Obi Smells My Sandwich

I walked into the living room with my freshly made sandwich and placed it on the end table. Obi was so cute sleeping in the chair that I turned on my camera to take his picture. I accidentally woke him up (poor baby) and that was a bad move on my part....

Damn that woman, (yawn) waking me up...

Hmm, do I smell something?

Oh yeah, I just got a whiff of a tofurky sandwich!

At this point I had to put the camera down and go save my sandwich, so sorry, no more pictures.

OWL!

Over the last couple of years we have noticed an increase in owl vocalizations in our neighborhood, primarily at night as one would expect. When we first moved to this neighborhood (15 years ago?) I don't remember any owl sounds at all. So imagine my surprise one recent morning as I was trying to rush out the back door on my way to work when I looked out my kitchen window and saw an owl sitting on the bird feeder post.

(taken through the screen and glass)

I opened my back door to be able to take a better picture and he/she flew to the tree and looked back at me.

This is an enlarged as I could get the picture without it getting too pixelated.

Although several species of owl migrate through South Carolina there are only four species of owl that live and breed here year round. Below is a brief description of the barred owl which matches this fellow perfectly, including the  "who-who-who-who, who-who-who-whoowha" sound we hear every night. (It's only about 7:15 pm and an owl is hooting right now!) The excerpt comes from  hiltonpond.org. Bill Hilton is well known in this area, was a local high school biology teacher, and runs The Hilton Pond Center which serves to conserve animals and plants in this area and allows for study and research. In fact when I was studying to be a biology teacher I subbed for his classes for three weeks when he went on an expedition to Australia.

Barred Owl
Of all owls found in the state, the Barred Owl (Strix varia) is seen most often because it is "crepuscular." This means it is active in twilight hours of dusk and dawn, and sometimes in broad daylight. Named for its breast markings, this large owl is the only Carolina species with dark eyes; all the rest have yellow irises. Barred Owls also have the most recognizable call, a "who-who-who-who, who-who-who-whoowha" that most people translate into "who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-all." Barred Owls are especially vocal during courtship when, in the words of Allen Eckert (The Owls of North America, Weathervane Books), there are "specialized calls made with relative infrequency which virtually defy written description. Some are coarse, guttural, and, to human ears, almost uncouth in character. Others are much like the fierce, hair-raising shrieks of mating alley cats. There are deep chucklings, harsh laughing sounds, maniacal gibberings and gabblings, disconsolate mutterings, howls, and yells. Occasionally there will even be a decidedly disconcerting humanlike scream of pure agony." Such vivid description explains why my friend Russ Rogers Jr. barely slept for the three months it took a Barred Owl pair in his Fort Mill backyard to court and then raise offspring. Barred Owls are most common in wooded bottomlands and swamps.

This is what the owl sounds like:

Found Two Videos

Just before I started growing my sabzi for Norooz Cyrus (and probably his mom and dad) came for a visit. I must have taken a couple of videos of Cyrus toward the end of that weekend that got in with my 'growing the sabzi' pictures and found them today. In the first video I catch the tail end of a game he and his Baba had been playing and clearly Cyrus wasn't ready for the game to be over! In the second one we were just hanging out on the deck and at one point he keeps saying 'bin'. You'll see that eventually I figured it out. Notice too the condition of the deck; it has since gotten a nice coat of stain on the floor boards and paint on the railings.

Norooz 2010

Two weeks ago we celebrated Persian New Year or Norooz (or Now Ruz.) Anahita flew in from Cali and we drove down from the Hill to meet at Shirin and Gabriel's house in Athens. Since Tita's visit was short we spent basically every minute together as a family.

Saturday's weather was predicted to be the only reliable good weather day so the women took the little bubsy to Memorial Park. The men? Bah, probably in front of the computer or a book.

Watcha doin? Silly question.



The master slider no longer requires any assistance.

Tita decides to see if she can still cross the bars. Look at that expression of determination!

She can still do it...

... but boy does it hurt your hands when you no longer weigh 65 lbs.

Meanwhile the little man gets a booboo on his knee and needs some TLC.

I'm trying to poise them for a picture and he's still talking about his knee.

Back home Anahita spends some quality time with Cyrus. This video is so sweet.

When Cyrus says no, he means no.

Since my birthday was the Friday before Norooz I was allowed to choose the restaurant for dinner -- THE GRIT it is! Here we are happy and full leaving The Grit.

Remember that game Barrel of Monkeys? Cyrus was teaching Tita how he likes to play it which probably differs more than a little from the original instructions.

At Cyrus' nap time we all run to the kitchen table to play Catan -- it's understood. Tita hasn't played it since the last time she was home and gets some reminder tips from Shirin.

After Cyrus' nap it was raining so we went mall walking. We noticed a little train driving around on the bottom floor of the mall so here are Cyrus and Shirin waiting for the train to circle back. (Notice his little hand resting on her leg.)

Look at Shirin's hands. So did she learn that "Where is the train" maneuver from Cyrus or did he learn it from her?

Tita kept walking around. I guess little trains aren't that exciting to people from Californina.

There's the train! It made all the appropriate whistling and chugging sounds.

It's already heading away. Boy, all that waiting and it's gone so fast.

I missed most of the wrestling, but Cyrus has learned a very interesting maneuver to get out of a tight spot:

We finally got down to the business of celebrating Norooz. Our haft sinn table was left surprisingly intact. Cyrus was very curious and we let him fondle things as I was putting the table together, but once the table was finished Gabriel kept telling him it was Baba's table and not to touch it. I never thought he'd be able to resist all the goodies on the table but he did. What a good boy. Notice the sabzi in the back left corner of the table that I posted about earlier.

Here is Saeed getting out his wallet to present Eidi - the crisp new dollar bills for the 'children'.

Cyrus says, "Hey, where's mine?"

Look at that smile!

Family portrait.

The next part of Norooz is the children "kissing the hands of the parents" tradition, one that I have always felt very uncomfortable with. The meaning behind it is wonderful, however, as it symbolizes the children's love and gratitude to the parents for their loving care through the year. For us now it's more hugging and thanking and expressing terms of endearment, something Cyrus really picked up on immediately. I know he couldn't have understood what was going on and what was about to happen, but somehow he sensed this was a very warm fuzzy moment and made the rounds hugging everybody.

I missed him hugging Tita but his little grin here at the end is priceless.

Animal, Vegetable, Miserable

Sad Easter Bunny

Op-Ed contributor to the New York Times, Gary Steiner, wrote an article titled "Animal, Vegetable, Miserable" that I will reproduce here. It appeared on Nov. 21, 2009, so, pre-Thanksgiving, but Easter is a meat-heavy, animal killing, animal harming (buying rabbits as pets on a whim) religious holiday as well. It's funny that the Easter bunny escapes the horrific destiny the Thanksgiving turkey suffers. The Easter lamb and the Easter ham aren't so lucky. Gary Steiner:

LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner? Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)

None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways. Some suggest that human beings but not animals are made in God’s image and hence stand in much closer proximity to the divine than any non-human animal; according to this line of thought, animals were made expressly for the sake of humans and may be used without scruple to satisfy their needs and desires. There is ample support in the Bible and in the writings of Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for this pointedly anthropocentric way of devaluing animals.

Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us capable of suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively exceeds the suffering of any non-human animal. Philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who is famous for having based moral status not on linguistic or rational capacities but rather on the capacity to suffer, argue that because animals are incapable of abstract thought, they are imprisoned in an eternal present, have no sense of the extended future and hence cannot be said to have an interest in continued existence.

The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of reasoning came from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story “The Letter Writer,” in which he called the slaughter of animals the “eternal Treblinka.” The story depicts an encounter between a man and a mouse. The man, Herman Gombiner, contemplates his place in the cosmic scheme of things and concludes that there is an essential connection between his own existence as “a child of God” and the “holy creature” scuffling about on the floor in front of him. Surely, he reflects, the mouse has some capacity for thought; Gombiner even thinks that the mouse has the capacity to share love and gratitude with him. Not merely a means for the satisfaction of human desires, nor a mere nuisance to be exterminated, this tiny creature possesses the same dignity that any conscious being possesses. In the face of that inherent dignity, Gombiner concludes, the human practice of delivering animals to the table in the form of food is abhorrent and inexcusable.

Many of the people who denounce the ways in which we treat animals in the course of raising them for human consumption never stop to think about this profound contradiction. Instead, they make impassioned calls for more “humanely” raised meat. Many people soothe their consciences by purchasing only free-range fowl and eggs, blissfully ignorant that “free range” has very little if any practical significance. Chickens may be labeled free-range even if they’ve never been outside or seen a speck of daylight in their entire lives. And that Thanksgiving turkey? Even if it is raised “free range,” it still lives a life of pain and confinement that ends with the butcher’s knife.

How can intelligent people who purport to be deeply concerned with animal welfare and respectful of life turn a blind eye to such practices? And how can people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption? The simple answer is that most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they did care, they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at once a very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the consumption of animal products of all kinds. The easy part of this consists in seeing clearly what ethics requires and then just plain doing it. The difficult part: You just haven’t lived until you’ve tried to function as a strict vegan in a meat-crazed society. What were once the most straightforward activities become a constant ordeal. You might think that it’s as simple as just removing meat, eggs and dairy products from your diet, but it goes a lot deeper than that.

To be a really strict vegan is to strive to avoid all animal products, and this includes materials like leather, silk and wool, as well as a panoply of cosmetics and medications. The more you dig, the more you learn about products you would never stop to think might contain or involve animal products in their production — like wine and beer (isinglass, a kind of gelatin derived from fish bladders, is often used to “fine,” or purify, these beverages), refined sugar (bone char is sometimes used to bleach it) or Band-Aids (animal products in the adhesive). Just last week I was told that those little comfort strips on most razor blades contain animal fat. To go down this road is to stare headlong into an abyss that, to paraphrase Nietzsche, will ultimately stare back at you.

The challenges faced by a vegan don’t end with the nuts and bolts of material existence. You face quite a few social difficulties as well, perhaps the chief one being how one should feel about spending time with people who are not vegans. Is it O.K. to eat dinner with people who are eating meat? What do you say when a dining companion says, “I’m really a vegetarian — I don’t eat red meat at home.” (I’ve heard it lots of times, always without any prompting from me.) What do you do when someone starts to grill you (so to speak) about your vegan ethics during dinner? (Wise vegans always defer until food isn’t around.) Or when someone starts to lodge accusations to the effect that you consider yourself morally superior to others, or that it is ridiculous to worry so much about animals when there is so much human suffering in the world? (Smile politely and ask them to pass the seitan.)

Let me be candid: By and large, meat-eaters are a self-righteous bunch. The number of vegans I know personally is ... five. And I have been a vegan for almost 15 years, having been a vegetarian for almost 15 before that.

Five. I have lost more friends than this over arguments about animal ethics. One lapidary conclusion to be drawn here is that people take deadly seriously the prerogative to use animals as sources of satisfaction. Not only for food, but as beasts of burden, as raw materials and as sources of captive entertainment — which is the way animals are used in zoos, circuses and the like. These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are: so many forms of subjection, servitude and — in the case of killing animals for human consumption and other purposes — outright murder.

People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that my cat can’t appreciate Schubert’s late symphonies and can’t perform syllogistic logic does not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled to treat him as a commodity with minuscule market value. We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are scarcely aware to view non-human animals as resources we are entitled to employ in whatever ways we see fit in order to satisfy our needs and desires. Yes, there are animal welfare laws. But these laws have been formulated by, and are enforced by, people who proceed from the proposition that animals are fundamentally inferior to human beings. At best, these laws make living conditions for animals marginally better than they would be otherwise — right up to the point when we send them to the slaughterhouse.

Think about that when you’re picking out your free-range turkey, which has absolutely nothing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. All it ever had was a short and miserable life, thanks to us intelligent, compassionate humans.

~ Gary Steiner, a professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, is the author of “Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status and Kinship.”

Thank you Gary Steiner.

Sabzi And Goldfish

Goldfish are one of the symbols of Persian New Year. The decorative table Persians lay out includes goldfish swimming in a fish bowl which is very beautiful. The meaning of the goldfish varies but basically it represents a happy life full of activity and movement. Fortunately I'm not the only one who thinks this is no way to treat the poor little goldfish who is swimming alone in a very small glass bowl and then gets (typically) thrown away. There's a website for people who care about this issue and suggest a kinder way: click here. 

Here's our goldfish! He looks a bit confused but at least he's not suffering.

One of the other things gracing the Persian New Year table is a big plate of sprouted wheat (sabzi.) It's meaning is easy to see: fresh growth and prosperity. I have grown sabzi before and often have some trouble (one year Rainbow ate all the green shoots) but decided to try it again. This year I wrote Saeed's sister, Nahid, for specific directions. She very sweetly wrote a long list of directions which I tried to follow to the letter.

Step 1: soak wheat in water for three days in a warm place. This was challenging as it was snowing outside and we keep the house at 65 degrees, so we put it on the mantle of the fireplace.

I also had to keep Obi from drinking the water.

Step 2: drain the water, spread the sprouted seeds on a plate and cover with a moist cheesecloth. The hardest part of this step was finding the cheesecloth in the store.

Step 3: sprinkle the cloth with water to keep moist and keep checking the sprouts for green shoots and...

... make sure they get plenty of sunlight. It was gray and miserable outside so we put the plates out of harm's way (cats' way) and set up the florescent light.

Step 4: once the green shoots are poking up through the cheesecloth remove it.

There's always a show off in every group!

Step 5: keep warm and exposed to light and sprinkle with water, but not too much.

A week later : WOOT!

Some mothers just won't let go of their kids.

Uh oh, is that mold?

A few days later and I couldn't deny it any more. Waaaaa... this has happened before. Sigh..... need to use less water next year. Sorry Nahid; you did say not too much water.

Once the weather got sunny and warm I put them out to try to encourage the growth of the shoot and discourage the mold, but mold is a tenacious beast. The plate on the left isn't looking so good.

Step 6: tie a pretty red ribbon around the sabzi.

Cats are also tenacious beasts. Hey Frosty! Quit untying my ribbon!

Hey Chappu! Quit eating the sabzi!

So even gray weather, cold weather, mold, and cats still couldn't completely thwart my project. We'll be taking the winning sabzi to Shirin and Gabriel's house where Tita will be joining us to celebrate new year. Thanks Nahid and...

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Hangin Out With Cyrus

A few weeks ago Cyrus came to visit and we had the best time together. He forces me to slow down and appreciate every rock, leaf, and sweet gum ball right along with him.

Obi, on the other hand, found a spot between two chairs to hide. You can see him alert and listening to Cyrus who's on the other side of the chair.

While Shirin and Gabriel were gone Cyrus and I just hung out together outside. He discovered something very interesting between the bricks in the stairs by our front door. (Yes, that's a little pile of leftover snow.)

No honey, you shouldn't pick the red berries off the bush. (Somehow a few accidentally got picked off anyway.)

That curved step behind him used to be his arch nemesis, but now he walks over it like it's not even there.

The best thing ever, a pile of stones. (Grandma yawns a bit here.)

Last summer Saeed carefully pulled Cyrus around in this garden cart. Now he can crawl into it himself in order to throw out each little sweet gum ball...

... and crawl out...

... by himself.

He found the bag of bird seeds Saeed left out from when he filled the feeders. It becomes Cyrus' duty to carry it to the feeders to do the same.

He is so fascinated by those sunflower seeds.

Cyrus, what are...

... you doing? And this chair was JUUUUST right.

When Shirin and Gabriel came home they caught us sitting in the leaves in the sun doing absolutely nothing other than sitting in the leaves in the sun. It felt so good.

The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.

When your arms aren't long enough you have to just go right in after it.

Got it!

I hope Cyrus has inherited some of his mommy's genes for art.

Oh Yeah! Looks like he's got it.

I assure you that my grandson is anatomically correct (as opposed to Barbie) but I have photo-shopped in some extra thick water in these bath scenes to camouflage the proof of that. It seems kind of ridiculous, but I heard about some grandparents who got arrested for photographs they took of their little toddler granddaughters in the bath tub. The store who developed the pictures called the police. So, Cyrus has been photo-neutered.

Cyrus has learned to wash himself...

... and to 'wash his face' while the water comes rinsing down so it doesn't get in his eyes.

I love bathtub baby pictures. They just look so....    clean!

Kissing the turtle.

All done!

Cyrus loves to watch himself so this video was nothing more than an attempt to record him so he could 'watch the baby'.


I was watching Cyrus and Saeed for quite a while from the kitchen window. When I decided to record them, Saeed, unaware of my presence, decided he'd had enough. Cyrus, at first, doesn't want to come in and goes back out to the feeder. But soon you hear him say "In, in, in, in" and in he comes.


Following the little man around.


Did I also enjoy stones when I was little? Must have, but I only remember enjoying biology.



Cyrus notices Obi sunning himself by the door.


I love the determined little boy who wants to bring the seeds to the birds. It sounds like he keeps saying "Wadee" which is the way he pronounces "Frosty"... so I'm a little confused by what he was repeating.


Cyrus is in heaven with his seeds and bird feeder: