Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends is a Facebook group I’m a big fan of “with a focus on humorous wildlife and pro-conservation content.” A while back someone asked for book recommendations on #nonmemesunday, which was how I came across the moss book.
It is a gentle book about the power of tiny things, big things, and people. It made me curious and more observant of things up close.
A few chapters in, we went in search of a loupe. Eventually finding one in SoLow, a store that sold everything and nothing. It was a little before Halloween, so my memory of the experience is marked with periodic cackle from the skeleton greeting new customers.
It’s been really fun pausing and looking at moss during walks. Noticing different types of lichen on the same blop of fence. Making the discovery that random bits of moss on the stairs leading down to the bike storage is likely thrown there by jackdaws doing their morning foraging.
Two things:
p.83
I’m told that the Chinese character for catastrophe is the same as that which represents the word opportunity.
The indigestible fiber of mosses has been reported from a surprising location—the anal plug of hibernating bears. Apparently, just before entering the winter den, bears may eat a large quantity of moss, which so binds up their digestive system that it blocks defecation through long winter sleep.
Human memory is not great. Lots of little facts about my life slip through the cracks, unrecoverable. I can’t tell you what I ate for dinner 3 weeks ago, or what I was doing at specific times. This honestly scares me. That a year from now, all I’ll know about 2022 are vague visions of ghosts of Lilian past.
Record keeping makes me feel marginally better about the ephemeral-ness of experience,1 but the practice of record keeping, in a way that works for me, is something I’m still figuring out. For instance, I’ve been keeping a bullet journal for a few years, mostly to manage to-do lists and keep track of long term projects. Not so much for journalling, apart from moments when I am loaded with feeling (generally once a month, depending on the moon). Upon rewatching the How to Bullet Journal video recently, I realised I only ever used the tasks bullet “•”, and not the notes or events bullet (“–” and “o” respectively). Thus, as part of new-year-new-me,2 I’ll be rapid logging a wider scope of things.
Also part of new-year-new-me is figuring out what I want this website to be. Largely inspired by this walk/birding blog and the Backyard Nature website, I want a place to record events, ideas, and deepdives.
Some time was spent with regards to the structure of the blog. I like the idea of a whole year being on one html file, so that at the end of each year there’s some symbolic manual archiving. I quite like that posts can get lost over time and isn’t so easy to get to. Perhaps I’ll do some sort of manual threading and cross referencing, perhaps not! Perhaps there won’t be a single post after this one! Isn’t the future exciting!
List of post ideas:
baby product marketing aesthetics
potato soup recipe
crows
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed being the treasurer, to be tasked with keeping track of every financial transaction, so that future treasurers can look back and know what happened. ↩
New-year-new-me isn’t really a “resolution” thing so much as “I’m changing all the time so everything I do this year is part of the new me” thing. I do sort of have a plan going into the new year of stuff I want to do though. ↩
This is a template blog post for figuring out how I want to structure the html of any given post.1
This is a H2
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
This is a H3
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
This is a H4
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.