The All-New Bunrab

When last seen, other than a few short tweets,we were in Elko, Nevada, and I was complaining that there were great chunks of the North American continent that should never have been settled, and we *certainly* shouldn't be encouraging idiots like me & Steve to visit them by building an interstate highway to them. I-80 continued to enchant the next day, when we drove as far as Rock Springs, Wyoming, where tiredness, rain, darkness, altitude, whatnot, combined to say "We're stopping here instead of continuing to drive." The people in Rock Springs were very nice, both at the KOA and at the supermarket, where we bought too many desserts. Pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies!

The next day was, thank goodness, our last stretch of I-80 for the moment. From Rock Springs, we made it to Denver in time for supper, even with my stop at Cowgirl Yarn in Laramie. Delightful people in that yarn shop! They are currently at 115 Ivinson, but wanted to let everyone know that in June, they'll be moving -two doors down, so they'll be next to the coffee shop instead of the chocolate shop (don't worry, the chocolate shop will still be easily accessible). I got out of the yarn shop relatively cheaply - lower prices than Baltimore-area yarn stores! Not counting the gasoline it took to get there, of course.

Denver is where we had built in an extra day, good thing, too, because after driving through heavy rain and snow, we really needed a break from the road for a while. Sunday, Vince and Chas did the driving - as we went up Pike's Peak, where there was more snow! We were only able to go up to 12,000 or so feet, as the road above that was closed. Interesting stuff: though there is no official venue for such sports, there were quite a few people skiing and snowboarding down the mountain. Absolutely nuts. Crucial thing to know for anyone else considering a day at Pike's Peak: the gift shop at the Glen Cove point has only one unisex restroom, that is one toilet, and so you can expect quite a line, especially if everyone has been drinking lots of water as is recommended for the high altitude.

Speaking of high altitude, I have to admit it did leave me a bit dizzy. Although we had been rolling along the highway at 6000 feet or so for a couple of days, and adjusted to that altitude, 12,000 feet is something else. My heart and lungs were not 100% happy with me. I recovered fully after a really long night's rest, though.

On the way home from Pike's Peak, we ate at the Rockyard Brewery and Grill, in Castle Rock, and I can highly recommend it to anyone else touring the area. Lovely Mission decor, excellent sandwiches; I hear the beer is quite good though I wasn't up for alcohol after already experiencing low oxygen, but I did have the homemade root beer, and it is spectacular. And free refills!

Since I slept in today, I missed breakfast, but made it out of bed in time to head to the zoo - where we found that not only was every parking lot and every side street full, such that even some school buses were roaming around looking, but every spot of grass in the lots was occupied by groups of schoolchildren waiting to go into the zoo. So we went to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature instead. Cool stuff! We only saw part of it, the dinosaurs and early mammals - lots of dino fossils found in Colo., so a lot of the exhibits were of local items! There is a really nice lounge in the back of the Space Odyssey area, where people can relax in armchairs while looking out a glass wall at the City park, and behind the city, the mountains. Very relaxing.

And then we went to a bookstore... well, Tattered Covers is one of the most famous independent bookstores in the country. Yes, I was bad. I was rather thoughtless, in spending unlimited time there without even wondering where the rest of our party was and whether they had other things to do. Sorry! And I spent too much, too. But hey, bookstore. And back at the Museum, the only things I got at the gift shop were one refrigerator magnet, and a bookmark for Cindy - surely that restraint balances things out?

By the way, back at Pike's Peak I only got a magnet, too, though at the Garden of the Gods Park, which is sort of an introduction area to the peak, I did buy a t-shirt because I did not have enough layers of clothing on for the expected temperatures at the peak. It's a cute t-shirt: three squirrels in the classic "hear no, see no, speak no" poses, with stuffed cheeks, and a caption that says "Birdseed? What birdseed?"

One of the books I bought is a collection of all of Stephen Foster's songs, along with a few from several other songwriters of the same era. It's funny how much we think of as being folk music was actually written by Stephen Foster.

Well. Having been extremely well-fed by C&V, and having some of our remaining cookies from Rock Springs for dessert, I think we're up to date now. Tomorrow we are back on the road, but I-80 is much greener, and fewer occasions of having to climb up mountains, from here on in. So, Omaha next!

I did warn y'all that my attempt to read more nonfiction and a lower percentage of murder mysteries was going to probably mean a lot of pop science. Well, here's some of that:

Fish That Fake Orgasms, and other zoological curiosities by Matt Walker - whole bunch of biology trivia, in little factiod snippets. Not completely accurate, either; he consistently refers to the domestic horse as equus callabus instead of equus caballus, and apparently no proofreader or copy editor caught it.

Father Knows Less, or, Can I Cook My Sister? by Wendell Jamieson. One man's attempt to find answers to all the weird questions his five year old son asks. He also collects odd questions from other people's children, and even some of the ones he asked his father when he was around 5. After collecting all these questions, he then goes to various experts to find answers - the director of the Division of Pain Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, for example, to answer the question, "What would hurt more: getting run over by a car or getting stung by a jellyfish?" and to the official historian of the FBI in Washington DC, to answer , "Why is it called 'kidnapping' if you can steal away adults, too?"

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby. Endersby is English, and so this history is slightly Anglocentric, but nonetheless good. Basically, it's the story of how the mating of a USDA colony of guinea pigs with a bunch of wild Russian fruit flies led to modern molecular biology. No, really, it's sort of an era-by-era look at biology by looking at what plants and animals were being studied, when. We start with the quagga, which went extinct in 1883, in a chapter titled "Equus quagga and Lord Morton's mare" and go on through a plant in Darwin's greenhouse, homo sapiens as Francis Galton's research animal, Mendel's work on the pale hawkweed; Hugo de Vries and some flower; then, "Drosophila melanogaster: Bananas, bottles and Bolsheviks" which ties back to Galton. Finally, we get to chapter 7, "Cavia porcellus: mathematical guinea pigs." We get a history of the domestication of the cavy, and of the naming of it, and then of Abraham Lincoln's establishment of the USDA in 1862, and within only a few decades, the USDA had a large colony of guinea pigs at its experimental farm in Maryland - which I happen to know where that was; we drive past the current Dept. of Agriculture site along Rt. 29 regularly, and every time I see its enormous front lawn now, I envision piggies browsing there. Sewall Wright, who had started working on guinea pigs accidentally as a grad student at Harvard, kept in touch with JBS Haldane from about 1915 on. Haldane and his sister had had a huge bunch of guinea pigs as children:

...his sister Naomi (who would later become a celebrated novelist under her married name, Naomi Mitchison) developed an allergy to the horses she had loved and took up keeping guinea pigs instead. She loved the animals and knew many of them by name; she could impersonate their squeaks and grunts so well that they would answer her. When her elder brother came home from Eton for the school holidays and discovered her new pets, he 'suggested that we should try out what was then called Mendelism on them.' She agreed, deciding that 'Mendelism seemed quite within my intellectual grasp,' and so her pet population began to expand. ... One of JBS's friends remembered that in 1908 the lawn of the Haldanes' house was entirely free from the usual upper-class clutter of croquet hoops and tennis nets; instead, behind wire fencing, were 300 guinea pigs.

Anyway, Haldane's work interested Wright, and Wright went to work for the USDA. And therein lies the tale. By the way, did you know that guinea pigs helped win twenty-three Nobel prizes?

The book does continue after that, to the bacteriophage virus, corn, a plant called mouse-ear cress (at least in England), the zebrafish - still in use in a lot of heart research! - and finally OncoMouse (r), the first patented, transgenic animal.

Great but serious reading, not written for humor like the first two or like Where's My Jetpack? from a previous post (that one was actually written almost entirely for the sake of being sarcastic).