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worm story Monday, April 6 2015
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
According to Gretchen, this morning on her walk in the forest, Ramona narrowly escaped disaster when the porcupine she was chasing decided to leisurely climb a tree. Ramona remained at the bottom of the tree for awhile barking, not apparently remembering how much trouble these sorts of creatures have been for her in the past.
In other news of the local biosphere, I heard Phoebes calling this morning only a day after first hearing them in Silver Spring. Either they'd covered that ground in between in a day or they'd been present but mysteriously-silent in Silver Spring on that warm Friday the day after we'd arrived down there. The day ended up being warm here today, with highs in the mid-60s, sufficient to open the front door and laboratory window to let in fresh air for the first time since 2014 (we probably could have done it on one of those warm days when the snow melted while we were in Silver Spring, but of course we weren't around).
I took advantage of the warm weather to start up the gravity-fed running water in the brownhouse. To do this, I have to close a valve at the top of the water hose so as to make it into a functional siphon. Then I have to suck on the faucet at the bottom to prime the system.
Unexpectedly this evening Eva & Sandor invited us to meet them for dinner at New World Home Cooking to celebrate Eva's birthday. We're not big fans of New World, but they were having some sort of Meatless Monday pre fixe, with the added incentive that if it was your birthday and you brought two people, a third could eat for free. Soon after arriving, I was sipping on my Ommegang Witte (since the IPA choices at New World are terrible) when Eva said she had a story to tell us, but that it was gross and perhaps should wait until after dinner. No, no, Gretchen and I insisted we could take it. So then she described how she'd gone to the bathroom to drop a deuce and, when she was done, she saw something strange hanging out of her butthole. It turned out to be a worm measuring some eight inches in length. After her initial horror, Eva managed to gather it, place it in a container, and eventually take it to a medical specialist. It was identified as a female round worm nearing the end of its three year lifespan. She was prescribed a dewormer and should now be worm-free. But since round worms lay 100,000 eggs every day, Sandor is now being tested to see if any made it into him. As for how Eva might have gotten infected to begin with, a good possibility is a trip she took to the Ukraine some three years ago. Being vegan, she'd been forced to eat a lot of vegetables, some of which might not have been particularly well washed.
I did not inherit my mother's problem of losing her appetite after hearing stories about disgusting things, but I have to say that I would have enjoyed eating my plate of blackened spicy greenbeans a bit more if they hadn't so closely resemble eight-inch-long butt parasites. The food tonight was somewhat better than it had been the last time we'd eaten at New World. This was partly because there was simply more of it, and partly because our waitress brought me a good selection of hot sauces to try. I ended up eating so much seitan that it filled my abdominal cavity like a big knot of round worms and actually diminished my lung capacity.
As Gretchen and I let our dogs run around the New World parking lot, I heard Spring Peepers for the first time this season. When she returned to the car, Eleanor was excitedly carrying a clam shell in her mouth. She and Ramona could be heard crunching on parts of it for the rest of the ride home.
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