Congrats to comment #6, thepricklypinecone!
She receives my copy of National Wildlife Federation’s Attracting Birds, Butterflies & Backyard Wildlife.
Thanks to everyone that entered!
Happy backyard gardening 🙂
Green living, playful parenting and the pursuit of happiness
Congrats to comment #6, thepricklypinecone!
She receives my copy of National Wildlife Federation’s Attracting Birds, Butterflies & Backyard Wildlife.
Thanks to everyone that entered!
Happy backyard gardening 🙂
Soccer started early this morning; shin guards went AWOL; my link love is later than usual. My apologies.
Whether you need interesting dinner party fodder, something to ponder while in the shower, or just something to read while waiting in line at the grocery store: I gotcha covered.
My favorite links from the week….
“Robert Groves, editor of Collins English Dictionaries and editor of the latest word list for Scrabble users, said: ”The latest edition adds nearly 3,000 new words to the existing quarter of a million available to Scrabble players. These additions are an eclectic mix of new technological jargon, overseas English, recent colloquialisms, street slang, and a few fairly well-established phrases that had not made it onto the list until now.”
Excuse my French, but what a load of hot horse puckey. In this house we play according to the King’s English.
“The applications cover ‘entertainment and education services,’ ‘toys, games and playthings’ and ‘clothing, footwear and headwear.’ “
Henry David Thoreau said, “It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience,” and by that he meant, “WTF, Disney?!”
I shudder to think what heroic softening glow Disney plans to put on those Seal Team 6 toys, games and playthings. My parents were the playthings of war. My uncle, permanently emotionally damaged: substance abuse problems and all the other issues that stem from there.
Though I wouldn’t buy these for my kids either, they are a much more realistic representation of what soldiers are like… after the war is over.
The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A separate investigation into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.
It’s no different from the stupid Disney princesses. What happens after happily ever after?
Yeah, I still haven’t read the book yet. But the woman knows what she’s talking about. Tiger Cub got accepted by Yale and Harvard.
How Do We Prepare Kids for Jobs We Can’t Imagine Yet? Teach Imagination and The Creativity Crisis: Why American Schools Need Design. I linked to both in last week’s roundup.
DUDE. STOP GIVING McDONALD’S YOUR MONEY. Have you not seen Super-Size Me?
It’s really not. I swear. Especially now, during farmer’s market season; the less you do to fresh foods the better it tastes.
“People not being accustomed to cooking is a bigger barrier than money or class or any of those other things that people are bringing into the discussion [of real food.]”
Would you agree?
“…cavities are caused by nutritional deficiency and when this nutritional deficiency is corrected, the cavity heals. If you think about this in an open-minded manner leaving all preconceived ideas about cavities behind, doesn’t this make sense? Shouldn’t the body be able to heal a cavity just like it heals a broken bone or a cut on your arm? Why would teeth be any different from a broken wrist after all?”
Interesting; all the more so because I had the shadows of a cavity forming six months ago, and I was sure that six months of not-quite-perfect brushing with new braces on meant I’d be getting that cavity filled. At my visit last week though, I was told the soft spot had resolved itself.
Several people asked if I had seen this. To be honest, I’m more disturbed by this girl’s parents decision to post a video of her shirtless on the internet, than by her choice of lovey plaything.
I do love this video of a sock gone missing and the quest to find him… vaguely not suitable for children for its (split-second) cartoon depiction of a body part that rhymes with sock. Via kurositas, which always has such interesting visual stuff, particularly animation. Check it out.
For Sock’s Sake from Carlo Vogele on Vimeo.
The universe is full of magical things,
patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
– Eden Phillpotts
NOTE: I’m giving away a copy of the National Wildlife Federation’s Attracting Birds, Butterflies & Other Backyard Wildlife. Details are at the end of this post.
Last week I talked about 13 great citizen science projects that kids can participate in, to foster a love & knowledge of the life all around us (while aiding researchers). To make those projects even more enjoyable & meaningful for your family, you might want to consider cultivating your garden with wildlife in mind. The better suited your property is to your local wildlife, the more wildlife will visit (and stay); the more for your kids to report!
May is Garden for Wildlife Month, so I’m going to try to stay focused long enough to have our yard registered as a Certified Wildlife Habitat with the National Wildlife Foundation. It’s one of those things I’ve always meant to do… like, for over a decade.
When you certify in May, the NWF will plant a tree on your behalf; in addition, for a fee you can receive a sign to place in your yard signifying its habitat status. (Why does this matter? Because studies show that people are more likely to do good when they see others doing good. Your sign might inspire passers-by to garden for wildlife too!)
Think of your wildlife garden as a square in a patchwork quilt. Your neighbor’s yard, the next square over. Build the quilt in your mind to encompass your entire town, city, state.
How many of those squares are taken up by hostile, barren environments like shopping malls, parking lots, interstates, power stations? How far does a hummingbird need to travel, from one nectar-providing oasis to the next? Is it any wonder that migratory animals encounter hardship? That many species of local wildlife are in decline?
In so many ways making a difference for the planet is about fostering connections. Stand together or die alone, as the saying goes. How many people can you encourage and inspire to stitch a square onto your patchwork?
We’ll have sunflowers up. We have a variety of nectar-bearing plants, a hummingbird feeder, a bird feeder, and a board mounted onto a downed log that we screw corn cobs onto for the squirrels and crows. We also have more foliage than you can shake a stick at, and wild raspberries and wineberries in late summer. (I don’t know if you can count those as a food source, though; the kids are pretty vigilant about picking the ripe ones themselves.)
We have a vernal (seasonal) pool— a more accurate description might be seasonal puddle & trickle— and a birdbath on our deck. We need to learn how to take better care of both so we’re not doing more harm than good.
We’ve got this one covered: woods, brush piles, stick piles, evergreens, brambles (really just a forsythia that got overtaken by a stickerbush, but seemingly hundreds of birds hang out in there), the “pond”, bird houses. (I’m trying to convince Jeff to let part of the yard go to meadow but he seems to think that will invite the “wrong kind” of wildlife.)
We’ve got live trees and dead trees, shrubs, burrows, birdhouses, the pond if you want to count that (I’m not, since we’re going to be working on it and disturbing it). I think we have some milkweed that volunteers for the caterpillars, but I want to plant some more host plants just ’cause I like ’em.
Er. OK, Jeff bought organic soil and mulch (this is sort of a big deal, as I would never have said anything about it if he hadn’t. In fact, this tiny gesture meant more to me than I can ever say). He also has been yanking the never-ending garlic mustard. We have a compost pile and a worm farm, but fell off the composting wagon over the winter; I’ll try to get back on that. I’ll ask Jeff to make a rain barrel, since he’s always telling me that they’re too expensive and he can make one for nearly nothing. We conserve water, more out of a benign neglect than anything else 🙂
And that’s it! We do qualify based on what we do already, but we’ll definitely try to do more. We’re mainly optimized for birds and squirrels (and deer, groan), but I’d like to see us being more hospitable to bees, butterflies, bats, frogs and toads.
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GIVEAWAY! I have a copy of Attracting Birds, Butterflies & Other Backyard Wildlife (pictured above), by David Mizejewski, manager of the National Wildlife Federation’s Backyard Wildlife Habitat Program. This is my own personal copy, bought with my own monies. It is in used but Like New condition, with the exception of a little sticker gunk where the price sticker was on the cover.
Leave me a comment telling me what bird, bug or animal you’d like to attract more of, for your chance to win!
For a second entry, like my fan page on Facebook and leave a 2nd comment letting me know you did. (If you already like me 🙂 leave a comment to that effect.)
**Must be a US mailing address. Winner will be chosen at random from all entries at noon on Sunday, May 15th.**
Disclosure: I have no affiliation with the National Wildlife Federation and was not compensated or anything for this post. I just wanted to encourage everyone to garden for wildlife and thought, hey! Nice tie-in for a giveaway!