Ten Days of Little Celebrations – December 2016

I decided to choose the little celebrations I looked in December that were non-traditional. There were four groupings:

Classes

I thoroughly enjoyed a 2-day class on aquatic macroinvertebrates last week. It’s been almost two years since I too anything that was more than a few hours in duration….and a long time since I had been in a lab. I celebrated the subject matter and the experience that reminded me a lot of my undergraduate days.

There are two Coursera courses that I celebrated – linearly since I was not taking them concurrently: Osteoarcheology and Anatomy of the Abdomen and Pelvis. They are probably among the most challenging Coursera courses I’ve taken…but I’m so interested in the topics that I’m celebrating their availability and that I have the time to dedicate to them.

Food

I volunteered at the Howard County Conservancy’s Natural Holiday Sale and celebrated the huge variety of cookies to choose from. I like trying different kinds of cookies – never having enough time to try all the cookie recipes that ‘look good.’

I made the Paleo Chocolate Pudding (made with avocado!) and wow! I’ll make it again as part of our celebration at the beginning of 2017.

Backyard Birds

I heard an owl in the forest behind out house just before it was light enough to see it…and celebrated knowing it was there.

A red-tailed hawk visited our backyard again. I celebrated that it did…and that it didn’t stick around long enough to scare away the birds that visit bird bath and feeder.

Out and About

The most Christmasy items on the list of little celebrations are a walk around Brookside Gardens’ holiday lights and the poinsettia display at Rawlings Observatory.

And I always celebrate seeing Bald Eagles at Conwingo. The birds – rare not so long ago – are back in large enough numbers that it’s possible to seem them often. Something to celebrate!

Going to Class in December

The community college in the neighboring county hosted a Freshwater Benthic Macroinvertebrate Workshop on Monday and Tuesday this week. It was two full days of day of taking small critters (preserved in alcohol) out of vials, putting them in a small Petri dish, and looking at them under a microscope. There were two lab rooms full of student – most teachers or Master Naturalists or environment monitoring related non-profits or government organizations. I’d signed up as soon as I heard about it….a great opportunity to see a lot of specimens and improve my ability to identify them for upcoming field trips with students in the spring.

It’s been a long time since I was in a lab like this – since the 70s!  I liked that there were actual chairs with backs rather than stools. I can remember classes held in labs and being very uncomfortable both from the hardness of the seat and not being able to lean back at all. We also had a microscope for every student; when I was in school we always had to share.

Some of the things I saw, I won’t see on the field trips because we don’t have enough magnification: oval shaped gills (easily detached when preserved) or comb-like spines (that look like false eyelashes) that distinguish certain families of mayflies (Ephemeroptera).

I learned about Macroinvertbrates.org and am looking forward to seeing its continued development. The family-level key we used in class is also online. Generally, we only classify to order on the field trips.

In the foyer of the building – where we registered and a table was filled with morning caffeine urns...and donuts that called all of us to jettison our diets…there was a display case of bones, which dovetailed nicely with the osteoarcheology class I just finished on Coursera. There were pathologies (like arthritis) and young bones (with the defined areas near the ends where growth was occurring).

I enjoyed the course tremendously and have signed up for another anatomy related course from the same university. I seem to be focused on biology related topics this December!

Ten days of Little Celebrations – November 2016

So many little celebrations – it was hard to choose just 10!

There is always a lot of good food in November:

Thanksgiving was celebrated with our tradition of brisket cooked in the crock pot…but I enjoyed two new sides even more: a slaw made with Napa Cabbage, beet noodles and crystalized ginger (homemade cranberry relish and olive oil dressing) and butternut squash mousse (following the recipe for pumpkin mousse found here – sort of…I substituted unsweetened coconut for the banana).

Graham crackers have become my ‘comfort food’ for my afternoon snack or in the evening. I like the ‘originals’ the best and celebrate that they are still available!

Pomegranates are in season. They are so beautiful and their season meshes very well with Thanksgiving and Christmas. They have become part of my tradition in those big celebrations.

Being home again after travelling was worth celebrating too:

A red-tailed hawk visited our backyard after we returned from New Mexico and I managed to get a picture when the bird sat for a bit in our tulip poplar tree. I celebrated my new camera’s ability to get the picture…and that the bird was around. But I don’t want it to stay around all the time because I like the little birds that come to the bird bath and the feeder!

The Modern World, Part Two is the Coursera course I am viewing this month. I’d taken Part I way back in 2013! I celebrated when I found this one in the Coursera catalog because I’ve always thought my basic knowledge of history since 1900s was patchy.

The trip to New Mexico had so many celebrations…but I managed to pick just 5:

Birds that I had not seen (or maybe had not noticed) before worth celebration: Grebes and Brewers Blackbirds and Pyrrhuloxia to name a few. I should count each new (to me) bird is a little celebration all by itself!

Sandhill Cranes silhouetted by the sunrise…the image, the luck to catch it, just being at Bosque del Apache.

Wild Turkeys in action. Turkey being stately is one think…turkey running down the road to catch up with their cohort…I celebrated their quick analysis of their situation and seeing them move in hurry!

Macro Photography of Cactus. I haven’t gotten around to posting the pictures yet…but I celebrated how well my camera worked in the small botanical garden at Bosque del Apache.

Petroglyph National Monument. I had read a book before I left for New Mexico about petroglyphs in the southwest and celebrated being the place (near Albuquerque) to see some. They’ll be a topic of an upcoming post as well.

Learning Log - April 2016

The majority of learning in April was experiential rather than formal course work although it seems that I always have at least one course in progress or scheduled!

I learned about mealworm cookies and Fresh Paper (for keeping strawberries fresh longer) while during my volunteer gig at my county’s STEM Fair and

Realized that I was glad cooking for 12 people was not the norm for me (it is quite a bit more work that cooking for 2-4) and

Was pleased that I didn’t panic when an opossum carcass turned up beside the stream where 7^th graders were going to appear to search for macro invertebrates in a few minutes (no shovels were available so we pushed the stinking mess into a bucket and dumped it into some nearby brambles).

I did take a macro photography class via Creative Live: The Art of Seeing: Macro Techniques for Flowers and Plants with Frans Lanting. I wanted the course on the day it was broadcast (and thus ‘free’) and then have been experimenting with selective focus since then. One of my first attempts is the picture below. It is fun to ‘fool’ the autofocus on my Point and spShoot camera (a Canon Powershot SX710 HS) into creating blurs in the foreground and background.

I also finished the second unit of the Soul Beliefs course available via Coursera from Daniel Ogilvie and Leonard Hamilton at Rutgers. I’ll do the third and last unit after the spring field trip season is done – maybe start in mid-June.

Learning Log – March 2016

March was a huge month for classes...both online and traditional classroom/field work.

The 6 modules of Coursera’s Big History were a whirl wind discussion beginning with the Big Bang to the present and then initiating the importance of our understanding Big History as we contemplate our actions into the future. This is unlike any history course I’ve taken before in that it integrates a lot of disciplines rather than the traditional view of history. In Big History - wars and memorization of dates are way down on the scale of importance. Instead thinking about increases in complexity and energy flows are the drivers of change….and human history is in the context of the universe rather than insular to our species. I still have some references from the course to read/view but I was so fascinated by the material that I did all the lectures in March!

I finished 9 of the 11 modules of Coursera’s Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences Unit 2: Belief Systems. This is a continuation of Unit 1 which I finished in February. This part of the course is delving more into neuroscience and psychology. I’ve enjoyed it.

The Howard County Conservancy provided volunteer naturalist training for the spring field trips that will beginning in April for pre-school through middle school students. There was quite a range of topics: rocks, history of the places where we hike, insects, habitats, watersheds, literacy, seasons, and Bioblitz. In each of the 7 sessions, there was a classroom segment and then a hike to demonstrate the types of things we would do with the students. We looked at macroinvertebrates in the stream, learned to use iNaturalist, explored the hiking routes in detail, and sometimes pretended we were students. The first field trip is next Monday….so we’ll see how prepared we all are very soon!

Then there were all kinds of experiential learning going on – here are my top three for March:

Observing the effect of the combination of pine bark beetles, tree age, salt mist, and big storms at Chincoteague

Noting the large number of Tundra Swans at Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge and Snow Geese at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge

Seeing two organisms I knew about from books and pictures but had not seen in the wild: the hemlock woolly anelgid (see previous post here) and a wood duck (more images coming in an upcoming post).

Learning Log – February 2016

There are so many ways that we learn new things. Since I started logging something new I learn every day – I am more conscious of how varied what I’m learning and the way I am learning it really is.

Observation is a way to learn new things. Birds were very active in February in our area and two ‘new to me’ observations were mourning doves making and geese climbing from open water up onto ice!

Experience. Several items on my learning log fit this category: 1) I started experimenting with not wearing my glasses and discovered that I rarely need them when I am working at my computer…and the neck/shoulder discomfort I had started to feel sometimes later in the day has completely disappeared. 2) Another learning experience this month was having a thyroid nodule biopsy; it was not bad but I really am not keen to have another one. 3) I learned to use a laminator (to make a tree identification guide more durable). It isn’t a big thing but was ‘new to me.’

Books. I started looked at the Hathi Trust collection of online books; there are so many items there is it overwhelming; botanical prints are my first ‘theme’ for browsing. On the physical book side, I read several books about Wild Life Refuges and have already started applying what I read to vacation planning; we’re going to visit the 4 National Wildlife Refuges on the Eastern Shore (of Maryland and Virginia) in March: Eastern Neck, Blackwater, Prime Hook and Chincoteague. In the Internet Archive arena my theme for browsing in February was ‘wallpaper’ with particular focus on wallpaper catalogs from the year I was born!

Udemy’s Photography Masterclass: Your Complete Guide to Photography). I finished as much of the class as I was interested in. I learned a few things but realized that I am spoiled by the quality of the courses I’ve taken on Coursera and Creative Live. The 4 Udemy courses I have taken are just not up to the same standard in terms of production or content.

Coursera’s Soul Beliefs (Unit 1). I finished the 11 ‘weeks’ of lectures for this portion of the course and will start on the Unit 2 lectures in March.

Coming up in March – there are already some other types of learning coming up: travel and ‘live’ classes.

Learning Log – January 2016

January was a month of varied learning opportunities.

Udemy. I finished one course: Unearthing the Trojan War: The Life of Heinrich Schliemann

And started another (Photography Masterclass: Your Complete Guide to Photography).

I prefer the Coursera type courses over Udemy. The Udemy courses have less depth and the range of materials is limited to videos (often voice over charts)…without a robust list to references outside the course.

Lecture. I went to a one-hour lecture about Black Bears in Maryland and enjoyed it thoroughly. The presenter had a trunk of materials to pass around. One was a pelt of a largish black bear (obtained from a road kill); it took two people to hold and examine. I realized that I fall back into my long standing habits as a student in the classroom very easily: taking notes to pay attention – it works for me and always has. Now I’m prepared to trivia questions about black bears. Did you know that in the fall bears need to eat at least 20,000 calories per day to prepare for hibernations?

Coursera. I’ve finished 2 weeks of the Soul Beliefs course. This is the first in a series of courses which I will make my way through over the next few months. This is a good time of year to take courses since the weather encourages indoors activities.

Raptor Free Flight. My favorite experiential learning in January was the Raptor Free Flight at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. We saw Harris’s Hawks, a Barn Owl, Chihuahuan Ravens, a Great Horned Owl, and a Prairie Falcon. The Harris’s Hawks live and hunt in small groups; their coordinated efforts while hunting are quite different than the solitary owls and falcon.

Learning Log – January 2016

December was full of learning opportunities - surprising with no Coursera classes!

Udemy. I discovered a new-to-me source of free or inexpensive short courses. The first one was referenced in the Ancient Egypt course I’d completed via Coursera in November. The courses I finished in December were:

Blue: a symposium exploring aspects of life in Ancient Egypt

Napoleon in Egypt

I have already started two more in January:

Unearthing the Trojan War: The Life of Heinrich Schliemann

Photography Masterclass: Your complete Guide to Photography (I got it when it was on sale for $10)

The Udemy courses tend to be chart sets with a lecturer…not as many references or extended reading that usually accompanies the Coursera course. Still – I enjoyed the topics and will explore more of the courses they offer.

Travel to Hawaii. The biggest source of learning experience in December was traveling to Hawaii. I had never been to anyplace like it and the length/complexity of the travel was more too. There were all kinds of tangential topics too – like learning about Dengue Fever (they were having an outbreak while we were there).

Looking forward into January – I am set for more courses because there is not so much going on otherwise. Along with the two Udemy couses, I’m starting one from Coursera as well: Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences – Historical Foundations.