August 31, 2017

Good lord...I have not made a post since June 11th.  Suffice it to say that I have been very busy.  Where to start?

Well, I guess I have spent a great deal of my time at my restoration project for the FPDWC.  This calendar year so far, I have put in over 300 hours of volunteer time.  Most of that has been out spraying invasive species. I have gone into so many areas at the preserve that I have lost count.  On days that were to be really hot, I would go out as early as 6:00 AM to beat the heat and would be done already by 9:00AM.  The reward is that the prairie looks fantastic this year with all of the work and the burn that was done earlier in the spring. I have already started to do some seed collecting as various seeds are starting to ripen.

The weather this summer was not too bad in the really hot department and for the most part, we have gotten sufficient rain.  I did have to water the garden a couple of times, but not bad at all.  I have spent a lot of time canning and making preserves with the bounty from the fruit trees and the vegetable garden. 

I made a batch of "Whimpy Ass" salsa, pickled the beets, made two batches of sweet relish and multiple batches of dill, sweet and bread and butter pickles.  I found a new canning book on sale and have tried a couple of the preserve recipes that turned out really good.  New preserves I made were Bananas Foster Butter, blueberry and raspberry mojito jam, and I also made some of the old favorites. 

Things are starting to wind down in the garden and I have already cut back a great deal of it already.  The task is very time consuming and labor intensive, so since I am retired I can now take it a day at a time and it seems less daunting.

 I have raised 15 black swallowtail caterpillars and am currently finishing up raising some Monarchs.  The black swallowtails were very successful, but I have had some mortality issues with the monarchs.  I still have a few monarch cats that appear that they will make it.

I decided not to do tagging of monarchs again this year as I am just happy to find and raise eggs/cats from my yard and send them on their way. 

Butterfly monitoring this season was really not great in the early part of the season.  Gradually as the season went on, I did start seeing more butterflies, but overall it was not a stellar year.  I hope to get out to monitor one more time this month before the season is over.



Another thing I got into was thanks to the Mokena Public Library.  My arthritis is getting so very painful that I was looking for more non-medication relief.  The Library offered some free Yoga classes so I thought I would give it a try.  I actually like the Yoga and it seems to be helping with my joints so I purchased a yoga mat and I sewed a few shirts to go along with the yoga pants I got.  I also found a yoga tape that I like a lot and I will often do the yoga tape early in the morning.  As always, I am looking for free/inexpensive activities now that I am retired.  I can honestly say that I keep so busy that I often ask myself when did I find time to actually work.

Where I do not do many Star Wars events anymore, I have tried to do a couple per month.

Right after the JLSWD, the Historical Museum held a SW Trivia contest on 6-21-17.  A few of us members from Nar Shaddaa Base signed up and formed a team.  Our team won the contest!  I guess I was surprised at that as some of those trivia contests can be very difficult.  We had a great team and everyone seemed to have their own areas of expertise and we soundly beat the competition.


Next up was a last minute 4th of July parade in Warrenville.  It was a lot of fun and the people along the parade route were some of the most enthusiastic Star Wars parade watchers that I have ever encountered and I have done a lot of parades.  Usually my "character" in the parade gets little notice, but there were lots of folks that were asking for high fives and fist pumps...lol.  I guess they were happy to see us.

On July 19th I did an event in New Lenox.  The Village presents movies at their public square and for July it was "Rogue One".  It was a very hot night, and a lot of sweating was done in my Rogue One Fleet Trooper MP costume. 
It was nice to have another RFT there too.  Costumes like the RFT are always better received if there are more than one.  I didn't stay to watch the movie as I was soaked with sweat.


On August 13th I participated in the Montgomery Parade in the same costume.  Usually it is really hot for the Montgomery Parade but this year it was not too bad.  The parade itself is short but finding a place to park near the parade start area is usually challenging, so I have to add a lot more walking just to get back and forth to my Jeep.




                                                                            On August 26th I did the White Sox game for their annual "Star Wars Day" game.  It is also generally hotter than hell for this game too, but the evening was fairly cool so I was able to wear what is probably my hottest costume in terms of just so many layers that really make me sweat my ass off.  Fortunately, the Resistance X-Wing costume I made I didn't bother getting a helmet for so it is always a little cooler if you don't have something on your head too.  As usual, my costume got a luke warm response from the general public.  I guess they realized I was NOT Poe Dameron...lol..  Tonight I am signed up to do a midnight release of the toys for the new movie "The Last Jedi" at the Toys R Us in Orland park.  I will wear the Resistance Pilot costume again as it should be a cool evening and does tie into the new movie.

Two of the biggest things I did this month was that I headed downstate on Friday August 18th for a visit with my relatives down there, a chance to see the Missouri Botanic Garden and butterfly house AND of course the Solar Eclipse. 

I left on Friday morning and hit the Missouri Botanic Garden Butterfly house first and then went to the Missouri Botanical garden itself.  The MBG had a glass sculpture exhibit that was simply amazing. 

I was not able to spend a lot of time at either of the venues, but made the most of the time that I had.  I tried to avoid the St. Louis rush hour to get back to the hotel in Highland at a reasonable time. 


After all, I had got up at 2:00 AM, drove over 300 miles and spent hours walking around both venues.  I did, however get in a massive traffic jam anyway, but got to the hotel in not too bad of time and spent some time that evening wandering  around Highland and got a visit from my cousin Steve and Alanna.  It was nice to just sit and talk and get caught up.

The next day I went driving around to some of the old haunts.  I visited my cousins Paul and Ralph on the farm and then later in the afternoon headed to Glen Carbon to my other cousin Marks house where they had a Eclipse party and family reunion.  Again, it was nice to see a lot of the cousins that I have not seen in a very long time. 

 It was hotter than hell and very humid the morning of the eclipse.  We drove to Harrisburg Illinois to the home of Mark's wife Donna's sister.  Harrisburg was in the 100% zone and was about 30 miles east of the epicenter of So IL eclipse "happenings" at SIU in Carbondale.

The eclipse was an awesome sight and it was great to view it with my family.  My brother had been looking forward to the eclipse since the early 90's when he clipped an article about it out of a magazine and had been carrying it with him all those years.  My family started talking about going down together for the viewing for over 2 years.  It all worked out very well.  Probably the most mind blowing part was the ride home.  I was caught in a 300 mile traffic jam from Harrisburg to the Peotone exit on I-57.  It took me over 10 hours to get home and it should have only taken me about 4.5 hours.  As mind numbing as the drive home was, it was all part of the "experience" and most of the drivers in that same traffic jam just took it in stride, there were not a lot of asshats in the bumper to bumper traffic...no road rage.  I did rent a car for the trip and was glad that I did as I would have burned up probably 3 times the gas in the trip home if I took the Jeep vs the crappy little Mitsubishi that I had.

August 29th also marked a very busy and great day as one of the "usual suspects" (Mark Bettin) secured us restoration volunteers a very nice behind the scenes visit to the Field Museum.  It was incredible to see parts of the Museum's plant, insect and bird collections.  We spent about 2 hours at the Field seeing as much as we were allowed to.  I got a chance to hold one of the Museum's passenger pigeons and where it was a huge honor to hold the stuffed body of a creature now extinct was so very sad.  The stuffed passenger was from the late 1800's. 

We saw plants that were pressed by EJ Hill in the late 1800s.  We even saw a book on gardening in the Museum's library that was from the 1700's. 

There is so much behind the scenes at the Field Museum that I am contemplating being a volunteer there in a "behind the scenes" capacity.  There are people volunteering that do some of the duties of sorting and labeling where it does not require you to have a degree.





After the museum, we went to Gensburg-Markham Prairie in Markham.  Always nice to see what the prairie is supposed to look like.  We saw amazing blooming plants, some strange insects and as we were leaving, R. Panzer (one of the founding fathers of the restoration movement) happened to come by to do a little work.  Where he is now partially disabled, he still gets out to the prairie to work because (in his words) - "there is no one else".



I also went to the Will County Fair this year to volunteer for the Master Naturalists.  I helped man an information table and I brought some of my monarch caterpillars with me.  Folks that stopped by seemed to really like seeing the monarchs.

Whew....busy, busy, busy and the next couple of months will be no different as my calendar is stuffed with commitments already.