Did you miss me?

buttoned up, we’re going with the 3 piece suit for this journey

we’ve unbuttoned now. the button was too much. too formal. this is better somehow

the jacket had to go. we’re slowly coming to terms that the 3 piece suit in the middle of summer was a stupid idea

for some reason the shirt was the bum wheel but the vest? the vest was on to something

:D :D

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Kitties rub their heads against their chosen people as a method of scent marking, but not of ownership. Instead, they’re getting their scent on you because they know that you’re a family, but you smell “Funny” compared to them. They’re trying to make you smell like their family.

If your cat allows you to kiss their little head, it’s because they’re accepting -your- scent, and being part of your family.

In animals that have communal grooming as part of their behavior, sticking your face in their face for kisses/boops doesn’t bother them at all because they know you’re not going to eat them.

But, with frogs (and other animals you shouldn’t be putting your mouth on) that do not have communal grooming there’s a high chance their first reaction will be “plz don’t eat me” before realizing you do not mean them any harm.

Also; if you accidentally step on a cat or a dog, or accidentally pinch/hurt a smaller pet and after they squeak or yelp you start petting them and trying to reassure the animal that you weren’t trying to hurt them they’ll understand that. Puppies and kittens get a little too rough with their play, but when a litter-mate ends up squeaking because they got hurt the puppy or kitten will stop playing so roughly and switch to kisses/licks as a way to apologize before they go back to playing.

When humans act the same way, and do not hurt them again it registers as “oh that wasn’t on purpose” and the animal quickly forgives you.

THANK YOU

stranger things month | day four ↳ season two: favourite episode

Murder’s a game my college does every year where everyone’s given a plastic knife with someone’s name on it. The knives are shoved under your door at midnight and for the next week you have to try and ‘kill’ the person on your knife. If you kill them, you get their knife and have to kill that person, and so on, until there is one lone survivor. You can’t kill someone in the dining hall or in their room, or if they’re naked. I’m pretty sure the prize is a bottle of vodka.

Of course, I made the mistake of asking why everyone calls this one guy Brickaday and it turns out that he worked at a brickyard for 40 years, stealing exactly one brick every day and making no particular efforts to conceal the theft. Nobody thought anything of it until years later he was discovered to have built three houses.

His boss is said to have shrugged and made some remarks about the importance of coming up with a plan and sticking to it.

According to the smithsonianmag.com, the world’s oldest bristlecone pine was a nearly 5,000 year old tree later named Prometheus. In 1964, a man named Donald Rusk Currey decided to use an increment borer to determine its age (a process that cuts a small hole into the center of the tree trunk, and is not intended to kill the tree). Unfortunately, the borer got stuck. He and a park ranger cut the tree down to remove the equipment, and when they counted the tree rings, they realized their mistake. Oops. This incident lead to better protection of the remaining bristlecone pines.

There’s some wiggle room about what can be called “the world’s oldest living tree.” The world’s oldest living single tree is the tree that the OP is referring to. Its name is Methuselah,and it is also around 5,000 years old. Since its location is unknown, nobody knows what it looks like. But it might be this tree here:

But technically, it isn’t the oldest living tree. Let me explain.

It turns out that root systems of trees can send up genetically identical saplings (aka clones) via their root systems. Like so:

Which means the original trunk can die, but since the root system is attached to other trees which give it nutrients, it lives on. The root system can theoretically do this indefinitely. So the tree trunks could be fairly young, but the roots could be large and very, very, very old. So the oldest “tree” isn’t a small grove, it’s a logic-defying forest.

I’d like you to meet Pando.

This male quaking aspen covers 106 acres and is ancient. I’m talking an estimate of 80,000 years. The trees you can see are just “shoots” he sent up, and their average age is 130 years old. He is his own forest. If trees could talk, I’d love to hear what he had to say.

He might be dying, due to insects and drought (hmm, wonder what could have happened to cause that). A section of Pando is being studied in an attempt to find a solution. But in the meantime, we can enjoy him for his beauty.