Six Random Things About Me

I've been tagged by FrugalNYC to write about 6 random things about me. So here they are:

1. I like crème caramel, but I hardly ever eat it.

If I was Iron Man, crème caramel would be my secret soft spot.

2. If you sing "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" to me, it is an apt tease.

For a time when I was a girl, I wanted to be a nun. Remember Maria in The Sound of Music? Yeah, like that, and like her, it didn't work out for me either. You might still catch me singing in the woods some days though. :)

3. I lived in a house in the woods for a time as a girl

Our house was on Cariboo Lake in the British Columbia interior. No power, only propane lights and an emergency generator. Truly rustic, but breathtakingly beautiful. It was a place where your mind could really be as wide as the sky and touch the stars at night.

There was only our family, some hippy squatters we never saw and an old retired Swiss couple living on the lake at that time. Hmm, maybe that's why I related to the Sound of Music Maria so much?

If you are wondering if I encountered much wildlife at Cariboo Lake the answer is, "Yes!" I had encounters with porcupines, bears, beavers, snakes, many birds, and was even chased by a wounded moose once. Mostly, I would hang out in the yard and draw or do puzzles. Since the yard was lined with lilacs, it was particularly beautiful in the Spring. I would also roam the nearby woods with my dog, Duke, but I never went too far because the ghastly stories the local kids told about grizzlies put me in a state of perma-grizzly-fear. I never did run into the wild frothy insane bear of all those stories though. The only bears I ever saw could care less if I existed or not. Blueberries were far more interesting than I, measly human.

Living in the forest also helped me to understand Walt Whitman better:

There Was a Child Went Forth

THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-Month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—all became part of him.

4. I'm a generalist

It's been hard for me to narrow down an area of study in university because I'm interested in many things, and they all seem interconnected in intriguing ways. I ended up focusing on climatology and ecology because the first involves integrating what we know of the biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and atmosphere to figure out what is going on with climate change, and the second because ecosystems involve all the life in a given area and their environment.

I eventually became interested in ethology/behavioural ecology/cognitive ecology as I came to see that what we are doing to the environement within our respective ecosystems, that impacts on things like climate change, boils down to the minutiae of the daily decisions that we make. What influences these decisions? Genetic factors? Parenting? Peers? Society at large? Random chance experience?



Along the way studying ethology, I've come to have much more respect for animals besides us as sentient and feeling creatures, as well as become interested in the genetic and biochemical factors underlying proximal and ultimate causation behind behaviour.

5. I think I might have synesthesia

I sometimes get one type of sensation with another. Like I will see a colour associated with a smell or massage will cause me to experience the taste of something.

Hmm. Actually, it would be awesome if I could work it so that massaging my temples would cause me to taste crème caramel!

6. I miss my Uncle Jack


My Uncle Jack (center of photo above, beside Joan on the right, who still has a lovely sheep farm) was a real farmer. He lived in Saskatchewan and actually rode a horse to round up the cows, farmed wheat, smoked like a chimney, was rarely without his cowboy boots and hat. He built the rock wall around the house where he, my Aunt Marj and cousin Laurel lived. He had a "pet" Texas Longhorn Steer that he trained for rodeo shows. Tex was adorable in spite of his tonnage, and liked it when I fed him crab apples. Uncle Jack was tough as nails to do the work he did, but always really sweet to me. He'd let me wear his cowboy hat and leather fringed jacket when I was a kid, and I loved to parade around in them and pretend I was a real cowgirl too.

Over the years Marj and Jack's farm became affectionately known to my Mum, Dad and I simply as "the farm". Visiting the farm was like entering story book heaven for me. It literally was Little House in the Prairie to me. My cousin was the country mouse and I was the city mouse, and I always sensed she had the better end of the deal. Yeah, even with the cow patties and the flies. The endless fields, stacks of hay to jump in, runaway hogs that were so big they'd shake the house as they rubbed up on it, chickens pecking in the yard, cats and dogs galore, horses to ride whenever you liked, bulls that would chase you when you jumped in their pen, mud to stomp in and get as messy as you like. These and more made the farm a child's paradise.

Uncle Jack told me once that he tried to get into organic farming but that it was virutally impossible for a man like him to get around all the red tape involved, and that the whole system was laced with strange loop holes and bureaucracy. He complained too about the pesticide planes that would spray neighbouring crops. I would spy cut outs of farmers being quashed by companies like Monsanto on my aunt's desk. As my cousin and I grew, something else strange happened. Modern life creeped in. The TV was contantly tuned in and the song of the phoebe bird was not on any channel. The fields went from green to gold to grey. Smoking in the pit, crashing pickups into ditches and rolling in the hay replaced saddling up the horses and camping in the open range surrounded by song birds, grasshoppers, prairie lilies. What was left now and then was the bone chilling midnight lament of real free range coyotes, one of the last sounds I remember from the farm.

My Uncle Jack and Aunt Marj passed away a few years back, both in their early 60s, and both due to cancer. Today, their farm house, like so many other empty homes I've seen dotting the Saskatchewan plains stands cold and empty. I hate to think of mice, mildew and cobwebs taking over where once a family flourished. I've considered moving there myself, but considering that the ground water isn't potable, and what an agriculutral student told me once about his job working as a crop sprayer, I try and stay as far away as I can myself.

It's up for debate as to why my aunt and uncle died so young. Was it only due to Jack's smoking? My own suspicion that all the chemicals used in modern farming that they were surrounded with was a big part of the reason. I'm wondering what other people's experience is with health and living in the bread basket of America.

To me, Uncle Jack's home, a home he helped build with his own hands, stands like a hollow reminder of how we have gone wrong on this continent from the railway middlemen who originally took price control from farmers, up through things like Enron and the recent economic collapse. Because of what Uncle Jack represented to me, I'm thinking I'd like to take a better and closer look at modern agriculture, its effects on the small farmers out there. I long to leave the big bright city for the rural roads, green pastures dotted with cattle and sheep, and sweet smelling stacks of hay. Some people call me an idealist, and tell me that I don't know really know what I'm talking about when I wax poetic about the life pastoral. That I don't really know what life in the country is like and that I would probably change my mind pretty quick if I actually had to live there.

Well, the picture below is of me and my cousin Laurel riding out in the pasture when we were young. It's evidence enough that my thoughts are more than just distorted memories and idealistic dreams. It's evidence enough that something has been lost, and I just need to find the smoking gun.


------------------------------------------------
If you are on the list below, you've been tagged to post about 6 random things about you!

• Yesterday's Glitter
  
• Raincoaster
• Wowie Whispers
  
• Perro...K!?
• Essential Prose
  
• David Niall Wilson
  

THE RULES (for this game of tag):

1. LINK TO THE PERSON WHO TAGGED YOU
2. POST THE RULES ON YOUR BLOG
3. WRITE SIX RANDOM THINGS ABOUT YOURSELF
4. TAG SIX PEOPLE AT THE END OF YOUR POST AND LINK TO THEM
5. LET EACH PERSON KNOW THEY ARE TAGGED AND LEAVE A COMMENT ON THEIR BLOG
6. LET THE TAGGER KNOW WHEN YOUR ENTRY IS UP
7. DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN (not actually a rule)