Trudy Myers's Blog, page 29

Tohono Oʼodham

The Tohono O’odham are a Native American people of the Sonoran Desert, and they are recognized by the US federal government as the Tohono O’odham Nation.After the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, a competitor people (The Pima) used an insult to refer to the Tohono O’odham, which the Spanish (and later English) mispronounced as ‘papago’, but this term has been rejected by the tribal government and most of the people of the tribe.The Tohono O’odham Nation’s major reservation is located in southern Arizona, and stretches into Sonoma county of Mexico. The Tohono O’odham share roots with the Akimel O’odham (People of the River). Both are descended from the Sobaipuri, who resided along the major rivers of southern Arizona as long ago as the 15th century.The O’odham-speaking people were a settled agricultural people who endured raids from the nomadic Apache when the latter needed food. It wasn’t until European settlers encroached on the O’odham people’s land that the O’odham and Apache found some common ground. It was more traditional that they were at odds, each taking captive woman and children during raids on the other.The music and dance of the O’odham lack any grand paraphernalia or ceremonies. Both the music and the dance is subdued, with the music being ‘swallowed’ by the surrounding desert floor, and the dancing featuring skipping and shuffling quietly in bare feet on dry dirt to raise dust.The traditional O’odham diet consisted of game, insects and plants. They foraged ironwood seed, honey mesquite, hog potato, cholla cactus, acorns and organ-pipe cactus fruit. They cultivated corn, squash, white tepary beans, papago peas and spanish watermelons. They hunted antelope, gathered hornworm larvae and trapped pack rats for meat.The land did not provide ideal conditions for growing crops, but the O’odham developed the ‘mouth of the wash’ farming method. When they detected imminent rainfall, they would quickly prep the ground and seed it as the rain began to flood the area.It is often assumed that the desert people embraced Catholicism, but the Tohono O’odham villages resisted change for hundreds of years. During the 1660s and the 1750s, major rebellions forced the Spanish to retreat, and the desert people preserved their traditions nearly intact for generations.Apparently, the Tohono O’odham never signed a treaty with the Federal Government, so they managed to get a reservation by conducting trades for the land they thought was already theirs. They have retained many of their traditions into the 21st century, and still speak their language. However, US mass culture has started to penetrate and erode their traditions. Diabetes has become a major health problem for the tribe as they shifted away from their traditional food sources. There is a movement to assist the group to return to their more traditional food choices, and they are advocating for access to the rivers so that they can return to growing their own crops.The Tohono O’odham Community Action was founded in 1996 with the intent to restore lost tribal traditions. It started as a community garden and basketweaving classes. It now has 2 farms, a restaurant and an art gallery. It is estimated that the restaurant - opened in 2009, and incorporating traditional foods into each item served - serves over 100,000 meals yearly. That’s a minimum of 274 meals a day! I don’t want to cook for that crowd!The basket weaving classes were held once a week, initially, and a single basket might take an entire year to make! The fibers that were used had to be harvested and prepared, plus they needed to create a design that represented the tribe’s history.Before contact with Europeans, the O’odham migrated north and south with the seasons, and this continued at least until the US-Mexico border cut through their lands. Even then, much of the O’odham continued to move about as they wanted, but efforts were made during the 20th century to ‘close’ this open hole in this border. By 2000, the Mexican census indicated there were no more O’odham to be found in Sonora.Well, as the article got closer and closer to the present, I found myself losing interest, as is often the case when I’m looking at history. Besides, this was already a long episode. And thirdly, it kept mentioning all the ways this tribe has been and still are being treated as less than full citizens, which always pisses me off. I will have to remember that when I create cultures that are not based on US culture. Heck, even if they are based on US culture, from the looks of how things are now.The most interesting things I found were the descriptions of the music and dancing, and the information on their traditional foods. Thisis the kind of stuff I really want to have available in my mind when I’m thinking up new cultures for future stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O%CA%BCodham

The Sky is Falling

If you follow me on facebook, you may have noticed that I have shared many articles on climate change and that I have started using the comment, “The Sky is Falling.”
It seemed more appropriate than saying, “The Boy Cried Wolf.” In that story, the boy is lying, only looking to introduce some excitement into his own life, without regard for the consequences.
Chicken Little, on the other hand, was telling the truth, as best he knew it. Something (a raindrop) had come down from the sky and hit him. He had never experienced anything like that before, so the logical conclusion was that something terrible was happening, the sky was falling! Chicken Little ran around the farmyard squawking his terrible news, trying to warn all the other farm critters.
Even that doesn’t exactly fit the problem of climate change. Chicken Little was very young and inexperienced. But it’s scientists who have been trying to warn the world’s population that the climate was changing far quicker than it should. They have lots of experience at studying climate and how it has changed in the past, and they have a pretty darn good idea where it’s headed.
In the past week, I have read several articles concerning the number and severity of heatwaves that have been happening around the world. Not only has the world been having more of them, not only have they broken records for daytime high temperatures, they’ve broken records for the highest low temperatures as well. That means that after a sweltering day, you don’t get much relief during the night, because the heat that has accumulated all day doesn’t dissipate fast enough.
I think Europe has already broken several summer records during a heatwave in June of this year. There’s no guarantee they won’t have another later this summer. Or this fall, or... whenever. A heatwave can happen at any time on the calendar, because it is a comparison between the present and what has been ‘normal’ previously.
The scientists don’t ‘think’ any particular place will start having a heatwave every year. But it could happen. After all, they wanted us to keep the warming of the Earth to 2°C or less. What are they saying now, that it’s officially reached a warming of 1.8°C? But in Europe, the temperatures reached +4 to +8°C over ‘normal’.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t get much done when the temperature gets to 95°F. I sure don’t want it to consistently reach 123°F. Or higher.
Maybe Chicken Little isn’t the best story for me to quote to try to get my point across, but it’s the one I can remember as the summer heat settles in. So I’ll keep squawking my warning and hope somebody is listening, because...
The sky is falling.

The Castle Cave

Castles can be scary and/or awe-inspiring. Caves can be scary and/or awe-inspiring. So, what do you suppose you get when you combine the two? You get the Predjama Castle of Slovenia.Predjama Castle is a renaissance-style castle built with a cave mouth in South-central Slovenia, an area historically known as Inner Carniola.About 1274, the Patriarch of Aquileia built the first castle at this location, using the Gothic style. At that time, it was known by the German name of Luegg Castle. It was made difficult to access by building it under a natural rocky arch set high in the stone wall below the cave. It was later acquired and expanded by the Luegg noble family, also known as the Knights of Adelsberg.Sir Erasmus of Lueg became lord of the castle in the 15th century. He was the son of the imperial governor, and according to legend, he killed the commander of the imperial army, who had offended the memory of a deceased friend of Erasmus. Lueg fled the wrath of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, returning to the family fortress at Predjama, where he began to attack estates and villages in the area. Thus he became a robber baron.The emperor ordered Erasmus be captured or killed, but for a long time, the best that could be accomplished was to lay siege to the castle. Surprisingly, that didn’t seem to keep Sir Erasmus from continuing his attacks. It turned out that there was a vertical shaft through the cave roof. Erasmus ordered it enlarged, and that was not a means to allow him to continue robbing his neighbors, but also allowed him to smuggle food into his besieged castle. Eventually, however, he was killed.Apparently, the seige saw the destruction of the original castle. The Oberburg family acquired the ruins. A second castle was built by the Purgstall family early in the 16th century, only to be destroyed in an earthquake in 1511.Better luck next time? It would seem so. In 1570, the current castle was built in the Renaissance style and hugging the vertical cliff. In pictures, you can see the top of the cave mouth hanging just above the tower tops, looking like some huge monster trying vainly to open up enough to swallow it whole.In the 18th century, it was known as a favorite summer residence of the Cobenzl family. I have to wonder about people who enjoy spending their time in a huge castle precariously protruding from the mouth of a cave. Perhaps they were not gifted/cursed with my level of imagination.At the end of World War II, the castle was confiscated, nationalized, and turned into a museum.Have you seen it? Predjama Castle was the castle featured in the 1986 movie Armour of God, starring Jackie Chan. It was also the filming location of Laibach’s Sympathy for the Devil cover’s music video. AND the “Castle” map from the 2014 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive DLC, Operation Breakout, is based on Predjama Castle. So, you might have.There are lots of pieces of the story of Predjama Castle that would lend themselves to a story. I’ll just add them to the ‘pot’ I have brewing in the back of my mind and see where they gravitate to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predjama_Castle

Canada’s Burgess Shale

We’ve researched fossil beds that included depictions of ‘soft parts’ before. One of the most famous places for finding this type of fossil is the Burgess Shale found in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. It is a large deposit of shale, with at least 2 known outcrops, one near the town of Field in Yoho National Park, and another 42 km south, in the Kootenay National Park. This shale bed is 508 million years old, so it contains some of the earliest known soft-part fossils.Charles Walcott discovered one of the Burgess Shale beds late in August 1909, just as the season for such work in Canada was drawing to a close for the year. He returned in 1910 with his wife and children to the area of Fossil Ridge. In fact, he returned almost every year until 1924, when he was 74 years old. In that quarter century, he had collected over 65,000 specimens.He recognized that a huge number of these organisms were unknown to science, and he continued to describe them and attempted to categorise all of them into living taxa until his death in 1927. Unfortunately, most scientists of the time saw the fossils as mere curiosities.In 1962, Alberto Simonetta started a first-hand reinvestigation of these shale fossils and realized that Walcott had barely scratched the surface, so to speak, because it was clear the fossils did not fit into modern groups.The Geological Survey of Canada resumed excavations at the Walcott site, as well as established another side 10 metres high on Fossil Ridge. Trilobite expert Harry Blackmore Whittington and his helpers began a thorough reassessment of the Burgess Shale, discovering that the fauna were much more diverse and unusual than Walcott had recognized. Some had bizarre anatomy, including the Opabinia, which had 5 eyes and a snout like a vacuum cleaner hose, and the Hallucigenia, which was originally reconstructed upside down.Collecting Burgess Shale fossils became more difficult - politically - after the mid-1970’s, when Parks Canada and UNESCO recognized the shale’s significance. Other outcrops have been discovered, and yield new organisms continuously.One thing I reported previously was that soft tissues are fossilized in anoxic conditions, meaning very little oxygen was present. However, mounting research has shown that oxygen was continually present Burgess Shale was deposited. An alternative hypothesis involves brine, rather than a lack of oxygen.Of the organism discovered in Burgess Shale, about 14% have hard parts that are more typically fossilized. It is assumed that the organisms without hard parts are typical for the time and location. Free-swimming creatures are relatively rare, while the majority were bottom dwellers, either moving about in some way or attached to the sea floor. About 2/3 of them fed on organic content of the muddy sea floor, while the rest filtered fine particles from the water. Less than 10% were predators or scavengers, but these were larger than the organisms they ate.If I ever write a story about people who find themselves on a planet during its Cambrian-type age, I’ll have to remember to give my imagination free reign when dreaming up local inhabitants! 5 eyes! A vacuum cleaner nose! Spines on the back that could easily be mistaken for legs. Reality can be so much stranger than fiction!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Shale

What the heck is Lagerstatte?

When I first read about fossils found in ‘Lagerstatte’, I thought it was the name of a place or region, probably in Germany, that had a plethora of fossils residing there. Everything I assumed was pretty correct, except it’s not a place or region, it is a typeof place. It turns out that in German, ‘lager’ means ‘storage’ and ‘statte’ means ‘place’. What this word indicates these days is a particular type of sedimentary deposit with fossils of exceptional preservation. I mean, sometimes even the soft tissue has been preserved, which is pretty darned exceptional.This may have happened when a carcass was buried in an anoxic (without oxygen) environment with minimal bacteria, which would have delayed the decomposition of all biological features until a durable impression was created in the surrounding mud or whatever.There are 2 types of Lagerstatte beds. The concentration type holds a lot of disarticulated hard parts, such as bones. Invariably, the accumulation of bones without a lot of other sediment takes time, so this type displays a large time period.The 2nd type is conservation Lagerstatte, which hold exceptional preservation of fossilized organism or traces. Each of these sites can provide answers to important moment in the evolution and history of life. It’s like a snapshot, allowing the viewer to see the entire animal, even what the skin was like. Or the texture of a feather or shape of a footprint, in the case of a trace.My first thought after reading about lagerstatte was that the now-fossilized creature must have fallen into water or mud, but there is oxygen in water (and thus in mud also), so that would not necessarily provide an anoxic condition. Still, there were places for them to land in order to be truly well-preserved.Several types of inorganic replacement of the organic remains were mentioned in my reading; phosphorus, silica, pyrite (iron) and microbial mats. But in all these cases, this chemical change happened underwater. And if I read things rightly, under seawater.The articles did have some pictures of these fossils, but they weren’t of T Rexes or stegosaurs, so I didn’t know what to look for. I gather that the large majority of these fossils are from way back when most creatures didn’t have bones, so they weren’t very large, and they hadn’t been well known before Lagerstatte beds were found.I would have preferred to see one of these fossils first hand. Not to touch it, but when you have a picture, you can’t change the angle of how the light hits it and bounces into your eye. Sometimes just changing the angle a little can let you see details you otherwise wouldn’t notice. So I feel like having the item in front of me - even if in a display case - would let me study the tiny nuances that make these discoveries so exciting for those in the field.Now, how could I use this knowledge in my writing? I don’t know. One of the beauties of writing fiction is that you get to use bits and pieces of knowledge in unimagined ways. So now that I have this knowledge, I can look for ways to use it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagerst%C3%A4ttehttp://www.fossilmuseum.net/fossilrecord/Lagerstatte.htm

The Wonders of Math

I love math, from the time I was a small child and it was known as ‘Arithmetic’. The more I used arithmetic to find sums and differences, products and quotients, the more I noticed all the neat little tricks and rules that numbers used.
You know the kind of thing I talking about. 5 times any other number always produces a number where the ‘ones’ digit is either 5 or 0. 9 times any number between (and including) 1 through 10 always equals a number where the separate digits, when added together, equals 9. If you don’t know this little ‘rule’, check it out for yourself. For example 9 X 6 = 63. 6 + 3 = 9. It works until you go past 10, then it gets a little tricky. But I haven’t figured out a rule for 11 through 20, or anything above 10.
And each year, it seemed like arithmetic presented me with new things to play with. Numbers squared and cubed. Square roots. Imaginary numbers!!! Not only would I always do my home work assignments, but I was likely to attempt some of the harder problems that hadn’t been assigned to us, just to see if I could do them.
Eventually, arithmetic became Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II. I still did all my assigned problems, but now I was attempting the harder problems with the encouragement of my teachers. My one regret from that time was that I never managed to prove the Pythagorean Theorem the way Pythagoras did it. Hmmm, that problem has been simmering away on the back burner of my mind for about 50 hears now. Maybe I should take another stab at it.
My senior year in high school, I was the only girl in 4th year math, known as “Trigonometry and Math Analysis.” I’m not sure where the ‘analysis’ came in at. The entire year was like every other year of math: “This is how you do these problems. Now, on page *, do these problems so I can see that you understand what you just learned.” Somehow, I missed the clues that we were now analyzing how anything in the real world worked.
Then I started college. I was assigned to Calculus I, which I had rather expected to happen. It wasn’t like I had flunked any of my math classes. So try to imagine my surprise to overhear one kid from Chicago complain that he had been placed in pre-Calculus, even though he had taken pre-Calculus in high school. “Oh, you poor kid,” my thoughts went. “How disappointing for you.”
Then I started Calc I. Whoa!! I was not used to taking a class in an auditorium packed to the gills. Or even a half-empty auditorium. And no microphone for the teacher, so it was next to impossible to hear him, particularly since he bulled his way through his entire lecture in a monotone, without stopping to ask if there were any questions or offer any examples. The book I had to pay lots of good money for didn’t explain anything in a way I could understand it. On Tuesday and Thursday, I had ‘homework lab’, where I could ask older students for help with my homework. Inevitably, our conversations went something like this:Him: This is how you do this type of problem.Me: But why does that work?Him: It just does.Me: When you do that, what kind of a result are  you looking for?Him: This is how you do this type of problem.
I no longer understood math. It no longer made any sense to me.
To be fair, I was going through some traumatic personal events in my life at that time. So a few years later, I went back to a (different) college to try again. I seemed to make a little headway in Calc I. By which I mean, I caught onto a few references to sines and co-sines during the lectures. The new book - which I again had paid lots of cash for - didn’t seem much better than the first. But mostly I was again just following the ‘rules’ for ‘how to do these problems’, without much understanding of what I was doing, why I was doing it, or what the answer told me.
But I made it through Calc I and Calc II and a couple other math classes. And then... more traumatic life events, and I again dropped school.
I would love to get my degree, just to prove than I can. But I didn’t really want to tackle Calculus again and suffer the same frustration, so I voiced the desire, but never really made any effort to get there.
Have you ever tried one of the ‘For Dummies’ books? My husband and I were recently at our makerspace when my laptop died. Hub wasn’t ready to leave, so I wandered over to see what they had on their reading shelf. And there I found “Calculus for Dummies”.
How hard could it be? Worst case, I wouldn’t understand it, but that was where I was, anyway. So I read the first chapter. And then the 2nd chapter... It made sense! This guy was explaining it in simple terms, reminding his readers of foundation knowledge that they might have forgotten and showing how things fit together.
I had to return the book to the makerspace. Time to get my own copy.
Here I come again, Math!

Trilobite, Do You Bite in Threes?When you spend a lot of ...

Trilobite, Do You Bite in Threes?
When you spend a lot of time as a child/teen/adult reading everything you can find on all those fascinating creatures that inhabited the Earth before Humans came along, you come across a lot of strange names. You aren’t sure what those names mean. You might have a rough idea what that type of creature looked like, and that’s probably about all that you know. Because, really, who cares about an extinct sea creature that looked like some crazy kind of beetle?
So I decided to see what I could find out about trilobites, see if there was something about them that would prove interesting. I headed for Wikipedia to get a smattering of layman information before I looked for more advanced info.
Wow. The first sentence in the Wikipedia article is (basicly) “Trilobites ... are a group of extinct marine arachnomorph arthropods that form the class Trilobita. Guess we’d better put on our thinking caps for this one! Extinct = they are all dead. Marine = lived in the sea. Or maybe lived in water.Arachnomorph = ? Well, arachnid is a type of spider, scorpions and what have you. (Thanks, dictionary.com, but why don’t you have the entire word in your list?) Morph has more than one meaning, but the one I’m most familiar with is “to transform”.Arthropod = an invertebrate with a segmented body, jointed limbs and usually a hard shell that can be molted (discarded) should the creature get too big for it.
So far, what we’ve got is a water creature with a segmented body, limbs with joints and a hard shell. Might have looked vaguely like a spider. What comes to mind is a lobster, but they didn’t really look like that. The most common rendition I’ve seen for a trilobite is an oval shape. The larger ‘end’ is a pretty solid ‘half moon’ shape, with a ‘tail’ that goes down the middle of the oval to the smaller ‘end’. Behind the half moon head and on either side of the tail, filling up all the rest of the oval, are lots of limbs. But other trilobites had much different shapes. Let’s go on; what more can I find?
Trilobites ranged from 1/10 of an inch to about 12 inches. I think that entire range is for adult specimen.
The last of the trilobites died about 252 million years ago. But before that, they were quite a successful species, having spread all around the world and existing for over 300 million years. Scientists believe trilobites started their long journey as much as 700 million years ago, or possibly even further back. And if you think humans have some wildly different lifestyles, you obviously have not met many trilobites. Some were aggressive, and moved over the sea bed as predators, scavengers and/or filter feeders. Others were less aggressive and swam while eating plankton. Scientists are still debating whether or not any trilobites were parasites, while one group of trilobites appear to have had a symbiotic relationship with sulfur-eating bacteria.
Trilobites are thought to have originated in what is now Siberia. But that was over half a billion years ago, and with plate tectonics, who knows where that was actually located? Well, I’m sure there are people who do know, but I don’t. I’m going to have to look it up. Look for it in a later episode.
Anyway, as I said before, the trilobites all died out. Although they seemed to excel in changing shape, habitat and food throughout their long existence, eventually there was only one family left, and when its habitat disappeared, so did they. But while they were here, there were thousands of variations of trilobite. This diversity helped them fill many niches in the cycle of life.
On the other hand, there are some very distant relatives of the trilobites still living on Earth. Think horseshoe crab and others of that ilk.
And that is all I found that I understood in this 29-page article on Wikipedia. Go ahead and read it, if you want, but I warn you, it is FULL of very long words, most of them names of genus, family and specie, but not all. The ones that aren’t are used generously, with no explanation what it refers to, and which may not be in your dictionary. Have fun!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite

Check Your Facts

Several years ago, I got an idea for a science fiction short story. It involved the young captain of a ‘worn-out’ asteroid mining ship who found herself pregnant. Such a thing is hardly novel on Earth, but I had the idea stuck in my head - with no idea where I had gotten it - that it wasn’t possible to get pregnant in space. The entire crew is left wondering, “How did that happen?”
Not terribly original, I suppose, but I hoped I was treating the story ‘differently’ from everybody else who had ever written a ‘mystery pregnancy’ story.
So I took the story to my writing group, where everybody told me that of course, she got pregnant; nobody was using birth control, and there’s no reason why people can’t get pregnant in space.
Bummer. That was one of the things that convinced me that my science knowledge was out of date, where-upon I subscribed to and started reading various science magazines, trying to do some catch-up. Until a week ago, I had tried to shove that space pregnancy story out my mind, figuring it had taught me a lesson; Check your ‘facts’.
I was wrong. But not in the way I thought.
Imagine my surprise when I came to an article in the May/June 2019 issue of Discover about how scientists are studying the problem of human reproduction in places that are not on Earth. The problem being that it doesn’t seem possible. Which would make colonies hard to sustain.
As I remember it, they started with lizards and amphibians, which they took to the space station for a period of time. Those didn’t seem bothered by the lack of gravity, or the increased radiation, but some of their off-spring weren’t right.
Then they tried the same experiment with mice, who are mammals, and - biologically - quite a bit like humans. (That’s a lovely thought, isn’t it?) Strangely, the mice must have been freaked out by the no-g or the radiation, or something, but they were not nearly as interested in sex as mice usually are. And even when they did indulge in sex, they didn’t have any offspring.
Apparently, there is a piece of the female mouse’s sexual organs that rapidly decreases and then completely disappears while the mouse is in space. If the same thing happens to human females, then Earth would be the only place where we can make more humans.
Now, that’s a Bummer. But... I was right! (To a degree.) If technology provides a method of humans to begat humans, but only in places that more or less replicate conditions on Earth, then the first human baby conceived without those conditions would indeed be a shock. Not only for the parents, but for the entire race. And that’s the kind of shock I was trying to portray.
So, yes, you should check your facts that you are putting in your stories. And even if everybody in your writer’s group says your fact is wrong, maybe you should check their facts, too.

Hallucigenia

I have started a new list of subjects to research and possibly write a blog about. I get these ideas from on-line and magazine articles that I read; sometimes I jot down the article subject, or a phrase, or just a word I’m not familiar with.Hallucigenia is one of those last ones. If I had realized how many MORE words I would have to look up just to make sense of the wikipedia article on this extinct animal...However, I’m trying to expand my science knowledge, so let’s get on with this.Hallucigenia is a genus of lobopodian worms from the Cambrian period, which lasted from about 541 million years ago to 485 million years ago. The Cambrian period is known for its explosion of new creatures, as nature explored all the different variations it could think of.Hallucigenia was discovered as articulated fossils in shale-type deposits in Canada and China, and isolated spines have been found around the world. Even so, trying to reconstruct what they looked like was difficult. In fact, the first attempt showed the creature upside down and said the front was the back.I probably would have made the same mistakes. First of all, these creatures were only 3/16 to 1-3/8 inch long. It kind of amazes me that anybody even noticed them. To try and imagine what they looked like, start with a worm about that long. Put 7 or 8 pairs of short, flexible appendages down the length of it. Now, flip it over, and put pairs of longer, stiff appendages down the other side of it. The ‘head’ and ‘tail’ are pretty much identical. Which appendages are the legs?The first reconstruction attempt placed the pairs of stiff appendages as the feet because half the flexible appendages were still hidden in dirt. But once the other flexible appendages were discovered, it made sense to put them on the bottom. Flexible legs are easier to use, and stiff ‘spines’ offer some protection.And, by the way, each foot ends with a claw.I found no information on whether these were marine or land creatures, what they ate, what might have eaten them... Now that I’ve researched these creatures, how could I possibly use this information? I suppose I could have a bare-footed colonist step on one, and strange chemicals from the creature are introduced through the spines now buried deep in the colonist’s foot? Or maybe on another planet, these creatures got larger and became the dominant, intelligent species? That might be interesting. How would you incorporate them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucigenia

Never Enough Time

I’ve retired from my day job. I should have plenty of time to do whatever I want, right?So, how come I don’t?I think back to when I was working, feeding the family and trying to hold the house together. I managed it. My house didn’t look like any you see in a magazine, because there were always things that hadn’t been put away, and dust accumulated far faster than I could wipe it away. But there was food, usually hot for supper, and I tried to keep the dirty dishes from piling up too deep in the kitchen sink.In the evenings, I almost always multi-tasked by writing while watching tv. Which is not easy to do; you either miss what’s going on in the tv show because you’re concentrating on the story you’re writing, or you stop writing to follow the tv show. Knitting while watching tv is much easier, as long as the pattern isn’t too difficult. Sometimes, I did that.On weekends, I ran errands and cleaned house. Seemed like I never had enough time to get everything done.I don’t work 40 hours a week at a job anymore. I don’t have to spend 45 minutes driving to work every morning and 30 minutes driving home (don’t ask me, it must have been the traffic flow), or ride a bus for an hour each way every day. I should have plenty of time!Hmm. Yeah. Guess what. I don’t.The thing is, I dusted off a few hobbies I used to do long ago, added a couple hobbies I never had done before, and... the days are not long enough!It doesn’t help that the errands have multiplied as well. Because I have diabetes, the doctor wants to see me every 6 months to see how I’m doing. To see how I’m doing, he has to have some lab work done. In Omaha, the lab was in the doctor’s office, so both could be done at the same time. Here in Florida, the medical labs are separate from the doctor’s office, so that’s 2 trips every half year. I have to see a cardiologist, who is not in the same building. I have to see an eye doctor twice a year. And because I’ve had kidney stones (thanks to the mineral-laden water one drinks in Florida), I’ve been seeing a urologist every 3-4 months.Because I suffer from depression, I visit with a counselor once a week, and see a medications monitor once a month.Not enough errands for you yet? I go to pick up prescriptions 3-4 times a month. Yeah, I’d get them all ‘synchronized’, except it seems like every couple of months, one of them gets changed. My husband has his prescriptions ‘synchronized’, but every single month, at least one of his ‘hasn’t come in yet.’ Why don’t they know they need to order it a day or 2 earlier so he doesn’t have to make a 2nd (or 3rd) trip?And because I have diabetes, I’m supposed to exercise 30 minutes a day, 6 days a week.My tiny business needs tending.The bills need to be paid, which requires moving money around between credit unions.The HOA insists we keep the lawn and landscaping in good shape.The dog wants some attention.The house still needs to be picked up and chores done from time to time. Thankfully, my husband does quite a bit of this.I have one day a week assigned for each of my ‘major’ hobbies. (Sunday is my ‘clean office’ day, which is a never-ending battle in and of itself.) Most weeks, I find very little time to devote to hobbies. I try not to beat myself up over that, but... it does get to me.Of course, it might help if I could get my body straightened out enough that I don’t sleep 12 hours a day. Or take 2-3 hours to ‘wake up’ after I do get up.Well, now I’m just dreaming!