Sleepytime Gorilla Museum played the final show of their tour up in San Francisco last night. M. and I went up to see it, and what a show it was! Shinichi and a small horde of Butoh dancers from Inkboat shared the stage with them. There were audience sing-a-long bits. There was some Moe!, even though he is no longer an official member of the band. There was a lot of very cool anti-Bush sentiment bubbling through the band and crowd as well. This made it even more of a cathartic experience than usual.

I have this thought that the east and west coasts should secede, and that we should gather together the far-flung remnants of the Berlin Wall and rebuild it around Washington DC, so nobody could leave. It would be sort of like sandbagging along the banks of a swollen river, except in this case the flood we'd be preparing for would be a flood of idiocy.

But enough of this talk about the small minded little cretins who continue to run this country. It's depressing. I spent another day outside, with a line of children trailing behind me. It was misty and cold, with the rain setting in towards the end of the hike. One kid had to leave halfway through (a classroom teacher and his mom came up to get him) because his grandma was dying. Maybe there's a thursday curse in effect. This is the second thursday where something unexpected happened. At least the one Yellowjacket nest we passed didn't trouble us. This week the Yellowjackets were all off stinging one of the other field groups - the one led by the other new guy. His experience wasn't quite as all-encompassing as mine was. Only two people got stung - the field leader himself (on the neck) and the kid who'd stepped on the nest (six times on the knee). Later, I told him that it must be some sort of secret initiation for new instructors.




This is a California Newt. We found yet another mutant one today, with an extra toe on its left front foot. The one pictured above had the correct number of digits. So far I've found three mutants, all with toe deformities.




This is what I call a good work environment. The camera ran out of memory at this point, so I wasn't able to photograph the strangely twisted, mist enshrouded Madrone trees further up the hill. Maybe next time.