What to do if you lose your compass

I sometimes go for a week or more without getting into the woods, then I go there and remember why I was feeling so badly about not.

I was able to visit my dry vernal pool Monday. Sure enough, a few of the recent rain clouds passed over and made it a pool with water in it. I shot a few minutes of underwater video and there clearly were multiple somethings, looking like translucent polliwogs, swimming around in there. Really tiny, but a few got to the correct focal distance and I could see their bulbous heads and skinny tails trailing behind like pieces of thread in need of a pair of scissors.

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It’s a small world, and electrons are really fast

John's picture(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 2/28/2014)

Across the years, each generation has found the world a tad smaller. I imagine early hunter-gatherers, accustomed to walking from place to place, were impressed by how much ground could be covered on a horse. And I can almost hear Mr. Ugh grunting to Mrs. Ugh something to the effect that “kids these days move too darn fast. They miss everything that’s going on around them.”

Then came trains, cars and airplanes, and each prompted Mr. and Mrs. U to assert the latest version of, “If God had meant us to fly, He’da given us wings.”

Then came the Internet.

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