9/24/23

 Sunday, September 24, 2023

In bed by 10:39 up at 5:48, Lilly sleeping on the floor of my bedroom again.  62°, high of 68°, partly cloudy, Beach Hazard Alert, waves 3 to 5', currents.  AQI=46. wind SW at 12 mph, 5-13/22.  Sunrise at 6:40, sunset at 6:45, 12+4.

Daybreak is beautiful this morning, with big puffy clouds hanging over Lake Michigan and the shoreline, the open skies around them the palest cerulean blue imaginable, almost white, and the clouds a blue-gray.  Autumn is clearly upon us; the front yards are full of fallen ash tree leaves, probably partly due to the diminishing daylight but also to the long drought.  Normally I expect the honey locust leaves to drop first.

I had quite a cleanup job this morning, because of last night's dinner of BBQ ribs and scalloped potatoes and because of my disappointing soup-making.  And because we ate after Geri's walk at Virmond Park with Shirley and Tom Mara and got engrossed in This is Us, leaving the kitchen mess unattended.  I had the dishwasher loaded and running by 8.

Cassandra Sanders, the prophet at an oasis  Bernie Sanders spoke at a public gathering at the UW-Madison Memorial Union yesterday, promoting his new book "It's OK to be Angry About Capitalism" written with co-author John Nichols, an editor of The Capitol Times and Madison resident.  "Hundreds of Sanders admirers packed the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union's Shannon Hall to hear the democratic socialist critique corporate concentration in "sector after sector" including Wall Street and in the media, and declare that "in many ways our nation is becoming an oligarchic form of society . . . The people who own America, the ruling class in this country, they are not nice guys," Sanders said."  Sanders and I were born about two weeks apart in 1941 but he's in a lot better shape than I am.  I was one of his supporters in the 2016 Wisconsin Democratic primary in which he beat Hillary Clinton.  I still wonder whether he could have defeated Donald Trump in the general election that year, or at least garnered more of the popular vote than Clinton did.  The DNC under the leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz did its best to ensure that Clinton would win the nomination cementing my belief that the Dems are only the lesser of two evils.  Last night Sanders  declared "One of the weaknesses of the Democratic Party has been not only that they have not done enough for the working class of this country, is they refuse to acknowledge the reality and the pain that tens of millions of people are living through right now."  Hear, hear.

Virgin sturgeon.   In the summer of 1961, I spent 3 weeks at the naval amphibious base at Little Creek, Virginia, the East Coast headquarters of 'the 'gator Navy.'  The officers' club there was kind of famous for its songbook and for the singing that occurred. regularly there.  One of the popular songs, a juvenile sex song, was "The Virgin Sturgeon" sung to the tune of "Reuben, Reuben."  When I retired and we moved to rural Saukville, I did a lot of volunteer work, helping with 'hippotherapy' for disabled kids in Darien, Wisconsin, and then in northern Ozaukee County and also at the Riveredge Nature Center outside Newburgh, WI.  One of my volunteer activities at Riveredge was helping to raise lake sturgeon as part of a project to restore a wild, self-sustaining lake sturgeon population in the Milwaukee River.  For two or three years starting in 2006 (I can't remember how many now) I drove once a week to a spot in the maple forest, Riveredge's sugar bush, near the Milwaukee River to a trailer with water tanks loaded with hundreds of baby sturgeon at different stages of development.  In teams of three, we carefully cleaned the tanks, checked the pumps, measured and recorded critical values of the water in the tanks, and fed the 'youngsters' a carefully controlled diet.  The whole process was carefully controlled and we volunteers, almost all retirees, were trained and supervised, our main supervisor being a terrific Riveredge staffer, Mary Hollenbeck, shown in the center of the photo following this recollection.  In the autumn, the young sturgeon were mature enough to be released into Lake Michigan with the hope that they would eventually return to the Milwaukee River to spawn.  This year's release will be tomorrow, a big event and celebration.  I had to stop this volunteer work when chronic pelvic and bladder pain problems became so disabling I couldn't manage the weekly trip to the trailer.  A big loss in my life.  This morning's JSOnline has two feature stories about the Riveredge Sturgeon Project.  It's great that the project is ongoing and successful.

Mary Hollenbeck, still working with dedicated volunteers.

An elaborate system of pumps, pipes, storage tanks, and filters deliver Milwaukee River water to the growing sturgeons in order to imprint the water characteristics on them so they will return to spawn.