Lola helps me plan a winter break journey...

She goes berserk for large expanses of paper... A few minutes after I took this picture, the little brat punched a hole in the map and ran off in a sprint. Sheesh.

Labels: argentina, chile, lola, maps, patagonia, south america, travel

A couple of days ago I posted a few pictures of some fruit I had recently picked in Virginia. One of my clever students, Chris B., saw an opportunity for some humor, and took one of the photos and added a "LOLcat" caption. He posted this on my Facebook page last night:

Thanks Chris! This made my morning... Literally: I'm LOL.

Labels: humor, lola

Last weekend, I went out to the Virginia countryside to harvest some fruit. Several of my college friends have farms out there, with organic fruit free for the picking each fall.

Just thought I would share a couple of images...

Here's my cat Lola checking out a tarp full of ugly but delicious apples:

Last year, I harvested a huge number of apples and pressed them into cider, and fermented 8 gallons to make hard cider, which was pretty good. Or at least drinkable, if not exactly "good." This year, the orchard at Smithfield Farm was far less fruitful, so I only managed 3 gallons of cider.

The good news is that Orange Springs Farm hosts a mature pear tree that was heavily laden with fruit, and I collected a good sixty pounds or so of pears. Once these ripen, I'll turn them into cider too:


The harvest bounty matches up nicely with our recent cool weather. Fall is my favorite season, and now the leaves are starting to senesce and the nights are crisp and cool. Good sleeping weather. On a field trip this weekend up to Shenandoah National Park, the sumac and the Virginia creeper had already turned scarlet, and the deciduous trees won't be far behind. Happy autumn, everyone!

Labels: lola, plants, travel, virginia

I leave this weekend to begin a two-month trip out west (Montana mainly, but also Grand Canyon and points in between). As I'm prepping for the trip, my cat Lola has been sabotaging my efforts to plan. Though I've reassured her that she'll get along great with my subletter, she is still obsessed with blocking my trip-planning progress.

Here she is lying on the roadmap of Colorado:



And here, covering the "explanation" for a geologic map of the states of the stable interior:



I love that my job allows me summer travel time, and I love that, living in DC, I can get a subletter to take over my rent and cat care during the time I'm away. But I will miss this little furball when I'm on the road. She's a great cat.

Labels: lola, maps, travel

Getting ready for a backpacking trip (to the Blue Ridge), and Lola wants in on the action. These photos aren't posed -- she seriously went over and inserted herself into the backpack belt loop!

This cat cracks me up!

Labels: field trips, lola

Yesterday I was working on some reading for my MSU MSSE class, when Lola called me over. It was a reading day for her too, and she had just opened the most recent National Geographic. "Check this out," she meowed. The magazine had put a one-page story about "designer" mice (genetically modified for research) right across from a cat litter ad, and both the cat and the mouse were looking inward (towards the magazine's fold or "gutter"). This made it appear like they were looking at one another. The advertised cat apparently had other things on its mind than hunting mice, but I thought the overall layout was too funny to be a coincidence. Lola, on the other hand, was disgusted, feeling that the whole composition was disgraceful to catkind.

It reminded me of a time last month when Lola was reading the previous issue of National Geographic. This time, she was intensely reading, sounding out the big words, concentrating hard. I looked over her shoulder and saw this:

As part of that issue's focus on animal intelligence, it was a small photo of a baboon teaching a cat to sit upright. The photographed cat didn't want to sit upright, but Lola thought it was a great idea. For the next several days, she sat upright constantly, reading the New Yorker and Wine Spectator, puffing her meerschaum pipe and looking contemplative. But then she lost interest in sitting upright when she read about fossil ammonites. Admiring their graceful sprials, she promptly curled up into a ball. Immediately, she began purring. "It's much more comforable," she told me. "Ammonites must be smarter than baboons."

I pointed out her lack of exoskeleton. "Ammonites have shells, Lola," I said, admittedly a bit condescendingly. An hour later, I found she had taken over my office wastebasket:

Labels: humor, lola

Yesterday I found my cat Lola pondering a fish fossil from the Eocene Green River Formation. Because she's more of an Appalchian cat, I explained to her that this fish was preserved in flat-lying lacustrine deposits in southwestern Wyoming. The formation is notable for bearing impressions/carbon-films of many species, essentially an entire fossil lake ecosystem. She seemed interested, so I referred her to a travel article I wrote on the topic once for Geotimes. She padded off to read it.

Later, Lola conveyed to me that during a cat nap, she dreamt of her own fossilization in the Green River Formation style:

I replied, as I'm sure you would, that I'm not into the idea of pet cryo-preservation or taxidermy, and that I hoped she'd remain unfossilized for the foreseable future. That made her purr. I also reminded her that most cats don't like water, and hence are unlikely to fossilize in their usual habitat.

Ahh, Photoshop: even better than Facebook for wasting away the hours...

Labels: art, fossils, humor, lola

Labels: blogs, humor, lola, nova

When she sees a geologic map of the eastern U.S., my cat Lola attempts to impress me by lining herself up with the trend of Appalachian structure. While noble in intent, she's not especially accurate. In the photo below, you can tell that she's off by about 20 degrees. Based on this, I conclude that cats have no natural instinct for structural geology. She can't use a Brunton compass, either.

Labels: geology, humor, lola, maryland