Candy Dance Art & Craft Festival

Is this the mother of all art and craft festivals? It seems bigger than the Mountain View Festival, which is one of the biggest events of its kind. Unfortunately, the Mountain View Festival was canceled due to pandemic concerns for the second year in a row. 

The Candy Dance in Genoa (Nevada's oldest town) has several hundred exhibitors,

It's now Saturday evening, and I'm home after my first day of the show. I can say that there are a huge number of exhibitors and lots of visitors .

I'm planning what I need to bring tomorrow. Today I brought more books than I could imagine selling under the best of circumstances. Yet I sold out of several titles. Tomorrow, I'll load my hand truck up with another stack of boxes.

I met a ton of readers. The stories I heard were touching. One gentleman said that the pandemic was very hard for him. But he started my series when the pandemic hit. Over the course of the pandemic, he's read all 19 of my books. He says they helped him get through the worst of it. What more could a writer want?

The Candy Dance goes until 5 p.m. on Sunday. 

Directions: From 395 in Carson Valley, turn west on Genoa Lane #206. (It's easiest if you're coming from the Carson City area to the north. If you're coming from the south - Minden, Gardnerville -, you'll have to drive past Genoa Lane for a bit, then turn around so you're heading south before you can turn west on Genoa Lane.)

Drive west on Genoa Lane about 3 miles and watch for a large parking field on the left. There is a parking fee. You'll get some exercise walking from the field up Genoa Lane to the Main Street crossing. Mormon State Park is on the right. I'm in the park, space MS3.

There are exhibitor booths all over the area, so expect to spend some time exploring. Put on your walking shoes, come to Genoa, and enjoy your day!

You Want Smart? Calves Can Be Potty Trained

Last week, I wrote about squirrel smarts. So while we're on the subject...

Everyone knows cattle are pretty dumb, right? Ranchers raise them, slaughter them, and people eat them. We don't give much thought to their intelligence.

It turns out that calves can be potty trained with about the same quickness as potty training a puppy. (They didn't try it with adult cattle. But we all know that potty training is best done young!)

As reported by Scott Simon on NPR https://www.npr.org/2021/09/18/1038533121/with-a-little-sweet-encouragement-calves-prove-cows-can-quickly-be-potty-trained, cattle produce a great deal of urine, among other waste. Cattle urine has lots of nutrients that can be turned into fertilizer, but only if the urine can be collected.

So scientists wanted to know if they could take young calves and train them to urinate in a certain place, the better to collect it. They devised a standard kind of reward. Basically, it worked like this: Urinate over here and we'll give you a sugar treat.

The calves figured it out very fast. 

Read the story. It's very fun. You'll never drive by another calf without thinking about how smart they are.

Squirrel Intelligence Is No Small Thing

 I read about a study that revealed two remarkable squirrel facts. 

1. Squirrels can remember hundreds of locations where they've stashed food.

2. When squirrels know that other squirrels are watching, they fake where they stash food, pretending to dig holes and put food inside and then, when not under observation, they sneak off and hide the food somewhere else.

Deception is a widely recognized mark of intelligence. Dog deception has been well documented. In controlled studies, dogs will deceive and manipulate people in order to get treats. Zoo keepers have lots of stories about how primates deceive humans, like the orangutan that hides something a human wants by tucking it in his cheek and then pretending to "help look" for the missing item.

Now you can add squirrels to the mix.

Yesterday, we watched a Douglas Squirrel exhibit some dramatic food behavior. (This in the Sierra foothills while we are still evacuated from Tahoe.)

The squirrel appeared to watch other squirrels and act one way if other squirrels were visible and another way if they weren't visible. 

For example, this squirrel ran up the trunk of a 100-foot White fir. At the top, it cut off the cones (which grow near the very top of fir trees). The heavy, green cones came crashing down, slamming onto the ground with enough force to knock you out or kill you if your head was in the wrong place. 

After many cones littered the ground, the squirrel came back down. He made a show of looking around the ground (I'm not kidding), and picked up a cone in his mouth (a real feat of strength considering the cone probably weighed a third or even half as much as the squirrel). He ran north into the forest, carrying the cone. In a minute, he came back with no cone. 

He looked around again, picked up another cone, then ran off with that one, again to the north. 

After several trips carrying cones to the north, he paused, looked around, then ran up the trunk of a nearby Ponderosa pine, also about 100 feet tall. Soon he came back down the Ponderosa pine carrying a White fir cone. It seemed like he was moving a bit slower than before. When he got to the ground, which was still littered with white fir cones he'd previously cut and dropped, he looked around (looking for other squirrels?) and ran off to the east. We saw him dig a small hole under a Black oak tree, bury the cone, then run back.

The squirrel repeated this process, running up the Pondersa pine, coming back down with a White fir cone, pausing, heading east, and burying the cone under an oak.

After a few trips, he went back to his previous behavior. He ran up the White fir, cut and dropped some cones, came down the fir, picked up a cone that he'd already dropped from high up, and ran into the forest to the north.

We tried to make sense of this strange behavior, picking up cones off the ground and running to the north, then carrying cones down from the tree canopy and burying them to the east. Add into the mix that he used a Ponderosa pine as his highway to the sky whenever he wanted to carry a white fir cone down instead of merely picking it up off the ground.

There might be many explanations. But the one that made the most sense to us was deception. His obvious moves of picking up cones off the ground were followed by carrying them north.

The sneakier moves of going up a Ponderosa pine, leaping across from the top of the pine to the top of the fir to get a cone, and leaping back, seemed very much like a routine designed to make his varied efforts less obvious to any less industrious squirrels who might want to simply steal his cache rather than going to all the work themselves.

Intelligence? Major league by my judgment.

Caldor Fire Evacuation... And One Thing To Brighten The Mood

One week ago, the Caldor Fire required the entire South Shore of Tahoe to evacuate. The order was issued for some areas on Saturday, our neighborhood on Sunday, and the rest of town on Monday and Tuesday.

The sheriff's deputies came through our neighborhood and made us leave in minutes. (They were kind and polite, but FIRM.) 

We took our computers and the clothes we were wearing and almost nothing else. That's stressful, not even having an overnight bag. It's easy to be gone for almost any length of time when you can have several hours get ready. The Evacuation Warning system normally gives you a day.

On Sunday morning, our area was not under Evacuation Warning. Then the wind shifted, the falling ash went from white snow to black charcoal chunks, and we were suddenly under Evacuation Order. (We never got the warning stage.) Thus we ran.

Now we will worry for days? weeks? about whether our house is going to be there when we're allowed back in. According to the current map, our house is okay. The firefighters were amazing. In nearby Christmas Valley, the fire came over Echo Summit, swept down the mountain on the west side of the valley, blew across to the east side of the valley, and swirled everywhere through the forest. Yet the fire fighters stayed near the houses and appear to have spared most of them from the flames.

We are very glad for the efforts of both law enforcement and the firefighters who throughout the Caldor burn have saved houses even as the wildfire roars right up to them.

Here is a link for one of the most up-to-date maps of the fire burn area. You can zoom in on the map and see, for example, how Christmas Valley burned and yet many of the houses were spared even though the fire came on all sides.

Now we'll watch the fire report and evacuation map for when we'll be allowed back in.

As for mood brightener... We had some business to take care of in Sacramento, but the only way to get there was to head east out of the Tahoe Basin, go north to Reno, then west down Interstate 80.

One of the best things about Sacramento is the American River with 30 miles of parkway on each side. Walking paths, biking paths, acres of green grass. Another good thing is its beauty, as you can see below.

So we took a break on the river and walked for miles.

One of the dogs we saw was a Golden Retriever. This one's owner was tossing sticks in the water, and the golden jumped in to retrieve them. When the owner tired of the game, the dog decided it could play by itself. Run into the water. Swim for awhile. Run back out. Find a stick. Take that into the water. Swim with the stick. Run back out. Drop the stick on the ground and look at it. Will it to move. Okay, it's not moving. Pick it up, run down the shore, and go swimming there. Come back out. Run to its owner. Drop the stick at its owner's feet. Will the owner to throw the stick. Okay, the owner's not moving, either. Run back into the water and swim. Come back out. Shake vigorously, throwing water all over the owner. That'll teach him.

Throughout this activity, the Golden gave that famous smile. Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing. But those who know dogs know that Goldens give you a smile unlike any other dog. (By comparison, Great Danes don't smile, but they can do a vigorous wag that is unlike nearly any dog, a wag that can raise bruises on your legs.) Like other dogs, Goldens have so much fun, it's hard to not believe they're smiling. And all it takes is water and a stick.

Decide for yourself.