The Clareverse

Does it look like I’ve had the baby? Do you see a baby anywhere around here?

(Catchy post title, I know, but if I want people to be directed to this guy’s site, I need to make this post findable for a search engine.)

Marcus de la Fleur is a landscape architect in my area, and he has a great website detailing his solutions for dealing with stormwater runoff at his (rented) house: 168 Elm Ave - One Drop at a Time.

Water conservation is one of my personal soapbox issues. Briefly, I know people whose houses have been ruined by a new “big box” store’s parking lot altering the water table for up to a mile around, water we use is taken from ecologies that would be prettier and healthier if we didn’t use so much, and in a few decades water is going to be as expensive and conflict-causing as oil is now, even for those of us here in the rich countries, so the sooner we figure out better ways to deal with it, the better. And as they say, act locally.

I’m all proud of myself for my single rain barrel and my passive-irrigation compost/tomato setup, and this guy has a whole water system with a fantastic looking grass gravel parking spot. If you own property and have trouble with flooding, or you just want to save some water to use on your own garden, check out what he’s done.

Aside from the impressive content, his website is well-organized. There’s PDFs with detailed directions for each of his projects and photos of the projects under way. I love the brick permeable pavement - I’m gonna make some next summer when we rip up our crappy old concrete.

Yesterday the sidekick and I saw the Darwin exhibit at the Field Museum. I thought I’d write a brief review of it in case any of you Chicago area readers are thinking about seeing it, or haven’t heard about it.

First off, I don’t think it’s a good exhibit to take kids to. The bulk of the displays is material to be read; there’s 4 looped videos, lots of cases of beetles and bugs that Darwin collected, but nothing interactive. Kids who enjoy going to museums for the fun of pushing buttons and playing those little games where you answer questions will have nothing to do.

The displays are organized chronologically and follow Darwin’s life from the background of his family through the voyage on the Beagle and his years of reclusive work to his eventual worldwide fame. Letters and journals show the progress of his scientific training and the gradual development of his ideas about natural selection in his own words. Darwin’s handwriting is really hard to read, so selected quotes from the papers are duplicated in type in the displays.

The exhibit carefully follows and explains Darwin’s thought processes in trying to figure out how evolution works. It’s interesting to see how gradually but inevitably the theory of natural selection came together. Darwin had the naturalist training to know what to observe and record when he traveled around the world, and the right background in geology, botany and biology to understand how everything fit together when he was back at home going through his notes and collections. The exhibit shows how each intermediary conclusion he came to along the way was supported by everything he’d found before, and followed naturally in his line of thinking. It’s a great demonstration of how intellectual honesty will help you think through a tricky problem, if, you know, you’re independently wealthy gentry and you’ve got 20 years.

From the personal letters you get a very good idea of Darwin’s personality. He was a great guy - enthusiastic about the natural world, devoted to his family, and always ready to be interested in whatever was going on around him. There’s some particularly funny displays where he applies scientific reasoning to the decision to get married, and observes how natural selection accounts for the behavior of his 2-year-old son. If you enjoy 19th century British lit like I do, you’ll get a kick out of all the Victorian-gentlemanly prose.

The exhibit finishes with a section on what “theory” means in a scientific context and why it’s misconceived to apply a scientific theory to non-scientific social and political situations. There’s videos of scientists talking about science and faith and a time line of the various court cases that have involved evolution over the last 150 years.

So anyway, it’s a very thoughtful and carefully organized exhibit, and you’ll learn a lot if you see it. Don’t bother getting the audio tour - it didn’t have any information that wasn’t in the printed displays. Like I said, there’s lots of reading; it takes about 2.5 hours to get through everything. You need a ticket for timed admission, so get one online before you go to the museum and you can skip the long ticket lines. The exhibit is running through January 1.

Since we found out we’re having a girl, the sidekick and I have been more interested in the next-door-neighbor children. They’re fraternal twin girls, 4 years old, and unlike the twins I’ve met who seem to match, between them they cover a spectrum of female characteristics.

The other day the twins proudly showed off t-shirts they’d picked out for the first day of preschool. One twin’s said “Princess” and the other twin’s said “Soccer”. This sums up each of their personalities. One of them, Girly Twin, always wears dresses and enjoys drama and all things princessy. Sporty Twin, on the other hand, always wears shorts and t-shirts and loves being athletic. She’s making decent progress with the whiffle ball and bat.

They have pretty much the same genes and are being raised in the same environment, so how are they so different? Did each of them have the innate potential for certain interests when they were born?

This is why the sidekick and I fear that in spite of our introverted geek dork personalities and a fairly gender-role-balanced home environment we’ll end up with an extroverted princess daughter who wants to wear short skirts and cheer for boys.

The last two varieties are ripe now: Amish Paste and Green Zebra. Yum yum.

I hate the heat we’ve been having lately, but I love its effect on my tomatoes. I’m harvesting more than I can eat every day, which is a lot.

These are from the three small-fruited plants: Stupice, Beam’s Yellow Pear, Mexico Midget.

Is there anything better than ripe homegrown tomatoes? No, there is not.