Reading? Of Course!

What book are you reading right now?

It’s a good time for that question, because I started a new book a few days ago, The Invention of Nature (2015). It’s about Alexander von Humboldt, whose work was very important for people like me.

I have it because folks were discussing naturalists and people who have a lot of species named after them. It became apparent that I wasn’t very familiar with von Humboldt, compared to Aldo Leopold. So, my friend “JC Maxwell” (a pseudonym) said she’d send me a book.

Sure enough, it showed up, along with a book called Regretsy, a humorous look at awful things sold on Etsy. I admit I read that first. It made me laugh aloud.

Back to Humboldt. So far he’s still pretty young, but he’s been running all over Prussia and its neighbors being an eccentric genius and meeting famous people. I guess that’s what you did back then. He seems to have had a lot of time off from his job looking at rocks in mines.

Right now he’s hanging out with Goethe and the king of some small chiefdom or whatever it was before countries emerged in central Europe. They eat a lot and discuss poetry and new ideas about how the natural world works. Plus, of course he knows Charles Darwin.

I’ll get to the parts where he goes off and identifies lots of plants and animals soon enough. Right now he’s just way over-studious and energetic.

Did you know in the 1800s he was the most famous person in the world? That’s what the book says.

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Today was full of chores, but Anita and I had fun grocery shopping for Thanksgiving at her favorite H-E-B store. We also visited Target and a couple of other places.

I still got home in time to horse around with Drew, who calmed down a bit today. All good.

Daily Bird

Today I went out on my usual morning walk and animal inspection. I heard an interesting hoot/honk sound. I looked down at the Merlin app and it said snow geese! Sure enough, they were flying over.

These guys are only here during migration, so I was lucky to get a glimpse. We saw tons at Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge in New Mexico when we went there. Beautiful birds.