He's an evil beast

I walked into the bathroom, as one does, and suddenly stepped on an extremely lumpy thing that hadn't been there a couple of hours earlier. I grabbed a towel bar to balance and not fall--this worked, if by "worked" we mean "strained the arm but did not, in fact, fall."

julian_tiger had knocked yesterday's bottle of bubble bath onto the floor. Ouch. He also woke me this morning by a sustained round of "push things off the dresser."

I'm not speaking to him. [This may last as much as an hour.]

He's an evil beast

I walked into the bathroom, as one does, and suddenly stepped on an extremely lumpy thing that hadn't been there a couple of hours earlier. I grabbed a towel bar to balance and not fall--this worked, if by "worked" we mean "strained the arm but did not, in fact, fall."

julian_tiger had knocked yesterday's bottle of bubble bath onto the floor. Ouch. He also woke me this morning by a sustained round of "push things off the dresser."

I'm not speaking to him. [This may last as much as an hour.]

Pleasant surprises (food and phenology)

cattitude and I celebrated his birthday today by walking in Central Park and then going out for dinner. We'd considered the Botanic(al) Gardens, but both of them were doing Halloween stuff today, and transport looked iffy [1], so Cattitude decided he'd like to just walk around Central Park and enjoy the warm afternoon and surprising amount of green. And such fall colors as have developed thus far, the occasional tree in orange, red, or yellow standing out against the green background [2].

We entered at Columbus Circle and walked north. The Parks Department had decided it had been dry long enough to open the Sheep Meadow; I decided it was warm enough to go barefoot. There are few places I'll go barefoot outdoors in the city, but this is one: the lawn is lush and well-maintained, basically free of glass, rocks, and even acorns. There were some squishy bits underfoot, and my feet got wet, but not excessively so.

What neither of us expected to find was wild strawberries, next to the fence. Cattitude spotted the yellow flower first, and bent down to take a closer look. Yes, the leaves matched. I said it wouldn't last long enough to produce ripe fruit, and then he spotted a bit of bright red. The seeds were still sticking out, in a "this isn't ripe" way, but yes, on the next-to-last day of October, in New York City, there were two developing wild strawberries and one strawberry flower.

No dragonflies, though we looked, nor lilacs.

The Ramble was nice, though we didn't hold still long or have binoculars with us, and saw nothing more surprising than a hermit thrush (the bird I added to my life list earlier this month). By then I was tired, so we sat a bit and read. When I got chilly, we took advantage of our memberships and went into the Museum of Natural History for a (not very good, but much-needed) cup of tea in the basement cafeteria, and the exhibit on new dinosaur discoveries.

If you follow dinosaur news, there won't be any surprises here, though I enjoyed looking at the recent fossil discoveries from Liaoning, China. They have a mix of actual fossils and photographs. The one thing that startled Cattitude wasn't a dinosaur: it was a slow-motion film of a running alligator, whose motion resembled that of a frog hopping rather than of a crocodilian walking. We stopped into the Hall of Vertebrate Origins to look at coelacanths--the exhibit needs updating (it still claims there's only one living species), and I hadn't realized how big the contemporary coelacanth is. The model that's about the size of my tattoo is of an embryonic coelacanth, with yolk sac still attached, taken from the belly of the fish that showed the species to be oviviparous [3].

For dinner, we went to the Silver Swan, because German food is one of his comfort foods. We both ordered a complete dinner--I overestimated how hungry I was--which comes with a choice of several appetizers. I was thinking I'd probably get either the duck pate or the smoked mackerel, but I had to ask what "ochsenmaul salad" was, because I didn't think it could actually involve hitting oxen over the head with hammers.

Not quite. Other end of the ox. "Ochsenmaul" is oxtail. I said something like "that sounds weird, I have to try it." It was weird and good, a slightly vinegary rare meat served over a bit of lettuce, with a little raw onion and a couple of tomato wedges. ('Twould have been a better salad in tomato season; as was, the only thing wrong with it was that there wasn't enough salad-stuff with the meat.) After one bite, I said "you'll like this," and gave Cattitude some. He did, enough so that I gave him probably about a third of it. He said it tasted like tongue, and we discussed the possibilities of a tongue sandwich at the Second Avenue Deli, though it wouldn't be like his Mom used to make--she served it with a sauce based on crabapple jelly.

[1] Getting from our house to the NY Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, involves two buses, and getting downtown for dinner afterward might have been tricky; the TA was messing with service on the best train line for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

[2] The tree directly across the street from the Indian Road entrance to our building was red this morning.

[3] They lay eggs, but carry them in their bodies until they hatch; once the egg is laid, the mother is providing protection but no further nutrition, unlike a placental mammal.

Pleasant surprises (food and phenology)

cattitude and I celebrated his birthday today by walking in Central Park and then going out for dinner. We'd considered the Botanic(al) Gardens, but both of them were doing Halloween stuff today, and transport looked iffy [1], so Cattitude decided he'd like to just walk around Central Park and enjoy the warm afternoon and surprising amount of green. And such fall colors as have developed thus far, the occasional tree in orange, red, or yellow standing out against the green background [2].

We entered at Columbus Circle and walked north. The Parks Department had decided it had been dry long enough to open the Sheep Meadow; I decided it was warm enough to go barefoot. There are few places I'll go barefoot outdoors in the city, but this is one: the lawn is lush and well-maintained, basically free of glass, rocks, and even acorns. There were some squishy bits underfoot, and my feet got wet, but not excessively so.

What neither of us expected to find was wild strawberries, next to the fence. Cattitude spotted the yellow flower first, and bent down to take a closer look. Yes, the leaves matched. I said it wouldn't last long enough to produce ripe fruit, and then he spotted a bit of bright red. The seeds were still sticking out, in a "this isn't ripe" way, but yes, on the next-to-last day of October, in New York City, there were two developing wild strawberries and one strawberry flower.

No dragonflies, though we looked, nor lilacs.

The Ramble was nice, though we didn't hold still long or have binoculars with us, and saw nothing more surprising than a hermit thrush (the bird I added to my life list earlier this month). By then I was tired, so we sat a bit and read. When I got chilly, we took advantage of our memberships and went into the Museum of Natural History for a (not very good, but much-needed) cup of tea in the basement cafeteria, and the exhibit on new dinosaur discoveries.

If you follow dinosaur news, there won't be any surprises here, though I enjoyed looking at the recent fossil discoveries from Liaoning, China. They have a mix of actual fossils and photographs. The one thing that startled Cattitude wasn't a dinosaur: it was a slow-motion film of a running alligator, whose motion resembled that of a frog hopping rather than of a crocodilian walking. We stopped into the Hall of Vertebrate Origins to look at coelacanths--the exhibit needs updating (it still claims there's only one living species), and I hadn't realized how big the contemporary coelacanth is. The model that's about the size of my tattoo is of an embryonic coelacanth, with yolk sac still attached, taken from the belly of the fish that showed the species to be oviviparous [3].

For dinner, we went to the Silver Swan, because German food is one of his comfort foods. We both ordered a complete dinner--I overestimated how hungry I was--which comes with a choice of several appetizers. I was thinking I'd probably get either the duck pate or the smoked mackerel, but I had to ask what "ochsenmaul salad" was, because I didn't think it could actually involve hitting oxen over the head with hammers.

Not quite. Other end of the ox. "Ochsenmaul" is oxtail. I said something like "that sounds weird, I have to try it." It was weird and good, a slightly vinegary rare meat served over a bit of lettuce, with a little raw onion and a couple of tomato wedges. ('Twould have been a better salad in tomato season; as was, the only thing wrong with it was that there wasn't enough salad-stuff with the meat.) After one bite, I said "you'll like this," and gave Cattitude some. He did, enough so that I gave him probably about a third of it. He said it tasted like tongue, and we discussed the possibilities of a tongue sandwich at the Second Avenue Deli, though it wouldn't be like his Mom used to make--she served it with a sauce based on crabapple jelly.

[1] Getting from our house to the NY Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, involves two buses, and getting downtown for dinner afterward might have been tricky; the TA was messing with service on the best train line for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

[2] The tree directly across the street from the Indian Road entrance to our building was red this morning.

[3] They lay eggs, but carry them in their bodies until they hatch; once the egg is laid, the mother is providing protection but no further nutrition, unlike a placental mammal.