influence the world around us. Case in point are stoves in third world countries. I've been working on this issue since I was 16 and building lorena stoves in Honduras (not that those were perfect by any means). In many third world countries, people still cook over a wood fire inside the house. This results in lots of little black flecks of particulate matter in the air. Some of this particulate matter harms their lungs; other particulate matter enters the air, travels on the wind, absorbs lots of heat from sunlight, and warms up whatever it lands on (for example, ice in the polar region). Helping these villagers make better stoves that produce less pollution results in benefits all around: less illness in their own village, less particulate matter all over the globe. One or two stoves changed won't make a difference, but if we can change over even half the stoves, there will be that much less junk floating around in our air.

I know this isn't a thorough scientific review nor even chock-full of examples. But it is my firm belief that reducing our emissions and the toxins we put into the air can only help, even if global climate change isn't something we can control. So remember this as you make your day-to-day choices; can you make a simple choice that might add up over time?

This took dedication

After literally months of going through my itunes, I've finally managed to cull out about three gigs of music. This took a few deep cuts (I said goodbye to KC & JoJo's "All my life"!), and I'm sure there's more I can cut, but I'm done with the massive push for now.

29. Get my itunes to 13 gigs of music (currently a bit over 15.5) in my 101 things is now done!

Happy Earth Day!

a great blue heron in flight

Go enjoy some nature today!

Blessings for the day

1. My camera lens is covered under warranty, so I'll be getting back a fixed lens (for free) at some point here.

2. The weather is lovely and grey and rainy. Very Seattle-like and much needed rain to boot.

3. I planned and organized a 5k run and 1 mile walk yesterday. It all went fabulously! I had about 120 participants, which was a 20% increase over last year. So awesome.

4. I can hear a mourning dove cooing outside my window, and it reminds me of a suburban owl. Tonight, I'll likely go for a walk with Matt (if it's not actively raining) to actually listen for owls.

5. I had a fabulous day off. I also have a four day work week and a three day weekend.

Overall, I am very happy with life

Oh, Car Rentals

I am going to visit the lovely April for Memorial Day weekend. Ever the conscientious shopper, I've elected to fly into Denver and drive the four hours to go visit April. I'll stay with family Friday evening then drive up on Saturday for a very full two days of fun. On the docket: hiking, baking, disc golf, and meeting her boyfriend. I'm quite excited!

Unfortunately, I've also had to delve into the world of car rentals. This is depressing at best and disastrous at worse. There's lots of jargon -- CDW, LDW, etc -- and lots of finger pointing (apparently, everything is the fault of the renter). My big questions: am I covered by my insurance, and what will my credit card do for me?

Turns out, even when your insurance and credit card say they cover you, it may be difficult to get covered. And then, if something does happen to happen, you will owe them -- big time. But is the risk worth the cost? Getting extra insurance, and especially the "loss of use" insurance (LDW), is really expensive. Where I've been looking, the insurance costs more than the daily cost for the car. And if nothing happens, then your rental company made a lot of money.

My rental for the few days should be around $100, and I'm pretty sure that I'll decline all coverage. Most useful in helping my reach this decision are the Smarter Travel articles. A guy named Ed Perkins has done an awful lot of research, and it turns out that I should be covered if I rent from Alamo, Enterprise, or National with my Visa Signature card. Especially helpful is the series that starts with Beware Gaps in Credit Card Coverage with Rental Cars and ends at the CDW gap. Since I was planning on going with Enterprise (they are fine with me taking the car across state lines, and they have lots of good options), I think I'll be good. Hopefully.

In the meantime, I'll try not to worry. I'm really excited for my trip. I haven't been to Wyoming in years and years, and I've never been to that part of the state. It'll be fun to see family for a little while and great to see April. Now here's to hoping for nice weather.

Prairie Burning

Tonight was a prairie burn here at my nature center. We do prescribed burns on a rotating yearly basis; the fire department gets practice, and we get to simulate natural burn cycles. This helps us maintain prairie, reduce invasives, and maintain needed open spaces and edges within our landscape.

As an added bonus, my boss brought her photo-savvy son. He has the same camera as me, so he showed me some awesome ways to use it and improve my technical photography. I'm very happy about this.

Here's the fire from several different viewpoints:

eerie in black and white . . .

Feeling vexed

One of the great frustrations of my life is trying to figure out when extra money spent will result in more, less, or the same amount of hassle. Amongst those who are frugal, one of the common pieces of advice is "spend more money for a quality item that will last longer."

Under this idea, I spent $400 on a mountain bike on Saturday. It's a lovely bike, and I already took it out for a trail ride. I spent an extra $50 to get a lighter frame (I'll be doing some road biking with it too), and it's definitely worth it. However, I bought the bike somewhere 30 minutes away, and I already have a service issue; in my very first bike ride, I managed to somehow pop my tube. I don't see anything crazy sticking out of it, so I can't imagine that I went rolling over nails. I've saved up money for quite a long time for this bike, and my excitement is now dampened by this unfortunate issue. I'm taking the bike to be serviced tonight, and I'm hoping that nothing is found sticking in my tube so that the bike shop will fix it for free.

Today, I will also be packing up one of the lenses from my D40 to be sent in for servicing. Thankfully, I'm still within the one year service window. The autofocus on this lens has been broken since December (yes, I procrastinate too much). And this lens issue has been causing me to use my camera less and be less happy about my camera ever since.

Conversely, I spent $5 on a pair of headphones last summer when my old pair went belly up. The headphones have worked so well for me that I bought another pair this weekend so that I can have a gym set and a home/work set (avoids putting on sweaty headphones at any time other than the gym). I could have shelled out for a much more expensive version, but why bother? And on the flip side, I spent more money for my ipod nano ($150) than I could have spent on a similar product, but the ease of use, loveliness, and long battery life have all been completely worth the investment for me.

I'm hoping that the fixing of my bike and camera lens will lead to useable products that don't have any immediate issues. But I have to admit that I'm a bit disheartened right now. Complicated products are often hard to do right, and I did my best to find good quality items. I did some research, checked out some reviews, and was quite happy with my purchases when I made them. But I must admit that problems like this are quite the downer and make me think twice about spending lots of money on something fancy.

Finding Motivation

The great thing about working out regularly is that you can take an unexpected day off from working out, but taking more time off is still difficult. Recently, I've been on a great exercise kick (sadly, not accompanied by a great eating kick, but that will come around eventually). From mid-March to mid-April, I worked out at least 5 times a week for four weeks, which satisfies goal 3. Visit gym five times a week for a month.

I started this goal on a Wednesday; for me, that seemed to be the necessary psychological kick. I can typically get into the gym with no issues on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. After that, I just needed to accrue two more days to get in my 5 times a week. Turns out, I usually ended up at the gym 6 times a week! In this past week, I went Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, which was a satisfying week of working out. Because I knew I was hitting the gym regularly, I was able to take off Friday night (I was feeling under the weather) with no big issues.

The problem came in just the past few days, and I'm now trying to get up motivation to head to the gym. On Tuesday, I was on my way over to Matt's so that we could head to the gym together when I got an unexpected phone call. A friend of ours in town had three free hockey tickets: did we want to go to a game? Yes, yes, and yes! We headed up to St. Paul immediately and called a friend on the way. This one day wouldn't be such a big deal . . . but we'd already made plans to go to a Twins-Mariners game on Wednesday. This put the kibosh on a Wednesday workout (no time after work, and I couldn't realistically wake up early to go to the gym, as I went to bed at 11.30 on Tuesday night).

Now, it's Thursday. I have the day off work for a job interview, but I don't have to leave for the interview until 10.30ish. I woke up at 8, and I've spent the last hour and a half saying "I'll go to the gym soon." It's hard to get up the motivation to return after taking off two whole days; I know it's just one day more, but this is so much more sluggish than I've felt about gym-going for awhile.

I think it's time to get back in the habit. Today will be 6 times in the month, so only three days off so far. I'll be able to make it to the gym on Friday and Saturday, and I'm going to find some way to exercise on Sunday (the gym is closed for Easter). Hopefully, after a successful four-day run, I'll be able to get back into the groove that has made the last month a great gym month for me.

Maybe I can be in Obama's cabinet

I just finished preparing my 1040X, the amended tax return. Back at the end of January, like a good citizen, I prepared my tax return, submitted it, and got back a really nice refund. Okay, maybe that's not a good citizen, since I didn't let the government earn interest on that money for another few months. But I'm kind of poor, so I think the government can forgive me.

Anyway, I filed my taxes and was quite pleased with myself for getting that task done early. A few weeks later, my mother calls . . . and I have another W2 at home. This one was for the stadiums in Seattle in the grand sum of $83.44. Wait, I said; I wasn't in Seattle at all in 2008. Very sad fact, but I didn't go home for an entire year (Christmas to Christmas), and the snows in the NW prevented me from getting to Seattle for Christmas '08. Turns out I had earned that $83.44 during Christmas of '07, but I hadn't received the paycheck until '08.

Today, I finally got around to filing that amended return. Interestingly, on that $83.44 I earned, I paid $5.17 in SStax, $1.21 in medicare tax, and a whopping $15 in federal taxes due to being pushed up two more brackets. I got to keep 75% of what I earned, so I paid 25% in some sort of taxes on this small amount (18% in just federal taxes). It's a far cry from the grand sum of my earnings; overall, I paid 7% in taxes because I'm fairly close to the poverty level. Very interesting how small increases in earnings can have a different tax on them. It was still worthwhile, overall, for me to earn that $83 (really $62.06). But, still, eye opening and interesting.

Animals

Besides my lovely dog Belle, we saw tons of other animals. I'm so glad Matt met Belle, as he now knows why I miss my dog so much. I can't wait to be a little more stable so that I can get a beagle; I'd love to do a beagle rescue of a little older dog.

Anyway, on to the animals. We visited the Oregon Zoo and the Seattle Aquarium, so we got our fair share of both kinds.

People always ask why I visit a zoo more than just one or two times. And the following is a reason why. I've visited the Oregon Zoo at least . . . 15 times? Maybe more. I had a zoo membership there for almost the entire time I was in college, and my membership allowed me a free guest. Plus, the zoo is on the MAX (mass transit) line, so it was easy to visit. In all my times of visiting the zoo, the polar bears have always been a little time. Finally, my diligence has paid off; they were rockin' the animal enrichment during our visit:

Polar bears, despite their size, are a thing of beauty. I had lots of fun just watching them play.

Also, the Oregon Zoo has a new bobcat exhibit. cute!