October 16, 2022

 

Dear everyone,

I’ve started this letter only a week after my last letter because Cindy and I are going to New Mexico for about five days starting on Tuesday. A possible highlight will be a hot air balloon ride if the weather holds.

Here in Chicago we experience the turbulent weather of mid-October.  Will it be sunny? Cloudy? Rainy? Windy?  This morning it started out around 35 and sunny without much wind, but it quickly became overcast and a bit breezy.  I know this because I was up at Fort Sheridan with Joel Greenberg and about 25 other bird watchers at the hawk watch station, which goes on from September to November.  I was wearing long underwear and several layers of clothing but my ears and fingers were still cold.  We did not see a high number of migrating raptors (the numbers increased later in the day as the NNW wind picked up) which included Merlins, Sharp shinned and Coopers Hawks, red-tailed hawks, and turkey vultures. A real hawk highlight was a merlin perched in a tree nearby, eating a yellow-rumped warbler.  Most of the time the raptors were flying high and fast in the sky, and the birders would call out where they were by reference to prominent trees on the horizon with names like ’Medusa’, ‘Sticks’, ‘the Gap’, or ‘the bowl’  (e.g. they would say “there’s a merlin flying left to right over Medusa, about two binocular fields above tree line”).  Other great birds included white pelicans, bluebirds, Vesper and Nelson’s sparrows, and about 40-50 more species.  I never would have seen most of these without experienced birders on my right, left, front, and back!

Saturday night we joined Andy and Gail at a party? Gala? at the Field Museum.  The Women’s Board was supposedly in charge of this, but the invitations came out quite late, and it was cocktail attire instead of black tie.  There were a lot of young people wandering around, and Gail thought that many of them were recipients of corporate largesse (that is, they worked for Exelon, or some other large sponsor of the museum, and were given tickets to go and represent). The appetizers were good, and the alcohol was free, but many of the wait staff seemed to not understand English.  There was only one entrée served (no vegetarian option as far as we know).  It was some kind of risotto and a large piece of beef.  My risotto was undercooked, and my steak was extremely rare. Prior to eating we wandered into the Sue exhibit, where they had a couple of paleontologists present to answer questions.  Andy astutely wanted to know how many pounds of flesh did these giant carnivorous dinosaurs eat? The answer was that they didn’t know for sure, but when they were adolescent up to their body weight each day (they have guessed at this by looking at the Raman spectroscopy profile of metabolites in the fossil bone)!  An Allosaurus weighed about 3000 pounds, so that meant about three cows each day.  A tyrannosaurus might have had to eat 5-8 cows each day when it was in its rapid growth phase.  During the dinner we saw a slide show honoring John Rowe.  He won a big award for philanthropy posthumously from the museum.  He was chairman of Exelon for many years, and surely knew Mike Madigan well.  On the other hand, he favored cap-and-trade carbon credits, and gave a lot of money away.

Andy as an amuse-bouche

Thursday Cindy and I drove out to Rockford for a repeat visit to the Anderson Japanese Gardens.  We were there the end of June, where we went on a guided tour with a docent, and then afterwards a trip to a famous FLW house.  We wanted to go in the fall to see how the garden changed.  Some of the trees had spectacular color, but the weather was cold and cloudy, with a few sprinkles of rain, so we didn’t spend nearly the amount of time there as we did in the summer.  Although we had a good lunch at the on-site dining establishment, it turned out to be a pretty long drive for the length of our visit.  We thought our time might have been better spent going to the Morton Arboretum.

I know I mentioned my tooth in my last letter.  I went to the endodontist, who gave me an X-ray and about a five minute exam, which was enough to convince both of us that I will need a root canal.  It’s planned for Halloween.

Love, H