Vernal Ephemera

Twice a year the National Capital area becomes a paradise. It happens in the interstices as the climate alternates between being a sweltering, foetid hellscape and being a wretched frozen death zone; and vice versa. These interstices are known as Spring and Fall. This Spring has been particularly lovely, as temperatures have remained stubbornly cool. So the flowers and trees have been preserved like a prom corsage in a refrigerator. Like life itself, the most beautiful things are ephemeral. Enjoy them while you can.

Cornus florida 'Comco No. 1', Cherokee Brave - aka Pink Dogwood

Pro Gnosis

The source of all the trouble.

Previously on MondoBlahBlah...

I had the consult with the NIH multidisciplinary team on Wednesday. In (very) short, the prognosis is quite good, though they want to treat aggressively. The cancer is still encapsulated in the prostate, and of very low volume, so they feel that given my relatively young age, there is an extremely good chance that this can be nipped in the bud so I can go on to live long enough to have my heart kill me. They have a way with encouragement, these guys.

They have laid out two recommended courses of action (Christ, do they actually call them “modalities”?) I do not yet comprehend all the details, but am rapidly coming up to speed. They are, not in any particular order:

Radiation/Hormone Therapy
Eight weeks of radiation and two years of hormone therapy, basically ridding the body of testosterone which effectively starves any cancer that survives the blast of radiation.

Surgery
Laparoscopic radical prostatectomy using a device called a daVinci robot. This is just what it sounds like – chop it out. If I read the NIH team accurately, this is their preferred approach, though that may just be because when you have a da Vinci robot, everything looks like a prostatectomy.

Both approaches have been pitched as equally effective and ultimately curative. Each has its own set of risks and potential side effects. The hormone therapy would turn me into Bruce Jenner for about three years and the surgery is, well surgery. Both promise the possibility of sexual and urinary “lifestyle adaptations” meaning I could potentially become an impotent bed-wetter, but they assure me that most men of my age who go through the procedures go on to live fairly normal lives with only comparatively modest accommodation (e.g., boner pills, etc.).

So, I'm now in the process of compiling a list of questions and I’m making arrangements to meet with my urologist, whose opinion I have come to trust, to get his take on it. The NIH team assures me that there is no urgency to decide on what treatment I prefer, and have encouraged me strongly to seek other opinions and carefully consider the options. On the whole I am very pleased with the NIH team’s manner – I had five doctors from the Urology Oncology Branch, the Radiation Oncology Branch, the Medical Oncology Branch, the Department of Molecular Imaging and Radiology, and the Department of Pathology spend nearly two hours talking to me about the details of my case and answering questions about the recommended treatment options. I was genuinely surprised to have such attention lavished on me, but then you’ve got to remember, these are federal government doctors, not for profit doctors; so they’re probably not under the same kind of pressure to turn over the table, so to speak.
 
Join us next week for another exciting episode...

Memory and desire, stirring

So this happened. And every time it does, it takes me by surprise. That brazen trollop Nature, after months of shamelessly torturing us with her icy necrotic pincers, comes suddenly, voluptuously bounding from her hibernation bed and rubs her nectar scented genitals in our faces. How are we to resist her delirious charms? I, for one, will not. I will wrap myself in her warming embrace and trip through her kaleidoscopic fun house, her floral fantasia, and once again be reassured that hope and beauty persist and prevail. Somehow makes you glad to be alive, doesn't it? 

Nectar scented genitals

April's fool

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

I've heard that some dogs can smell it, though what sort of odor abnormal cell growth could have is beyond my ability to imagine. Maybe I should have just gotten a dog. Might have saved some time. Now, after almost a year, two MRIs, assorted EKGs, CT scans and four biopsies, the men in the lab coats finally have what they've been searching for. As my brother said, if you let doctors dig around long enough, they’re bound to find something. It took them 84 needle pokes but they finally found it. Gleason score 4+4, 5% whatever that means. Funny word “positive”.

I’m enrolled in a research study at the National Institutes of Health, trading my samples for treatment. I’m young for this kind of thing, so they find me interesting. Maybe there’s something they can find in my genes that can be of use. I am now a patient on the same campus where they treat Ebola patients. Me and my little ‘ol prostate. Go figure. Though I guess I’m lucky to live so close to such sophisticated facilities, and to qualify for such exceptional attention, this is hardly the way I wish to be “special”.    

The doctor who called me with the results of the latest tests told me that the volume is low and seems “contained”. On Monday I went in for bone and CT scans. Staging scans, they’re called. They determine what stage the disease is in. All the world, after all, is a stage. Then on Wednesday I went in for a consult to hear the recommended treatment options. Cut it out with a blade or laser, irradiate it, blast it with drugs or some combination thereof.

I can add “11:35 am, April 1, 2015, in my car on the way to a meeting in White Oak” to my where were you when you heard the news list.

Of course I haven’t really started to even use the word yet. It gets a lot of attention when I do and I don’t want to induce any unnecessary freaking out. Plenty of time to freak out later. For now it’s just the constellation in which I was born and since I don’t believe in astrology it’s no threat at all.

Join us next week for another exciting episode...

Spring, schpring

First day of Spring, my ass. That white stuff, for the uninitiated, is snow. On the astronomic first day of Spring. I suppose this will be the final evidence needed by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to completely discount climate change. From now on I guess the sight of snow, once a beloved opportunity for delight and wonderment, will forevermore be associated in my mind with that dipshit Jim Inhofe. I really wish he'd just go back to where he came from and stay among his kind.

The view out the Observatory window here at the MondoBlahBlah North Bethesda Command Center

Lovely, dark and deep

At five I put my ear to the window, listened for a moment and heard the telltale sound of rain. Heavy rain. Drenching rain. So back to bed. Aroused from my slumber at about six forty five, I heard my uncle rustling around, making final preparations before heading out the door. "You're missing daylight, boy," he sang, though that was only barely technically true. The daypack was pretty much packed and ready to go so after a quick breakfast it was out the door and up the mountain.  

Wet, heavy snow weighs down every living thing in one of Paddy Mountain's clear cuts

Snow can be a boon to hunters. Movement is quieter, tracks are more visible and it takes more work for prey to forage for food buried beneath the fluffy stuff. Plus, should one actually shoot a deer, the snow makes it much more convenient to drag it back to the cabin. But it can also be disorienting. Fortunately on Paddy mountain there is only one way home - down. I frequently stray from established trails up on the mountain, but once I find my way down to the road I can always find the route back to the cabin.

This particular morning I overshot the trail up to my blind, but after having realized it, I decided to just keep going and explore an area I haven't seen before. So I turned uphill from the forest road that Fairmont Lane becomes (there's some debate about whether it's still Fairmont Lane at that point or Bonnet Hill Lane / Rt. 1857, as indicated on the National Geographic Massanutten and Great North Mountain map).

I crossed an earthen tank trap I'd never noticed before, thinking it was a jeep trail that would lead up what several of the neighbors refer to as Tartesall's Gut. Basically the next stream over from the one I usually go up. Any obvious signs of an established trail up the mountain petered away within a few hundred yards, but your intrepid narrator would not be deterred, even if I was slightly detoured. Despite being somewhat uncertain of my exact location, I was determined to get as high up the mountain as I could. The going was slow but quiet and lovely. I easily got up on the bench that runs across the mountain just beneath the spurs. It was there I started to see several sets of fresh deer tracks in the snow. I did my very best tippy toe stalking, slowly moving my way higher up the slope, following tracks as they zigged and zagged upward into the laurel. The higher I got the more jagged the tracks, with increasingly indistinct prints. I suspect I was pushing a small group upward as I moved, but as always with such scenarios, the tracks let straight into an impenetrable wall of evergreen claws and I eventually dead ended into an evil snarl of laurel. Ah well, it was beautiful and I took the opportunity to have a seat and enjoy a nice meatloaf sandwich in a peaceful little laurel cul de sac. 

Buttloads of snow

Suffice to say, the way home was considerably easier than the trip up. I wended my way down the mountain in a direction generally intended to put me back at the clear cut around which I generally hunt. As it happened I ended up within a few hundred yards of my blind. I then worked my way down the mountain edging my way around a clear cut with a stream bed running through its center, as is my typical pattern. I frequently close out my day with a visit to a rocky outcropping, overlooking the cut, that affords great views of the mountain above and the valley below.

The blanketed spurs of Paddy Mountain, Shenandoah County, Virginia

The next three days were wonderful. I only spotted a single deer, but didn't have a shot. Still, I wouldn't have traded the time in the snowy forest for anything. This year my brother, his sixteen year old son and fourteen year old daughter were able to come up for a couple of days after Thanksgiving. My niece accompanied me for two days which was a great deal of fun. I've never seen anyone who can sleep sitting on buckets, on rocks and in the snow. The girl, a lanky, athletic ginger, would sleep so deeply that her neck gaiter would become saturated with drool. Revolting. But this was a rare opportunity to spend quality time with my family and I cherished it. We should all be so lucky every year. 

After the hunt, a buttload of shearling-lined Chippewas drying in the mud room - Natural, waxed and vintage

Chillies

Autumn leapt directly into winter this year and the first hard freeze of the year came up with a howling wind. Per my habit, that meant a frigid evening of harvesting the remaining chiles from the plants.

All the colors of the rainbow - Santaka and Habanero chiles

As always with the final harvest, many of the chiles are still green with some in transition. Capsicum is basically a tropical perennial plant from Central America that doesn't know that ice and snow are coming to kill them. So they go about their business as though summer will continue forever. The last picking is consequently a snapshot of the plants which contain fruit at virtually all stages of development from flowering through red, ripeness. The Habaneros are particularly prismatic this year as I grew a red variety which transitions from green through an orangy-yellow stage to the final crimson colorway.

In addition to the mandatory Habaneros that make up the backbone of each year's crop, I planted two Japanese varieties and one Bolivian. The Japanese are the Santaka which I have not tried before and the Takanotsume, which I have grown before with great success. Back in 1996 when I was just getting started growing hot peppers in earnest, I was living in northwest Ohio in an apartment with access to about an acre of rich, black garden. Among the first batches of Picante sauce I ever made was a batch of Takanotsume, and to this day it is remembered by some of the very few, very lucky recipients. The Santaka is a similar chile, so I am hoping for similar results.

The Bolivian peppers are actually mongrels. They sprouted from saved Bolivian Rainbow seed, but as I am not a disciplined saver of seed, they are likely mixed with genes from nearby plants. They certainly did not display the lovely purple commonly associated with this particular cultivar. But they're packed with seeds, have nice heat and should make a good sauce. 

"Bolivian Rainbow" in X-mas colors!

So production of this year's picante sauce is well underway, with the early ripe Habanero already in the bottles. There will be just enough green chiles to get out a run of picante verde in each variety and probably a couple of bottles of field blend. Just a little something to warm a body through the winter...

Ripe, red organic Habanero, distilled vinegar and a squirt of lime juice. Nothing else. 

The Rut

The autumn has come and soon it will be hunting season. Okay, it's already hunting season, but I can't go yet on account'a I got this job and all. So, following the emerging pattern over the last two years, I'll take to the mountain during the week of Thanksgiving. It's becoming a family tradition, heading to the mountain with my uncle and whatever other family members are willing to come up and spend time tramping around the frozen forest from predawn to post-dusk.

This is what it looks like at my parents' house at Thanksgiving. How 'bout yours?

Of course successful hunting trips don't just happen. Like everything else in life (delightful Thanksgiving meals, for instance or securing the right to an adequate standard of living) they take planning and preparation. This year I got a non-resident lifetime Virginia Hunting License and bought the requisite Bear/Dear/Turkey tags early, so I'm legal. The paperwork is in order and I'm all set should Game Warden Timmy inquire about my bona fides.

A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

So, with my '42 Swedish Mauser I'm all set for deer. With the proper planning this year I should get five full days in. Many of the hunters up at Paddy Mountain extend their season by going out for the late muzzle-loader season, which could add another couple of weeks of opportunity, and my uncle offered to lend me a spare muzzle. But that would require an additional license and the season goes from December 13 - January 3, during which I'd probably have a hard time getting away from work and family obligations.

So this year I figured I would go out for Fall Turkey in addition to deer, which will extend the season at least as long as black powder would, and probably more. Plus my license runs through the Spring Turkey season so I can potentially go out again in April. Last year while I was ostensibly deer hunting, I heard what could only have been turkey up the hollow overlooking which I had established my stand. And this year while scouting around I found two turkey feathers quite close to the hunt club. So I've kind of got turkey fever. With that in mind, I turned my attention to my tools. I have a Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun left to me by my uncle, but it had a 28 inch barrel with a fixed modified choke; good for deer, but not so much for turkey which require a very narrow choke to keep the shot in a tight pattern. So I picked up a 24 inch turkey-specific replacement barrel and an XX-full choke tube - the narrowest I could find.

A proper turkey gun. Mossberg 500A, with a 24" vent rib bead sight blued finish barrel 90135

...and an XX-Full choke tube.

A few weeks ago I went up to the range to figure out what ammo to use. I've settled on Winchester Long Beard XR. I also tried Remington Turkey Loads, but the Winchester held a much tighter pattern much farther out. The description of their revolutionary polymer technology seems a bit gimmicky, and I worry that I am filling the woods with tons of plastic, but in my highly unscientific survey, they really did perform far better than the competition. For the moment I'm sold.

So now the ol' Mossberg is a proper turkey gun. Maybe not a perfect turkey gun, but good enough. And shortening the barrel by 4 inches makes the gun feel infinitely less cumbersome for a little guy like your faithful author. By contemporary standards a turkey gun should probably be all camo'd out. Apparently turkeys have good eyesight, and the conventional wisdom is that you need to be completely invisible. I've been advised to wear the equivalent of a camo burqa, and to paint my face in festive RealTree™. Turkeys are known to have very good hearing too, which is why, when hunting them you need to be vewy, vewy qwiet. Since this is my first foray into the quest to get a gobbler, I'm not quite ready to go full Rambo. I reckon the pilgrims managed to kill turkey with blunderbusses while wearing buckled shoes. So I should be fine in my LL Bean camo and Mossberg 500a.

Historically valid proof that the Pilgrims used blunderbusses to hunt turkeys - Gobble gobble BANG!

Speaking of shoes, that's another preparation I've made for the season. I got the old Chippewa Arctic 50s out of the closet and put a coat of beeswax on them, the better to keep the tootsies toasty and dry. I used the Justin boots beeswax-based waterproofing they gave me up to the Alvin Stokes General Store when I bought the boots last year. I am of the opinion that beeswax is by far the best treatment for waterproofing, and the fact that this was free from the manufacturer pretty much sealed the deal. And sealed the boots! The treatment darkened the leather a bit, which I like a lot. The Arctic 50 only comes in a colorway known as Bay Apache, a pleasant medium brown, but if I had my druthers I would have preferred a darker color in the first place. So form follows function and I couldn't be happier.

Newly waxed Chippewa Arctic 50's

During the summer The Managing Partner and I made a scouting trip up to Paddy Mountain to do some maintenance on my blind. It was always a kind of ramshackle affair to begin with; well situated with long sight lines in several directions, but with no more cover than a hastily assembled brush pile. We spent a couple of hours gathering up branches and leaves to construct a serviceable camouflage barrier which should obscure my presence. By the time I'm sitting in it, the blind will have been there for several months, so hopefully the wildlife will have come to take its presence for granted and won't notice the little man now sitting in it. 

So I got my gun set up, my boots are waxed and the blind is in tip top shape. The leave slip has been turned into the boss, and the plan is to spend the entire week up at the Twin Spurs Hunt Club. We will come down from the mountain long enough to make our way to Chester Gap for the Thanksgiving feast with family. Then it will be back to the mountain for the last couple of days of the deer season. Judging from the impending polar vortex, I'm sure going to be glad to have those fleece lined boots.

The hair on my chinny chin chin

Harry's - good design. But do they make good razors?

Have I fallen into some sort of retro grouch marketing trap in which I automatically fall for companies who sell sensible-seeming products in simple but attractive packaging featuring high recycled material content allegedly made by skilled craftsmen? Did Google figure out from my online behavior that I secretly want a non-stop supply of subtle, elegantly designed boxes arriving on my stoop, and then feed me ads for just such products? Well, barring an unlikely full disclosure from that oh so dark, mysterious algorithm monster, we may never know. Nevertheless, the products just keep coming, and on the whole, I couldn't be happier.

Following the recent delivery of the latest innovation in bicycle saddlery, I recently received a package from Harry's, a company devoted to making and selling razors that work as well as and cost less than the increasingly ludicrous products being propagated by "Big Shave". Harry's promises "a great shave at a fair price." Co-founded by one of the co-founders of Warby Parker (this Jeff Raider guy does a lot of co-founding), Harry's positions itself as a purveyor of sensible, affordable products shipped direct from the manufacturer to the customer by a company with a social conscience. As cliched as it sounds, they cut out the middlemen and pass the savings on to you; with 1% going to charitable organizations.

Harry's isn't the first to try this direct-to-customer model. But they're the ones who actually got me to pull the trigger. The frugality of the approach appeals to my inner penny-pincher. The 1% to charity appeals to my liberal guilt. And the whole we're just a couple of guys from Brooklyn thing appeals to my hypocritical desire to consume tons of cheap products, but not from gigantic corporations like Proctor & Gamble.

So the natural question is, do the products live up to the promise? Well, let's start with price. How does Harry's stack up against the shaving accouterments I was using previously, i.e., Gillette Fusion products? For comparison I searched for the Gillette Fusion "manual" razor. I have a constitutional aversion to using any type of battery powered shaving device, so I don't use Gillette's latest innovation, the Gillette Fusion Proglide Flexball Power Razor™ series, their hi-tech robo-razor. I am so regularly bombarded by ads for this silly contraption, that I thought to use it for comparison, but in the interest of fairness, I settled on what I consider to be equivalent products. Both Harry's and the "manual" Gillette Fusion feature a 5-bladed razor, some sort of swivel tip and a lubricating strip along the top. They seem comparable. So what's the difference in cost?  

What $40 buys you at Harry's - Handle, 19 blades, shaving cream, great typography, recyclable packaging.

What $40 buys you from Gillette - Handle, 9 blades, shaving gel, metallic orange blister packs to wrestle with.

Okay, so Harry's is cheaper. So what? Bic disposables are probably cheaper too. It's no use being cheaper if the quality isn't as good or better. Of course I'm not Consumer Reports. I don't have a high-tech lab with the ability to measure the relative sharpness of blades or the relative closeness of shaves. All I can do is provide my subjective impressions, which are these. On the whole I would say the two products are pretty close to equivalent. Harry's handles don't swivel as much, so I find I have to actually move my hand and wrist a bit more to keep the blades in alignment with my face, but if that's the toughest part of my day, I'm in good shape. The blades seem to be of equivalent sharpness and I can't say that either one is superior. I get a good, smooth shave either way.

I do like Gillette's little single blade precision trimmer on the back side of the razor for getting good and close to my nostrils. Harry's has no such feature, so it takes a little more facial contorting to not have a little rough patch just under my nose. But again, big whoop. And after years of conditioning, I am so accustomed to shaving with gel, Harry's cream seems a bit less luxurious. So for the moment I've stuck with the gel. I'm planning to get a shaving brush and trying a few alternatives, which I'll report on in a future post.  

So what's the conclusion? I have to give Gillette's Fusion the edge for superior pivotry and for their little single blade precision trimmer. I'm also more comfortable using their shaving gel than Harry's cream. But the Fusion is only marginally more convenient at over twice the price. So I'm going to stick with Harry's for a while. And as I've been exploring alternatives to the way I've been consistently shaving since I was a teenager (starting with Gillette's Atra back in the 1970s), I've learned that there is a whole cult of non-grocery store shaving people out there, and a lot of artisinal products available, so I'm likely to try out a few other shaving alternatives in the future.

No sweat

Summer is definitely here, with average high temperatures in the 90s (that's degrees Fahrenheit for you frainers; something in the 30s Celcius) with humidity to match. Ah, the Code Orange days. And that, Beloved reader, is when your humble blogger goes into perspiration overdrive. And let me tell you, it is not a pretty sight.

Paul Newman can make sweating sexy. Bartlebones cannot.

Cycling in the South in the summer entails having a constant rivulet of man moisture streaming down one's back, through the Cleft of Doom, and a steady stream of burning salt and sunscreen coursing across one's pupils and down the inside of one's Rudy Projects. Contrary to what you might think, that sucks. I can handle the incessant sphincter rinse, but the loss of sight is disconcerting when trying to navigate the mean streets of Bethesda on a bicycle.

Thus it was, in the afterglow of a recent foray into the steamy fields of rural Montgomery County, I punched the term "headband" into the search box of a certain online retailer to see what I could get my hands on in short order. I had used Halo headbands before and generally had a positive impression of them. They are pretty standard technical fabric headbands with a rubber gasket around the forehead area meant to channel the sweat back toward the temples where the stream, while annoying, will do no harm. And they work pretty well, for the most part. Certainly better than the forehead padding in any helmet I've ever known.

But as most super-sweaty cyclists must, having been enticed by the ads in the back of Bicycling magazine, (which, by the way shows up in your mailbox automatically about 15 minutes after you buy a bike and never goes away - I swear I've had a subscription for fifteen years and never paid a dime) I have been curious to try the Sweat GUTR® The Sweatband That Never Saturates™. Ooo, an actual sweat sluice. This I've got to try. So I ordered me up a GUTR® and a couple of Halo's, one of which is a new "Slim" model so as to have me a proper head-to-head competition.  

Don't sweat the small stuff.

The competition ended less than a half mile from the stately Bartlecave. See, the Sweat GUTR® is a good idea and all, but in practice, the lack of absorbent material actually makes a considerable difference. The first time I tilted my head forward (mind you, I am riding a road bike so that took about 500 feet), the sweat came coursing over the gutter's rim, splashing all over the inside of my glasses. Fail. Halo wins.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the Halo becomes saturated eventually and the dripping is pretty much the same when it does. But the cloth buys time and on days when it's not too humid (we have about 5 of those a year here in the Mid-Atlantic states) it suffices to keep all sweat out of the eyes. And after some experimentation, I would say that the slim version with its 1' width is less effective than the 1 ¾ inch Halo 1 or the wider 2" wide Halo II or it's "pullover" cousin. 

So I'm sticking with Halo. Sure you've got to wash them like garments rather than just dunking and rinsing the silicone GUTR®. And like the GUTR®, the Halo bands impress a line across my forehead that takes all afternoon to go away. But they keep the sweat out of my eyes longer and in the end, that's what matters.