What the noises of the night are telling us

Last week, Sandra's cousin posted a note about the peepers in Virginia.

New sound today: frogs. About a month back, there were Spring Peepers.  I missed them this year because of the foul weather and blocked trail when they were singing.
...
Several weeks later in the season, the singers in the same swamp are different frogs.  They don’t “peep” as much as bellow.  They proclaim the coming of a warmer season, very assertively.  And it’s easier to have real faith on an 80° afternoon.

via More of the Senses « Cycles of Life

Our peepers showed up last week as the result of the warm late winter/early spring and the rains that churned the waters' edges. During the last couple of nights, I've heard crickety kinds of things. (Friend Dr. Loree might appreciate my use of the scientific terms here.) It would be wonderful if the frogs made a strong return. I remember that great sound on warm evenings. The last couple of decades, however, haven't been kind to frogs in northeast, an indicator that the waters aren't as pure as they used to be and need to be.
My concern is that this might presage a hot summer. My tribe has the tradition of responding to heat by jumping into water that's as much as 100^°C colder. As you might expect, our responses to excessive heat aren't always the brightest.
Even the farmers are suspecting that we're going to have a warm spring that will lead to early crops.  Today's Telegram has a front page story, Growing concern, about the apple growers who are as much as a month ahead of their usual schedule. The farmers are now waiting for the bees to do their business, bees that Dr. Loree has discussed in her book, The Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe.
So, the night sounds and silences are trying to tell us something. As with most stuff, we'll  figure it out some time after we need to have figured it out.

Wait. What?

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More on parenting

We've decamped for a couple of days to stay at Mike and Lynn's while they're away on a mini-vacation. It's good for us at a lot of levels, giving us a chance to spend more time with the grandchildren, live out of baskets and bags for a while, and adapt when we're not always so adaptable.
It's that last point that's been kicking around my head since a conversation at the dinner table on Monday night. Let's see. Michael and his girl friend, Lindsey, Krista, Tess, and Cassie were here. Joe was out with friends and Matt has a place of his own now.
After dinner, Lindsey and I talked for a while. She said that her mother really enjoyed having the kids living at home, even though or perhaps particularly because they are all in their 20s. Lindsey observed that some households are all about the kids while others are all about the parents. Her household is all about the kids.
Hmm.
I thought back to the household we had when Mike and Adam were at home, of the households where  Sandra and I grew up, of other families we've known through the years. While not every household fits neatly into one category or another, there are some broad similarities.
Households that are kid-centric seem to be more open, with more people coming and going, more energetic, more spontaneous. It doesn't mean that those households are necessarily more permissive or without guidance - Mike and Lynn's children are invariably polite to new and familiar guests. It's just that, well, there's more of an inclination to say yes rather than no.
Parent-centric households are, painted broadly, are likely to be more ordered, perhaps just to keep order, perhaps to ensure that teaching moments are never missed. It also doesn't mean that parent-centric households can't be fun or inventive, but rather that you know who is  in charge (or, at least, pretending to be.
Neither model is necessarily more virtuous than others. Some parent-centric households are that way because the parents are so desperately trying to figure it out themselves that they're less tolerant of additional things being out of control. Some kid-centric households are such because the parents are clueless or powerless to assert leadership. There are good parents and lousy parents using each model.

If you know and trust your kids and if you know and trust yourself, you'll do fine with either choice. If you don't (and most of us don't), then the choice of model doesn't matter much either because the primary issues are still going to make the decisions for you.

Sooner or better?

News of the discovery of a human skull in Holden showed up on the new TheDailyHolden.com site yesterday afternoon: Hiker finds human skull in Holden woods.
Good breaking news without a lot of substance:

“We’re looking for any other human remains that might be in those woods,” [District Attorney Joseph D. ] Early said. “We do not want to identify exactly where the skull was found because of the ongoing nature of the search. I anticipate we will have more to say later this week.”
“At this time we have not identified the sex, age or race," the Holden Police Department released in a statement.

Later this week is, of course, this morning in the T&G, Skull found in Holden woods:

A jogger found the skull off Reservoir Street and called police at 6:49 p.m. Saturday, according to Holden Police Chief George R. Sherrill.

Score one for the old guard.

Sooner or better?

News of the discovery of a human skull in Holden showed up on the new TheDailyHolden.com site yesterday afternoon: Hiker finds human skull in Holden woods.
Good breaking news without a lot of substance:

“We’re looking for any other human remains that might be in those woods,” [District Attorney Joseph D. ] Early said. “We do not want to identify exactly where the skull was found because of the ongoing nature of the search. I anticipate we will have more to say later this week.”
“At this time we have not identified the sex, age or race," the Holden Police Department released in a statement.

Later this week is, of course, this morning in the T&G, Skull found in Holden woods:

A jogger found the skull off Reservoir Street and called police at 6:49 p.m. Saturday, according to Holden Police Chief George R. Sherrill.

Score one for the old guard.

What the night brings

The New York Times has been running a blog, All-Nighters, about insomnia and insomniacs. The posts cover a range of topics, such as how elderly people make productive use of the night-time hours, There’s More Than Enough Hours in Every Day, night-time with and without An Insomniac’s Best Friend, and how an artist tries to make sense of insomnia, despair, and depression, Counting the ‘Blessings’ of Insomnia.
After an afternoon of serious yard work in this luscious burst of spring weather, you'd think that a full night of sleep would follow. Nope. I was asleep by 10 and awake by 11:30. That's fairly common. Some nights, I might be asleep at 10;30 and wake at 1:00. The details stopped being interesting about a year ago. It is what it is.
Do I wish that it was otherwise. Yup. Have I researched and tried the various sleep remedies, pharmaceutical and other? Yup. Do I get angry at not being able to sleep through the night? Not usually. Do I wish that it was otherwise? Yup.
And how I do I spend this time. Reading, online and off, occasionally writing, sometimes some web development or system administration chores. On Sundays, the papers arrive around 3:00. (Weekdays I only read the online news, but the Sunday Globe and Times are still special.)
I'm continuing to make my way through my mother's papers. She had a similar sleep pattern and wrote letters and notes during the night. She'd often recollect her thoughts from previous events and then, later in the day, make a photocopy of her notes.

There's plenty of stuff to think about when you're awake at night. And some of it is even worth thinking.

What the night brings

The New York Times has been running a blog, All-Nighters, about insomnia and insomniacs. The posts cover a range of topics, such as how elderly people make productive use of the night-time hours, There’s More Than Enough Hours in Every Day, night-time with and without An Insomniac’s Best Friend, and how an artist tries to make sense of insomnia, despair, and depression, Counting the ‘Blessings’ of Insomnia.
After an afternoon of serious yard work in this luscious burst of spring weather, you'd think that a full night of sleep would follow. Nope. I was asleep by 10 and awake by 11:30. That's fairly common. Some nights, I might be asleep at 10;30 and wake at 1:00. The details stopped being interesting about a year ago. It is what it is.
Do I wish that it was otherwise. Yup. Have I researched and tried the various sleep remedies, pharmaceutical and other? Yup. Do I get angry at not being able to sleep through the night? Not usually. Do I wish that it was otherwise? Yup.
And how I do I spend this time. Reading, online and off, occasionally writing, sometimes some web development or system administration chores. On Sundays, the papers arrive around 3:00. (Weekdays I only read the online news, but the Sunday Globe and Times are still special.)
I'm continuing to make my way through my mother's papers. She had a similar sleep pattern and wrote letters and notes during the night. She'd often recollect her thoughts from previous events and then, later in the day, make a photocopy of her notes.

There's plenty of stuff to think about when you're awake at night. And some of it is even worth thinking.