This semester is almost over and Summer is about to start! I love Summer!
Summer is my favorite season for a variety of reasons: it’s my birthday season, it’s warm, there’s no school, and there’s so many possibilities!
This Summer, I’m going to be studying abroad in Italy, through the program ARTIS, which is very exciting! I can’t wait for Summer to start! I’m so excited!
Right now, it’s that awkward time of year where the mornings and evenings are extremely cold and windy, yet the middle of the day is warm and humid.
Every morning that I wake up, I have no idea what to wear. Mother Nature, make up your mind already! Do you want it to be cold or warm? Just pick one!
But please pick warm…I don’t like cold weather.
Photo by Susan Hanson
Last weekend my Nature & the Quest for Meaning class had a camping trip in Medina, Texas.
We spent a few hours at the river and I wore a tank top but forgot to put on some sunscreen.
Let’s just say that aloe vera is my best friend right now.
Photo by Susan Hanson
A few weeks ago, my Nature & the Quest for Meaning had a picnic during class at the Crook Park next to the San Marcos Nature Center and across the street from Herbert’s Taco Hut. That’s the same park that the Terry Scholars have adopted and that we keep clean on a regular basis through the Adopt-a-Spot program!
It’s a really lovely park and there’s an area that’s kind of hidden with picnic tables and a cool-looking bridge. There’s also a tree swing that you could use to swing into the river.
It was a pretty nice break from regular class.
Photo by Susan Hanson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Written by Mark Twain | Illustrated by Raymond Sheppard
A few days ago, Dianne Odegard came to my Nature & the Quest for Meaning class to represent Bat Conversation International from batcon.org and present about bats and the many myths that surround them.
Diane began her presentation with an informative PowerPoint presentation. She showed an impressive amount of varieties of bats, with more in Texas, with 33 species, than anywhere else in the United States. The smallest kind of bat is the “bumblebee” bat and the largest is a “flying fox,” or fruit bat, with an impressive 7-foot wingspan.
She also showed bats in the media, including in literature such as Mark Twain’s biography illustrating Huck and Becky running from bats in the forest. She explained that Mark Twain had lived near a bat cave and was very fond of the animal so he incorporated it into his work.
She explained just about everything about bats including their reproduction. Bats are the slowest-reproducing mammals for their size and only give birth to about two or four pups at a time. Usually though, a bat will only have a single pup. Although bats will swarm together in caves, mothers only allow their own pup to feed from themselves and can recognize their pup from its distinct cry and smell.
After presenting the Powerpoint presentation, Diane asked us all to write bat haikus in groups of two. We partnered up and wrote some bat poetry. After we shared a few of our words aloud, she asked us to email them to our professor so that she could post them on the Bat Conversation International Website.
If you don’t know by now, my favorite video game of all time right now is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the PC, Xbox360, and Playstation 3. I personally play Skyrim on the Xbox360 as I don’t own a Playstation3 and don’t care for playing video games on the computer. I am such a fan of the Elder Scrolls video games because of their attention to detail and attempts to create realistic, thriving, natural worlds.
Skyrim is an open-world role-playing fantasy game, which hits many of my favorite things about video games. I love role-playing video games, fantasy games, and games with lots of exploration and open worlds. Skyrim is a massive open world that allows its players to explore to their heart’s content and do whatever they please. While there are plots to delve into and goals to complete, the speed is left completely to the player and all barriers are down, allowing the player to go anywhere at any time and do anything. So many times I find myself simply exploring the countryside and scaling mountains just to enjoy the scenery and see what’s out there.
One of my favorite things about Skyrim is the vast amount of wildlife found roaming the open lands and the realism involved with them. The Elder Scrolls team tries to create believable worlds within their video games, so they spend the time to create a working ecosystem complete with prey and predators. When exploring the lands, you’ll come across deer grazing in the woods, elk venturing the tundra, and bears hunting them down. The animals live their own lives and make sense in the space around them. Not only can you see these animals and simply spend time with them or follow them around, you can also chase and hunt them down, ride them, fight alongside them, battle them, skin their fur, eat their meat, wear their hides, collect their claws, cook them in a stew, and mash their teeth into a powder to use in potions, and that’s only the beginning of what you can do!
The Elder Scrolls series always aims to create living, breathing, believable worlds filled with lore and history, so they allow the player to do almost anything they can imagine. This wide array of possibilities really helps bring the world of Skyrim to life and helps add believability to the animals and wildlife. The animals are not just computer models running about, but can actually help or hinder the player in his adventures. All of this realistic interaction really helps make Skyrim an enjoyable experience full of life and realism.
Zoomology is a game of wildlife recognition that I created that educates others in zoology through the use of zoomed-in photos and close-ups of animals, such as magnified images of their eyes, feathers, scales, or fur. Through this entertaining, yet educational game, children, students, and people of all ages can test their knowledge of wildlife identification and in the process learn something new. This game not only allows people to enjoy learning more about nature, but also creates a bond between animals and people. People are generally much less afraid and are usually more attracted to the familiar, drawing toward that which they know. When one is able to identify the species of animals that live in his environment, he is more likely to enjoy the environment and wish to preserve it. He has a much closer bond with the nature and life around him and will treasure it more than one who does not know the animals by name. Zoomology is a game that treasures the ability to identify animals in an attempt to bring to attention the threat of losing endangered species, to help those threatened species regain their numbers, and overall, educate the public about zoology and increase their knowledge of wildlife.
My love of foxes started when I was about 9 or 10 years old and my grandmother on my mother’s side won me a fox stuffed animal from the arcade at Sea World, San Antonio. I don’t know what it was about that stuffed animal, but he quickly became my favorite. I can’t say exactly when the fox became my favorite animal, but it was because of that stuffed animal that foxes were brought to my attention and shortly afterwards, I deemed them my favorite. I know for sure that they were my favorite animal by the time I was 12 years old.
After foxes were classified as my favorite animal I began collecting fox stuffed animals as I am a huge collector of stuffed animals and love the plush creatures. I only collected fox stuffed animals that I actually liked, and because it’s difficult to find a fox stuffed animal in the first place, I didn’t have that many.
In recent years, I’ve been desperately looking for a realistic life-size fox stuffed animal. It’s all I’ve been asking for for past Christmases and birhtdays, yet as each one passed, I never got one. As my birthday of 2012 passed and I again, did not receive a fox stuffed animal, I opened the Internet and typed in something along the lines of “realistic fox stuffed animal” into DeviantART, a website for artists. I figured that if I couldn’t find an already-made fox stuffed animal, perhaps I could find an artist that could make one for me.
“Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translation by M. D. Herter Norton
Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle of Rilke’s life that shows what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote them.
“After all this it is not hard to understand how I determined in that very hour to send my poetic attempts to Rainer Maria Rilke and to ask him for his opinion. Not yet twenty and close on the threshold of a profession which I felt to be entirely contrary to my inclinations, I hoped to find understanding, if in any one, in the poet who had written Mir zur Feier. And without having intended to do so at all, I found myself writing a covering letter in which I unreservedly laid bare my heart as never before and never since to any second human being.” -Franz Xaver Kappus, Berlin, June 1929, Introduction, 12
“Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth” by Craig Childs
The earth has died many times, and it always comes back looking different. In an exhilarating, surprising exploration of our planet, Craig Childs takes readers on a firsthand journey through apocalypse, touching the truth behind the speculation. Apocalyptic Planet is a combination of science and adventure that reveals the ways in which our world is constantly moving toward its end and how we can change our place within the cycles and episodes that rule it.
In this riveting narrative, categorized in the nature category, Childs makes clear that ours is not a stable planet, that it is prone to sudden, violent natural disasters and extremes of climate. Alternate futures, many not so pretty, are constantly waiting in the wings. Childs refutes the idea of an apocalyptic end to the earth and finds clues to its more inevitable end in some of the most physically challenging places on the globe. He travels from the deserts of Chile, the driest in the world, to the genetic wasteland of central Iowa to the site of the drowned land bridge of the Bering Sea, uncovering the micro-cataclysms that predict the macro: forthcoming ice ages, super-volcanoes, and the conclusion of planetary life cycles. Childs delivers a sensual feast in his descriptions of the natural world and a bounty of unequivocal science that provides us with an unprecedented understanding of our future.
“The word ‘apocalypse’ from the Greek apokalypsis, originally referred to the lifting of a veil or a revelation. The common definition as a destructive worldwide event is more recent. In this book, it is both.”
Craig Childs is a commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, Outside, The Sun, and Orion. Awards he has won include the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, the Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and, for his body of work, the 2003 Spirit of the West Award.
“Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution” by Jennifer Cockrall-King
A global movement to take back our food is growing. The future of farming is in our hands-and in our cities.
“The idea to write a book about urban agriculture-the practice of producing and distributing food right in cities-felt like it came looking for me as much as I went looking for it.
As a food writer with a serious passion for gardening, I had long been in the habit of stopping to talk with anyone watering a few pots of rosemary and basil, for instance, on the patio. (Several minutes later, we’d still be trading stories about what interesting edibles could be grown with the right amount of obsessive coddling.) But about five yeras ago, I started noticing more tomatoes and cucumber vines twisting around condo balcony railings where previously there had only been the usual flowerpot standards of geraniums and lobelia. Then a few maverick homeowners began ripping up their front lawns and replacing them with tidy rows of pole beans, peas, and carrots. Other urbanites were not so subtly defying city bylaws and keeping chickens and beehives in backyards. Finally, it was impossible to ignore how community gardens continued to mushroom in size and quantity, not just in my hometown, but in other cities I visited.” -Introduction, 9
Jennifer Cockrall-King is an award-winning food journalist whose work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, the National Post, Canadian Geographic, Maclean’s, and other major publications. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta, and in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, where she founded and runs the Okanagan Food and Wine Writers Workshop.
Visit Jennifer online at http://www.foodgirl.ca and http://www.facebook.com/FoodanttheCity, and on Twitter @jennifer_ck.
“Comanche Midnight” Essays by
Writing timeless essays that capture vanished worlds and elusive perceptions, Stephen Harrigan is emerging as a national voice with an ever-expanding circle of enthusiastic readers. For those who have already experienced the pleasures of his writing-and especially for those who haven’t-Comanche Midnight collects fifteen pieces that originally appeared in the pages of Texas Monthly, Travel Holiday, and Audubon magazines and is categorized in General Interest, Travel, Southwestern Studies, and Essays.
The world’s Harrigan describes in these essays may be vanishing, but his writing invests them with an enduring reality. He ranges over topics from the past glories and modern-day travails of America‘s most legendary Indian tribe to the poisoning of Austin’s beloved Treaty Oak, from the return-to-the-past realism of the movie set of Lonesome Dove to the intimate, off-season languor of Monte Carlo.
If the personal essay can be described as journalism about that which is timeless, then Stephen Harrigan is a reporter of people, events, and places that will be as newsworthy years from now as they are today. Read Comanche Midnight and see if you don’t agree.
A former senior editor of Texas Monthly magazine, Stephen Harrigan writes full-time from his home in Austin.
“In assembling a book like this one, there is a natural tendency for the writer to think of it hopefully as more than the sum of its parts, as a solid coherent statement rather than a scattershot collection. I’ve tried not to saddle Comanche Midnight with aspirations it cannot fulfill, but on the other hand I don’t believe that the components of this book came together by accident. For every piece I’ve included, there are two or three others that are still mouldering in the lost-magazine graveyard. Some of them don’t deserve to be resurrected, and in fact it would pain me to think anybody would ever read them again. Others, though, are pretty good. I left them out because, in some vague way, they didn’t belong. There is no great theme to this book that I can decipher, but it seems to me that all the pieces at least share the same frequency. They address my old preoccupations with worlds that have vanished, communication that is sealed off, perceptions that are out of reach. There is an air of mystery about them, and it is that mystery that finally emboldens me to think of them as true essays. They are a record not just of certain events and people and places, but of the mind that witnessed them, and that is still trying to grasp what it beheld.” -Introduction, xi
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