Dr. Elizabeth Pierce Olmstead

I did not know Dr. Pierce (Ross) Olmsted ," a pioneer for women in medicine". She graduated from the University of Buffalo's school of medicine in 1939 and "invented the diffraction lens used in the treatment of crossed and lazy eyes. The doctor was also one the the area's first female pilots, serving as a lieutenant in the Civil Air Patrol in the early 1940's."

I first heard about her a few years ago when my neighbors told me that she once lived in the house I just bought. She had also told them how both she and the neighborhood children would all take turns on a swing that was hung from the large Silver Maple in my back yard. Apparently my backyard was the IT spot to play 80 years ago.

What made me think of her was that I was thumbing through a red book of "Complete Works of William Shakespeare with notes" that I acquired one day at the estate sale of the doctor's home. I did not intend nor did I know about the sale ahead of time. But when I see those "Estate Sale" signs, I follow. I have been on the look out for books, art and old wooden toys (for my daughter). And I found a beautiful yellow with butterflies enameled picture frame and the collection of Shakespeare plays. As I was sitting at my desk about to start reading I realized that there were news paper clippings in the book. I began to think that this was a college text book with a snap shot of thoughts from a young woman's journey through college. There was a photo clipping of graduates from Lafayette High School. A poem by Dr. Frank Crane called "The Pressure". A problem solving article for the card game Bridge. A poem called "The Eulogy of the Dog" very sad. And lastly, a stiff card with a picture in blue and black on it called "Ex Libris". It is a night scene with a castle on a mountain and what looked like tiny knights on horse back in the foreground. It was like moments in a college students life. Together they almost told a story of someone enthralled with the drama and tragedy of Shakespeare, possibly feeling the pressure of school, death and sadness, and the fantasy of a far away land.

So, did the doctor own my house at one time? I was curious so I pulled the deed to my house. As I first scanned the deed I looked for an "Olmsted" and found no one by that name. Then realized that that was a married name. Then there was a Edward J. Liebetrut, a prospecting pharmacist from the East Side, sold the house to one William H. Pierce on October 30, 1919. William Pierce left the house to Clara K. Pierce, who was his wife, in June 10, 1912. Clara left the home to her daughter Elizabeth Ross and son William Wright Pierce on October 26, 1959. They kept the house until 1968. So, from what I can tell the stories are true. I wish I had a chance to ask the doctor some stories about the old house. And now it seems odd that her picture frame and old college book now sit on a shelf in the same house she once owned.

Solid Pine Kitchenette

I was gawking at all the great items on www.etsy.com again. I come across this solid pine kitchenette while searching under the word "Waldorf". It is for about half the cost of other handmade, solid wood kitchens and thought I would share the good news. Check it out Here

Age Two - Don't Hold Back

I often catch myself admiring my child. I watched each day as she made the transition from being a baby person to being a little person. She has always been independent and social. But I think she realized cause and effect. This tied in with the occasional impulsiveness desire, intense dedication to her friends and dollie, and determination to be self sufficient has caused me to fall even more in love with her. OR is it more complex? It may be that along with the intense love I have also developed admiration and...pride?

I have never been a proud person before. Yes, I have accomplishments but I am always pressing ahead to the next task so there is not much room for pride in what I have done. This, I think is different. I understand that my child is not perfect in the technical seance of the word. But she keeps me in awe.

She is outgoing in a way I am not capable of nor do I hold her back. I instead smile and hope I can learn a thing or two. Yah, a few locals last year have pegged her for a socialite. Often when we arrive at a shop or store it is marked with sales people, cashiers, etc extending a cherry wave with Hello dispite the task they have at hand. It has gotten to the point that as we leave the grocery store my child is waving and announcing bye bye so jubilantly that all the cashiers plus whoever is standing in line all wave and bid farewell. The first time this happened I felt as though we were at a ship launching. And I not being the most socially apt person smiled, said bye bye, while crouching my head lower as I really do not like attention. I had very mixed feelings. I so dearly work against my own personality just so my child can be herself. That is was I selfishly want. For my child to find herself, embrace herself, and go for it.

A Man's Last Message

I posted this video over a year ago. I though this video was worth posting again.

I think for many times people now, times may be a bit hard. But no matter what we need to be reminded sometimes that...well...

This is the last lecture given by Randy Pausch.

See his last lecture

Food, Memories, Gardens and Families

Food from gardens is something near to my heart. For a few reasons. One my great grandmother, Lillian Finn, went to college and became a nutritionist when she was 35. Second I split my time between the East Side of Buffalo where I was born and my home which was the old Singer's Orchard in the South Towns. We raised apples, cherries, pears, plums not to mention the the 16 garden beds and a 40 by 40 veggie bed. Third, I was raised on PBS. Who often interjected about the importance of community, health, and loving life.

The east side of Buffalo and our orchard near the Boston hills were worlds apart. I got to see both sides. I participated in events like the Love Joy Halloween parade on the East Side. Yet, I was throwing nets over cheery trees so the crows didn't steel them all. I would take a quarter my great grand mother Lilly Mae gave me, cross Filmore Ave as she waved me on from her second floor apartment, walk to the corner vending machine, and out fell a frozen carton of milk. Then again harvest time meant climbing into the plum tree and eating the purple drops of lushness while bouncing on a branch.

I remember my mom making cherries jubilee lighting the flames and presenting it to the table. Or the rhubarb crisp, apple pie, and mammoth berries off the rod. All pies were made in sheet cake pans about 16 by 24 inches. They last longer that way.

The wild animals loved the food. And the deer were kept healthy all winter long digging up the apples that were left on the ground. Which brings me to another thought. Farming and gardening is done differently in the city.

Last year, as people walk by my wild front garden, they would point to a plant asking for its name (which I often do not know) or comment on how much it has changed from two years ago. Even a seasoned "Garden Walk" participant asked how we got the plants to maturity in only two years. As I watch other gardeners I began to realize that many of the gardeners in cities and suburbs are different then in small towns and small farms. I have a few rules of I follow mostly because they worked for my mom. Much of what I know has been past down in my family. And every time I listen to my mom I am reminded of how little I know.

For example here are some things that are different between city and country:

1. If you want to remove a vine from a building cut the vines at the based from the roots. Let them die over winter. Then you may have a chance at scrapping them off the wood.

2. Rake your leaves ONTO your garden before the first frost. It should not be a foot thick or you can get rot. But a healthy 1-2 inches allows normal microbial breakdown, sustains nutrients in the ground and it is free.

3. Never ever KILL the microbes in your garden. You are better off with a few grubs and a ton of good fungi and bacteria then a sterile garden and or lawn. Sometime I walk by a lawn and I see a pretty green lawn with short dandelions. And sometimes I see a lawn that obviously has damage soil. These are the lawns that are deep green in the spring. They suffer from synthetic fertilizers and even pesticides. The owner thinks the deep green is a sign of a well maintained lawn. Deep green like that usually means the plant is pumped up on chemicals, will be short lived, die back, get sun burn, and only causes more work. Most of these lawns I see are homogeneous which is a lawn made of one species of grass. This is an odd thing to do to a lawn. A healthy lawn will have about 15% minimum of weeds and at least a couple species of grass. Some "weeds" are good for gardens as well. The lawn is an easy and obvious example.

4. Do you need to kill off grass? Spray vinegar ! The type you can get from a grocery store is perfect and then cover the ground with a tarp. If you are only killing grass and dandelions, a few weeks will do it. You also do not get the die off of the beneficial microbes. But if you have a creeping plant, with runners, you can over the ground in fall and come spring the ground should be ready to go. That is what I did with a front section of my lawn. It had an invasive weed that would choke out other plants. Now I have perfectly cleared ground to work with. I did get some weeds growing on top of the tarp but they popped off the ground when the tarp was lifted up. I also did no harm. My yard is carcinogen free. It is safe for children, dogs, my friends, family and me.

I have also been learning a lot about family. Right now with a toddler I can only work in the backyard or risk her running into the street every time she sees the neighbor's dog when in the front yard. But sometimes I get to go out and just work on the front garden. I enjoy working on my garden. It is not very old. Developing a healthy lush garden does not happen over night. I sometimes just focus on what I am doing. Other times I think about my relatives back when they had farms and what it was like for them. I have recorded the foods they grew and where they were sold. I have recipes from each relative that came to live in Buffalo whether they were from Italy or North Carolina. I have my great grandma Lilly Mae's southern cole slaw and biscuits. I have my Great grandma Lucy's Florentine mint cheese over sized ravioli. I have my mom's pizza, cherries jubilee, and sheet cake pan apple pie. And my Dad's lasagna. Though I am a vegetarian I have my... let me think here, yeah, great great grandma Maria's Abruzzi lamb/beef mint meat ball recipe. Wow, food is good. I just realized I have a food associated with each person in my family. There are more but I'll stop the the flashbacks now. It has been 4-5 generations since anyone made farming a living in my family. But we always maintained land, gardens and trees despite our careers. The foods and recipes each family member favored is reflective of the farms and places they were from.

Uber Urban Wild Life - Take a Look

From our third floor window my toddler and I watched a very healthy cardinal feed its large baby. There is a lot of wild life to be observed in a city. Attracting particular animals to a city yard is not that hard.

Here are some animals that may be in your east cost back yard.

Birds: Cardinals, Blue Jays, House Finch, Yellow Finch, Sparrow, Starling, Robin, Swallows, Turkeys, Warblers, Red Tail hawk, Cooper's hawk

Mammals: rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, bats

Amphibians: frogs, salamanders, toads

Insects: stick bugs, praying mantis, lady bugs, sulphur butterflies, Karner Blue Butterflies, ants, etc


Wild life is good for the neighborhood...Why?

Well, to start with predators eat pest meaning people have less work to do to remove vermin. If we provide habitation for one brown bat, it will eat 3000 mosquitoes in one night. The insects called praying mantis, stick bugs and ladybugs eat the insects that kill garden plants. The Northern Leopard Frogs eat mosquitoes. These frogs are also an indicator of water and air quality, the worse the quality the lower the number of frogs. Needless to say these animals are low in numbers.

The first year I saw a Coopers Hawk was truly the beginning of my appreciation of urban wild life. The hawk was was sitting just 20 feet above ground in a maple tree. Its long banded tail signaled to me that this was not a typical bird, and the way is was perched signified this was a hawk. The following year it found a mate and raised a baby in a nest three stories up in a neighborhood Silver Maple. I watch all summer long as the two parents fed their offspring rat after rat. There were very few rats that year in our neighborhood. A neighbor saw me and I turned to tell him that this small predator was a hawk. He responded with it made a loud ruckus, the cawing it did was so that the fledgling bird could follow its parents as they swooped and dove between buildings. I responded with, I watched the baby bird eat a half dozen large rats each day and maybe the added noise was a small price to pay for the removal of the rats. (There is always someone like this in a neighborhood.) This photo is the bird eating a pigeon in the Silver Maple that is in my back yard the year after it raised its baby. These hawks are considered rare in New York. So, plant a tree in your front yard that will grow tall, attract nesting birds that eat rats, and be inspired by this jet-fighter-like flying bird.

Nature Balancing Nature

A neighborhood reap the rewards if a few simple steps are taken by each homeowner.

1. Buy predatory insects so they can eat other pest insect.
2. Plant a maple, sycamore, or other large tree for perches for hawks to hunt from or nest on.
3. Do not rototiller a yard. It turns up dormant weed seeds and it kills earth worms.
4. Do not use pesticides on your yard, besides that it causes breast cancer, it kills the insects birds need to eat.
5. Plant bushes and brush. This is for shelter for song birds that eat weed seeds and insects.
6. Nesting boxes for birds.
7. Shelter boxes for butterflies.
8. Shelter boxes for bats.
9. Provide water supply; pond, rain garden, bird bath, etc.

Why are males developing eggs in their testes?

Why are males developing eggs in their testes?

Intersex, endocrine disruptor, thyroid glands, eggs found in testicles, fishing, rivers, lakes, soaps, deodorants, farm run off, lawn care....These are a few components that are part of the web of problems causing male animals to develop female eggs in their testicles and female like behavior. Some females exposed to these chemicals are producing male reproduction organs too.

Endocrine disruptors, found in everything from household cleaning agents to farms, are being found in toxic levels in many of the U.S. water supplies; Chesapeake bay (Virginia and Maryland) and Puget Sound (Washington) are two examples. The sources for the high levels of endocrine disruptor have been traced and tested. The sources are run off from lawns, farms and impervious surfaces such as parking lots and roads. When there is rain (or driveway washed car) the water washes all the chemicals from lawns, farms, parking lots and roads into sewers pipes and drainage ditches. These pipes and ditches empty into rivers, bays and lakes. Then we the people drink and swim in the contaminated water along with fish, lobster, salmon, deer, orcas, seals, dogs, etc. These chemicals cause a host of issues one of the major illnesses is reproduction organ damage. The results can range from undescending testicles, low sperm count, as found in human males to eggs in testes in fish and frogs to stillborn babies. An addition blow is premature onset of breast cancer.

What is even scarier is that when some of these chemicals are mixed together they can work in synergy against humans and other creatures drinking and swimming in the contaminated water.

Here is a definition from Wikipedia

"Endocrine disruptor (sometimes also referred to as hormonally active agents)^[1] are exogenous substances that act like hormones in the endocrine system and disrupt the physiologic function of endogenous hormones. Studies have linked endocrine disruptor to adverse biological effects in animals, giving rise to concerns that low-level exposure might cause similar effects in human beings.^[2]"

"Food is a major source of pollutant exposure. Diet is thought to account for up to 90% of a person's PCB and DDT body burden.^[35] In a study of 32 different common food products from three grocery stores in Dallas, fish and other animal products were found to be contaminated with PBDE.^[36] Since these compounds are fat soluble, it is likely they are accumulating from the environment in the fatty tissue of animals we eat. Some suspect fish consumption is a major source of many environmental contaminates. Indeed, both wild and farmed salmon from all over the world have been shown to contain a variety of man-made organic compounds.^[37]"

Endocrine disruptor include some of the following chemicals
"Chemicals commonly detected in people include DDT, Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's), Bisphenol A, Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE's), and a variety of Phthalates.^[46]"

"Some examples of putative EDCs are vinclozolin, zearalenone, 17-alpha ethinylestradiol, Dioxins, PCBs, PAHs, furans, phenols and several pesticides (most prominent being organochlorine insecticides like endosulfan, DDT and its derivatives). Substances with estrogenic effects include the xenoestrogens and phytoestrogens."

Though, Wikipedia sites food as people's closest point of contamination besides water, this is a chain event. The food and water would not be contaminated if storm water was not allowed into pipes and ditches that empty into drinking water sources. The pipes and ditches would not be contaminated if farms were organically farmed, and parking spaces, along with roads, were built to be permeable allowing water to seep through the cement or paving and into the ground where it can be filtered.

I am lucky. I found a water filter that takes out all the major contaminants up to 98-99% efficiency per contaminant. I have access to organically grown food. And I am educated on the health issues. But many people, neighbors, parents, sons and daughters are not aware, or have access to defend their health. Our water ways, our lakes, our bays do not have giant filters to clean them. Chesapeake bay has loss its fishing industry, its fish, its life. Puget Bay is losing its orcas, 7 died last year. There is no fishing allowed. Remember this is where many get their drinking water too. Mother's nurse their children can pass these contaminant on.

How do we stop this?

In the home you can buy organic when possible (endocrine disruptor are fat soluble), get a farm share (you save money here too), get a good water filter, refinish old wood floors (remodeled in the 1960's with PCB varnish) with a modern low VOC finish, avoid wild and farmed salmon, increase indoor home air ventilation and avoid house dust.

In your community you can encourage new housing/business developments to use permeable parking space (allows water to seep into the ground under paving), do not wash your car in the driveway take it to a car wash which filters and cleans the water, get a farm share also called Community Supported Farming, be involved in water way clean-ups and vote ! This is your community, family and your own health at stake here.

And always remember "Land use is key to protecting our drinking water and children".

You can watch the Front Line special on "Poisoned Waters" where I got much of the information for this post.