On Saturday 8 November we celebrated our Slava and Ruby Wedding at St Nicholas of Japan Orthodox Church in Brixton, Johannesburg. In addition to friends from the church, we were glad to celebrate with family and friends, some of whom we had not seen for a long time.
After the regular Saturday evening Vespers, we had our Slava. Slava is a Serbian custom, which is a family celebration, remembering the day when the first members of that family were baptised, and you can find an explanation of the service here, on a blog post we posted on a previous occasion, so we won't repeat all that here.
As we explained in our blog post about our wedding 40 years ago, we were actually married on 29 September 1974, which in the Western Church was the feast of St Michael and All Angels. We were received into the Orthodox Church 27 years ago on the 8th November 1987, which was the Orthodox equivalent of the same feast, and so became our Slava. We had the opportunity to choose new saints. names, and our son Jethro (then aged 7) chose Raphael, one of the archangels celebrated on that day. And so, because of the coincidence of the saints, we celebrate our wedding anniversary on the same day.
This time we had the parish priest, Fr Athanasius, and Fr Elias Palmos, with whom we are working on several mission projects. Also the celebration overlapped with that of St Nektarios of Pentapolis, who died on 8 November 1920, but is commemorated on the 9th because the 8th was the Synaxis of St Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and all the Bodiless Powers of Heaven. So it was also the name-day of another member of the parish, Nektaria (Nicky) Reynders, and so we celebrated that too.
In addition to members of the parish, we were also joined by friends and family, who represented different periods of our life.
The family was representred by Graham Downs and his wife Elmarie (whom we had not met before). As the family tree calculator tells us, Graham Craig DOWNS and Valerie Muriel Katharine GREENE are 3rd cousins 1 time removed. Their common ancestors are Henry CRIGHTON and Petronella Francina Dorothea FLAMME. An interesting point there is that Graham is actually just a year older than our son Jethro, but is a generation further back. Val is descended from the eldest son of Henry and Petronella Crighton, William John Crighton, while Graham is descended from a younger son, Frederick Crighton, and Frederick's descendants seem to have had children when they were quite old, so there are fewer generations in between.
There were also some old friends. One was Lionel Murcott, an artist, whom I had known before we were married, and in fact we had not seen each other for more than 40 years, but since he was living in Gauteng, he thought it would be quite easy to come and join us, and we were very glad to see him.
Stephen Hayes and Lionel Murcott.
Another old friend was Phillip Pare, whom we knew from St Stephen's Anglican Church in Centurion in the early 1980s. At about the same time that we joined the Orthodox Church, Phillip joined the Roman Catholic Church, but he and his wife and children live in Silverton, which is not far from us, so we've kept in touch.
There were also several friends that we knew from St Thomas's Church in Sunninghill, including Mira Mihaljevic. It was good to see them again too.
Val Hayes and Ivo (from St Thomas;s Serbian Orthodox Church in Sunninghill).
Many people gave us gifts, which were somewhat unexpected, and much appreciated. and thanks for all for their kindness and friendship. We can't mention all of them here, but only one or two.
And these helped to make it a memorable occasion. Father Athanasius read some special anniversary prayers for us as well.
It's quite interesting, looking back, to see how many things have changed, since we were first married. I'm typing this on a laptop computer, but back in 1974 personal computers were known only to serious technonerds, and were very limited in what they could do. Television broadcasting was just beginning to make an appearance in South Africa, and soociologists from other parts of the world were making a study of South African children because they were the last generation in a relatively developed country who had grown up without TV. The Sunday Tribune had a weekly Charity Jackpot, a crossword puzzle competition, where the prize was a car worth about R5000. Most people could not afford a television set (they cost about R1200) and so they changed the prize to a TV set, and the name of the competition to a "Tellypot". I wonder if they've changed it back. The price of petrol had just increased to 8c a litre, which everyone thought was iniquitously high.
Cellphones were unknown too. We were just starting our family history, and we corresponded with relatives overseas by snail mail, writing out family group sheets by hand, and occasionaly making photocopies — plain paper copiers were cutting-edge technology as most of them still used special coated paper. Occasionally we would type out family trees on wax stencils and run off copies of a Gestetner or Roneo duplicator. When did you last use an actual typewriter?
Finally, for closing, one of the most interesting presents we received was from Graham and Elmarie Downs: since it was our Ruby Wedding, they gave us "His" and "Hers" ruby grapefruit.
Ten years ago we met some Crighton relatives for the first time. Nita Harris (born Crighton), who lives in the USA, had lost touch with her brother Roger, but ten years ago the reestablished contact, and she came to South Africa with her son Roger Harris to see Roger, who was very ill. We arranged to meet between Johannesburg and Pretoria, at BJ's Restaurant, built over the freeway.
Walter Crighton is Roger Crighton's son (and Nita's nephew). The common ancestors are William John Crighton (1842-1886) and Anna Maria MacLeod (1849-1917). William John Crighton was a saddler in Cape Town, and died when fighting a fire on Table Mountain, when his horse apparently stood on a burning ember and threw him.
William John Crighton was one of 10 children of Henry Crighton and Petronella Francina Dorothea Flamme, and three of those children married members of the MacLeod family of Cape Town. Petronella Francina Dorothea Flamme was the granddaughter of a slave, Francina van de Kaap.
When we first became interested in family history we asked Val's grandmother about the Greene side of the family (her in-laws) and she said they were a Crighton family who were leather merchants in Cape Town. So in 1975 we looked them up in the Cape Archives, and in the files were found some correspondence from a Miss Nita Crighton (as she then was), who was interested in the same family, and had written from the USA asking for copies of the same records. We wrote to her at the address on those old letters, asking that they be forwarded if she had moved, and discovered that she had married William Harris and was living in California. So we corresponded for several years about the family history, and visited Nita's mother and her aunt who were living in an old age home in Bertrams, Johannesburg, in 1986, but it was only 10 years ago that we met face to face.
There ia more information about the Crighton family on our family wiki here and in another post on this blog here.
Nita is Val's second cousin once removed.


Scream Factory Set to Release David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers!
Extras Added to Scream Factory's Release of The Thing!
Child's Play to be Released in a 2-Disc Collector's Edition Blu-ray!
Arrow to Release Microwave Massacre on Blu-ray!


Fit4Work carry out many display screen assessments at some of the country's leading organisations, helping workers maintain good physical health while carrying out duties sitting for long hours at a desk with a computer screen.
You would be surprised by the number of poor workstation setups we've seen during our time working on DSE assessments and training courses over the years! Below is a practical 8-point checklist you can implement yourself to ensure you minimise the chances of suffering from back pain and other physical ailments while working long hours at a computer.
1. Your thighs should be parallel to the floor. Achieve this by adjusting the height and/or the angle of your chair. If you cannot adjust your chair and you're suffering from back pain, consider asking your employer for a new chair.
2. Your feet should rest flat on the floor or on a footrest. Again, achieve this by adjusting the height and/or the angle of your chair.
3. Back of the knees should be clear of the front edge of your seat. Adjust the depth of the chair seat so that you can easily place your fist behind your knee. Be sure to specify the appropriate seat depth length when ordering a new chair.
4. Your back (lower and mid-back) should be well supported. Adjust the height, tension and angle of the backrest to ensure the lumbar support is positioned at your waist.
5. Your forearms should be supported and your shoulders relaxed at all times. The height of and distance between your armrests should allow freedom of movement for your forearms when performing tasks, yet provide support for them during rest periods when using your mouse. Avoid hunching your shoulders to ensure that the elbows/upper arms remain close to your torso.
6. Your elbows should be approximately the same height as the keyboard. Adjust the height of your keyboard tray or work surface so the keyboard is at the height of your elbows.
7. Your wrists should be straight at all times and your hands in line with your forearms. Adjust the angle and height of the keyboard tray or work surface to ensure straight wrists. If your keyboard tray or work surface is not adjustable, adjust your seat to ensure straight wrists. You will need to use a footrest if you have raised the seat and your feet are not flat and well supported on the floor.
8. The monitor should be at a comfortable reading distance and height. The viewing distance should be within 16" – 29″ (40cms-74cms). About one arm's length. The monitor height should allow the neck to be in a neutral position when looking at the top row of text on the screen.
Place your mouse next to the keyboard and at the same height. Document(s) should be on a document holder that is placed either between the keyboard and the screen or next to and at approximately the same height as the monitor screen.
A task light can help to improve the lighting over the documents you're reading. The correct lighting and brightness of your monitor screen can reduce your likelihood to lean into the screen, avoiding bad posture.
A properly adjusted workstation allows you to adopt a natural and comfortable posture. To benefit from these adjustments your work should be properly organised.
We hope you found this guide useful when adjusting your computer workstation and that your newly adopted best practices help you to achieve a comfortable posture while you work!
To discuss carrying out a display screen equipment (DSE) assessment at your organisation, contact Fit4Work today!


text:
Registrar » Homeschooling
Homeschooling is a parent-initiated educational alternative. The Department of Education has a legitimate interest and responsibility for the appropriate education of all school age children in the State of Hawaii and recognizes homeschooling as an alternative to compulsory school attendance.
Whenever the school changes for a student (i.e., from elementary school to middle school or middle school to high school), a new Form 4140 or letter of intent to homeschool must be sent to the new school.
Where do I submit my notice of intent to homeschool?
Exceptions to Compulsory Education (Form 4140) or a letter of intent to homeschool should be sent to the principal of the public school in your neighborhood.
What is required to begin homeschooling my child?
Form 4140 must be completed and sent to the neighborhood school. A letter of intent, signed by the parent, can be used in place of Form 4140.
When can I begin to homeschool my child?
Homeschooling may begin as soon as the signed Form 4140 or letter of intent is sent to the neighborhood school.
What needs to be included in the letter of intent?
Name, address and telephone number of child; birth date and grade level of child; and signature of the parent and date of signature.
Do I need to submit any other records?
Parents are not required to officially enroll and un-enroll students in order to homeschool their child; therefore, no birth certificate or proof of residency is required.
How do I know if the school has acknowledged my intent to homeschool?
The school and complex area office acknowledge the notice of intent submitted by the parents by sending the parents a copy of Form 4140 after it is signed by the principal and complex area superintendent; or writing "acknowledged" on the bottom of the parent's letter of notification with the signature of the principal and complex area superintendent, and returning the letter to the parent. Copies of Form 4140 or the letter of intent are kept on file at the school and district office.
Who is considered qualified to teach homeschooled children?
A parent teaching his/her child at home shall be deemed a qualified instructor regardless of educational background or training.
What are my responsibilities to the Department after I have sent my intention to homeschool?
The parents submitting a notice to homeschool their child shall be responsible for the child's total educational program including athletics and other extracurricular activities. An annual progress report, showing satisfactory progress in all content areas, shall be submitted at the end of each school year.
Is my child required to participate in annual Hawaii State Assessments?
A homeschooled child is eligible to participate in the Statewide Testing Program at the local public school. Test scores shall be required for grades 3, 5, 8 and 10; however, a parent my elect to arrange for private testing of an equivalent standardized test at the parent's own expense. The parent may request and the principal may approve other means of evaluation to meet the Statewide Testing Program requirements.
What are appropriate methods to demonstrate my child's satisfactory progress?
A score on a nationally-normed standardized achievement test, which demonstrates grade level achievement appropriate to a child's age; progress on a nationally-normed standardized achievement test that is equivalent to one grade level per calendar year, even if the overall achievement falls short of grade level standards; a written evaluation by a person certified to teach in the State of Hawaii that a child demonstrates appropriate grade level achievement or significant annual advancement commensurate with a child's abilities; or a written evaluation by the parent which shall include a description of the child's progress in each subject area included in the child's curriculum, representative samples of the child's work, and representative tests and assignments including grades for courses if grades are given.
Do I need to submit any health records to the neighborhood school?
Health records are not required for homeschooled children. It is not necessary for the homeschooled child to submit the TB (tuberculosis) test clearance or Form 14 (Student Health Record).
Do I need to re-submit intent to homeschool annually?
No. The only time a new Form 4140 or a new letter of intent to homeschool needs to resubmitted is when the child transitions from elementary to intermediate/middle school or intermediate/middle school to high school, or if the child moves to another neighborhood.
Do I need to submit a curriculum to the Department?
Parents are not required to submit their curriculum to the Department or the school of record for review unless the school has reasonable cause to believe that there may be educational neglect. A parent is responsible for keeping a record of the planned curriculum for the child. The curriculum shall be structured and based on educational objectives as well as the needs of the child, be cumulative and sequential, provide a range of up-to-date knowledge and needed skills, and take into account the interests, needs and abilities of the child. A principal at the school of record may request to view the curriculum if the annual report is not sufficient to show satisfactory progress.
How do I know what to teach my child while homeschooling?
Schools are responsible for informing parents what basic units of study should be covered for a particular grade level. Information on the standards and benchmarks for each grade level can be found on the Department's curriculum standards website: http://standardstoolkit.k12.hi.us.
How can I end homeschooling?
Whenever the parent chooses to terminate homeschooling, the parent is required to notify the principal of the school of record (school where intent to homeschool was sent). The child shall be re-enrolled in the local public school or a licensed private school unless a new alternative educational program is presented within five school days after the termination of homeschooling. Notification may be written or verbal.
What grade level will my elementary child be placed after homeschooling has ended?
For grades one through eight, the homeschooled child shall re-enroll at the appropriate grade level by birth date. For example, if the homeschooled child by birth date should be an eighth grader, then he/she is enrolled as an eighth grader.
Can I challenge the grade level of my re-enrolled child?
Once the child is enrolled, if the school or parent has a concern about appropriate grade level placement, then the school shall evaluate the student (as it would any other student) and make adjustments accordingly, including placement at another grade level. Parents should be informed and involved in the assessment, as feasible. The principal's decision about grade placement is final.
Will my child receive a high school diploma at the completion of homeschooling?
Homeschooled students do not receive a high school diploma. A homeschooled student who wants to earn a high school diploma from the local public high school shall attend high school for a minimum of three full years to meet the graduation credit requirements.
Is there any other way to receive a high school diploma?
A homeschooled student who wants to earn a high school diploma from the community school for adultsshall meet the following requirements and must: a) be at least sixteen years of age, except in the case of an emancipated minor; b) have been homeschooled for at least one semester under Hawaii's homeschooling procedures; and c) attain a satisfactory score on the General Educational Development (GED) test.
May my child apply to college after completing homeschooling?
A child who is being homeschooled may participate in any college entrance examination, which is made available to all other students. The principal of the local public high school shall, upon request, supply written acknowledgment that a child has been homeschooled in compliance with the requirements ofChapter 12, Hawaii Administrative Rules. The letter is written for homeschooled children whose parents have met the requirements of Chapter 12, i.e., submitted an annual progress report and test data for appropriate grade levels.
Hawaii Homeschool Associationhha-info@hawaiihomeschoolassociation.org
The Hawaii Homeschool Association is organized to enable its members to share homeschooling ideas and experiences and to disseminate information relevant to homeschoolers on Oahu.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


However our focus today is righteousness by law through works.
Were there people that were called righteous based on works in the scripture? Yes!
What is this 'righteousness based on the law' that Paul was faultless in? He was referring to all the commandments/laws God gave to the Jews! Yes…all.
Was David talking about just the 10 commandments? No!
There were 613 commandments in the Pentateuch! Oh…you didn't know about them.Let me provide a link.
a)Ones recited before enjoying a material pleasure(eg eating,drinking etc) to thank God for His provision.
b)Ones recited before performing a commandment(e.g washing hands etc).
c)Ones recited at special times and events(seeing New Moon,rainbow,kings etc.
According to Jewish tradition, a person should recite 100 berakhot each day! Personally,David says he prays 3 times a day but praises 7 times a day (Psa 55:17, Psa 119:164).
8)Marriage(Gen 1:28) Divorce(Deut 24:1,4) and Family(Exo 20:12).
23)Clothing: "A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this"….
Luke 18:18-22 tells us the reply of Jesus to the Rich man that claimed he had kept all the commandments above:"You still lack one thing."!!!
*The righteousness by works is a shadow of things to come:"The old system under the law of Moses was only a shadow, a dim preview of the good things to come, not the good things themselves".-Heb 10:1.If you are found doing them,you are running after shadows!
We became sinners not because we sinned rather Adam sinned by falling short of God's commandment therefore his sin was imputed to us.
We become righteous not because we are righteous(in fact all our righteousness are like filthy rags before God),rather Jesus Christ was righteous(fulfilled the requirements of all the laws above),therefore His righteousness is imputed to us by faith! Halleluyah!!!
This faith however is not a dead faith…It is a faith that works!


text:
Fort Frederica National Monument
historic site, Georgia, United States
Fort Frederica National Monument, historic site on St. Simons Island (one of the Sea Islands), southeastern Georgia, U.S., near Brunswick. The monument (authorized 1936) covers 284 acres (115 hectares) and consists of the remains of a fort and surrounding town built by Georgia colony founder James Edward Oglethorpe in 1736 to defend Georgia from the Spanish in Florida. The English defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Bloody Marsh (1742), ending the Spanish threat to Georgia. Troops were withdrawn in 1748, and the town declined and was completely abandoned by 1758. The monument preserves colonial artifacts in addition to the battle site, the house foundations, and the ruins of the barracks and the King's Magazine. An annual festival (March) commemorates the area's history. The monument is accessible via a bridge from Brunswick.
Ruins of the King's Magazine, Fort Frederica National Monument, St. Simons Island, Georgia, U.S. Bubba73
This article was most recently revised and updated by Kenneth Pletcher, Senior Editor.
Sea Islands
Sea Islands, low-lying chain of about 100 sandy islands off the Atlantic Ocean coast of the southeastern United States. The islands stretch for some 300 miles (480 km), generally southwestward and then southward along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida between the mouths of the Santee and St.…
Georgia, constituent state of the United States of America. Ranking fourth among the U.S. states east of the Mississippi River in terms of total area (though first in terms of land area) and by many years the youngest of the 13 former English colonies, Georgia was founded in 1732, at…
Brunswick, city, seat (1777) of Glynn county, southeastern Georgia, U.S. It lies on St. Simons Sound and the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, about 75 miles (120 km) southwest of Savannah. Mark Carr, a friend of Georgia colony founder James Edward Oglethorpe, established a tobacco plantation in the 1740s on the site…
James Edward Oglethorpe
James Edward Oglethorpe, English army officer, philanthropist, and founder of the British colony of Georgia in America.…
Florida, constituent state of the United States of America. It was admitted as the 27th state in 1845. Florida is the most populous of the southeastern states and the second most populous Southern state after Texas. The capital is Tallahassee, located in the northwestern panhandle.…
Mariana Trench
Castillo de San Marcos National Monument
Olduvai Gorge
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve
Poverty Point National Monument
Hawaii, constituent state of the United States of America. Hawaii (Hawaiian: Hawai'i) became the 50th…
Mount Everest, mountain on the crest of the Great Himalayas of southern Asia that lies on the border…
Africa, the second largest continent (after Asia), covering about one-fifth of the total land surface…


text:
"A Test of Faith" – Alice G. Otto
by Emily Hitchcock, Publishing Director | Apr 22, 2014 | Best of Ohio Short Stories, Complete Stories | 0 comments
Charles and Maggie lived deep in the hills of Kentucky. They had an old tractor and an orange ATV and a cellar stocked with smoked meats and canned vegetables, so they rarely worried about the distance to town—a gas pump, a country kitchen and a church.
The snows, though, could be a cause for worry. The county-run plow wouldn't risk the four-mile dirt and gravel drive ascending from their cabin to the mountain pass, which took another twelve miles to meander into town. Charles rigged a corrugated metal roofing panel to the front of the tractor and strapped chains on its tires, and that rudimentary plow served well when God was kind for the winter. But, though the people of the hollers were kind to God, in prayer and services, He didn't often return that kindness in the cold months, when ice draped the trees and snow piled thick in the valleys.
As Maggie's pregnancy became apparent, the December sky roiled and heaved into slivers of steel, and winter's first blanket settled itself early. Maggie washed pots with a rag by the kitchen window and, with a small, calm smile, watched the menace building outside. She trusted her body as she trusted God. She felt wonderful, beautiful, and since spring, when Maggie's church friends first learned she and Charles were trying for a baby, they had passed along vitamins and onesies and bottles, nursing pads and rattles, a crib and a Johnny Jump Up, a portable food masher and little jars, booties and bibs and books. Their home was ready, and Maggie was ready, but Charles desperately wanted her to see the town doctor before the weather got any worse. He wanted the reassurance of facts, of medicine, but he only had the timeline for comfort—Maggie being three months along in December meant a June birth, most likely, which meant most any potential crises would fall outside winter's grasp.
The clouds murmured, dusted themselves, and by the second week of December began to salt the earth in earnest. At first, Charles spun out his makeshift snow plow once a day, then twice a day. He'd chopped wood all through September and October, stacking logs high in the den, piling them on the porch, along the outer walls, in pyramids between the shed and the cabin.
There was nothing Charles could do when the snow won, as it did for at least a short while every winter. Later, normally. January or February. The third week of December unfolded, and he awoke one morning to a bright white square where the sky and spruce trees typically showed through the window. He squeezed Maggie's arm.
Peeking over the down comforter, she said, "Mercy." The light was strange and muffled, as if the house were sunk in cotton batting.
"I don't imagine the tractor's gonna do a lick of good against that," Charles said. He pulled Maggie close, relishing her heat, the soft curve of her belly.
"How much of that was just the wind, do you think?"
"A fair portion, I'm sure." Charles looked at the window, like an oversized note card—so white! "But a draft that high, just on this one side, well…that still has to be a few feet all around, I imagine."
"My. Guess this means Christmas alone?"
"Just the two of us," Charles agreed. "Three of us, that is."
"Mmm…good."
Any thoughts of productivity laid to rest, the couple slept three more hours, happy to be warm, abandoned on their quiet homestead.
Charles heated handfuls of rags to press along the front door's edges, and jimmied and plied the door until it finally pulled open—to reveal another wall of whiteness.
"Mags. Come look at this."
She padded around the corner in her slippers and thick bathrobe, her long black hair in tangles and knots. "Well I'll be. How deep? Is it just another draft pushed up?"
Charles grabbed the broom by the fireplace and, holding the bristled end, drove the handle into the wall of snow. They peeked down the narrow tunnel: no sky, sun, or trees. Charles tried driving the handle up high, at an angle: no light came down.
"We're buried. I don't believe it, but we're buried."
"But the chimney?"
Charles nodded, "It'd be bad if the fire wasn't going all night. I mean, I have to think the snow couldn't go that high…but I don't know what to think, I just know it's good we had it going, 'cause even if the whole cabin's under, the heat kept that passage open. We'd be dead of carbon monoxide by now if it hadn't."
"That's very comforting, dear. Do you want potatoes?" Maggie asked.
They ate potatoes by lamplight, then read by the fire, taking turns feeding logs to its crackling orange tongues. They passed their sleepy days that way, aware of time only in that it had to be passing, and the grandfather clock clicked away the hours and nights in place of the sun.
Charles was checking the smoked ham hock in its pot on the fire, ladling the meat's juices over the potatoes to tenderize them, to make something like a holiday meal. It was Christmas Eve.
He heard a whimper behind him, and the sound mounted to a scream of instant, furious pain—"Charles!" He dropped the ladle and sprinted into the bedroom.
"Mags—Maggie!" he shouted when he reached her. "Oh, God. Oh God, it's gonna be okay, Mags, hold on."
Blood soaked through her nightgown and stained the sheet beneath her thighs, an inky maroon puddle in the oil lamp's glow. Maggie's eyes were wet, the nightgown clung to her skin and she clutched at the blankets with bloody fingers.
"Charles, I'm sorry, I'm sorry—help me I'm sorry, what's happening—"
He grasped Maggie's shoulders and pressed her forehead to his lips, kissed her cheeks, guided her hair behind her ears, off her shoulders, off her face. "It's okay. I'm here, Mags, we're fine. I'll be right back, okay, I'll be right back, we're fine."
Charles tore through the cabin. He pulled the ham hock off the fire and grabbed a large pot from the kitchen. He opened the front door and piled snow into the pot with his bare hands and shoved it directly into the fire to let the snow melt, then boil, and he grabbed a lantern and held it to the bathroom medicine cabinet, pushing bottles aside with shaky fingers, his mind stumbling to keep up with its instincts and reason. Maggie was in pain. Aspirin. Aspirin thins blood, she's bleeding, she'll bleed out—bleed out? Jesus, bleed out. No aspirin. A muscle relaxant. Wasn't a miscarriage something to do with contractions, with muscles—miscarriage. Miscarriage. Charles dug his shaky thumb into the cap of the muscle relaxants, fighting the childproof top. The pills scattered across the sink. He picked up one. Two. To the kitchen, poured a cup of water from the pitcher they'd been keeping on the counter, back to Maggie.
She looked sallow and desperate and primal in the unstable light. Charles put one hand behind her neck, craning her head up, and eased the two pills into her mouth, grabbed the cup and held it to her mouth to drink. The water dribbled between Maggie's lips and down her chin. She sobbed.
"It hurts. Charles I'm scared it hurts, it hurts, it hurts—"
Dizziness threatened his knees and heart. Charles told her to keep pressure on the wound, knowing that made no sense but having no idea what else to say, and ran to grab dishtowels from the kitchen and drop them into the water simmering in the hearth. The cloth squares bubbled and undulated in the pot like sacs of fish eggs ready to pop. Maggie moaned in the bedroom. Charles looked over at the pot on the floor with the ham hock and potatoes. A thin layer of fat was congealing on the broth's surface. He leapt up and squirted dish soap onto his hands in the kitchen, scrubbed it into his calluses. He picked at the permanent oily stains about his short nails, plunged his hands into the water pitcher and shook them furiously until they rinsed as clean as they could be. He pinched the dishtowels from the boiling water and barely registered the pain.
Time slowed for a moment, looking down at his beautiful wife, his wife, lost and suffering in a fortress of snow. It slowed for a moment. Sanitized rags were for childbirth, weren't they. They weren't for child deaths. Charles had no idea what to do: surely and calmly, he realized this. He peeled Maggie's nightgown away from her thighs. He pulled down her panties. He'd first done that ten years before. They were wet then, too; she was nineteen, had waited nineteen years for him, and she was beyond ready. He'd waited twenty for her, and when he first saw it—saw her, glistening, pink—it nearly sent him over the edge before they could consummate the marriage.
Now, there was nothing of that pinkness; all the colors ran red and black. Since it was the only coaching Charles could remember, he commanded, "Push." And Maggie did, and it was messy. Charles pressed the moist, boiled dishtowels against her inner thighs, around that opening from which this hell was springing.
"Push." What in God's name was he saying?
"Push." Push what, blood until she dies?
"Push." And Maggie was screaming again.
"Push." And Maggie was quiet.
Charles said, "Push," and there was something in his hands that wasn't blood.
She pushed one final time, without his guidance.
Charles looked at what lay partially cradled in his hands. The dizziness was back. Maggie was out: eyes shut, inert. That was best. He looked down again, and what he saw wasn't the bare beginnings of a baby.
It was puppies.
Charles gathered the puppies in his arms and set them before the fire in the den. They squirmed and gargled. He walked to the laundry room and opened the pantry which had been the baby closet since spring. He picked up a small knitted blanket. Charles returned to the hearth, knelt, arranged the yellow blanket into a nest, and transferred the puppies to the blanket-nest individually. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Five puppies. Their eyes were sealed and they wriggled atop and between one another, their little mouths parting and closing in search of milk.
Charles walked back to the bedroom, where Maggie lay motionless, her legs still splayed. He gently cleaned her thighs with a wet dishtowel. He placed another towel between her legs and straightened them, then pulled down her nightgown and tucked the comforter around her chest. Her breaths were even. Charles kissed her forehead and extinguished the lamp.
He grabbed the washcloths from the bathroom and tossed them into the pot on the fire; the water was still boiling. The wind blew outside. It transferred through the snow-insulated cabin as a low thrum. Charles crossed the den to the bookshelf and picked a selection from the shelf Maggie had labeled "MOMMY'S CORNER" in blue glitter-glue on a piece of pink construction paper cut in the shape of a stork. He flipped to "D" in the index. "Daddy's Checklist. Decorating the Nursery. Delivery Options. Diaper Changing Essentials." He flipped to "P" in the index. "Packing for the Hospital. Pelvic Pressure. Pet and Animal Safety." Charles flipped to that. It turned out dogs could carry bacteria such as campylobacter and salmonella, which a pregnant woman ought to avoid, and that it was wise to accustom a dog to a newborn by bringing back a blanket carrying the baby's scent from the hospital. Boundaries had to be set for the dog once the newborn was home in the nursery. Charles returned to "P." "Placenta, Preeclampsia, Premature Birth." Charles flipped to that. Useless. Preemies were prone to underdeveloped lungs and feeding troubles, but according to the book, they were not prone to being puppies.
Charles replaced the book and returned to the fire. He wrung the boiled washcloths out on the rug and shook them to dissipate the heat. The puppies appeared to have fallen asleep. He picked up the least entangled puppy and wiped its face, its belly, its little legs and tail, cleansing the blood and mucus from its fur. It suckled the air and whined until he put it back in the nest. Charles carefully pulled another puppy from the pile and wiped it off. It was dappled gray, with white feet. He put it back in the nest. He cleaned the last three puppies, changing washcloths as they soiled, and watched the fire as the quivering pile of puppies fell into a quiet slumber.
The grandfather clock chimed. It was Christmas. Charles put the ham hock and potatoes back on the rack. He stirred the broth, now and then, and stared into the bricks of the hearth.
When Charles awoke, the fire was weak, just an intermittent flame and the ashen glow of logs carrying their last heat. His back crackled from sleeping on the hard floor. It was too dim to read the grandfather clock, but Charles saw two dark shapes about a foot away from the blanket-nest on opposite sides, and he grabbed them, terrified to feel how cool the puppies were. He realized they were crawling into the darkness in search of their mother. Charles edged closer to the fire, stoked it, and tucked the two puppies under his sweater, atop his belly. He hunched over and pushed slow, hot breaths through the sweater, massaging the puppies through the yarn. A tiny haunch extended, a little head shook side to side: they were okay. The other puppies voiced aggravation as Charles lifted them to tuck the voyagers at the warm bottom of the mass, but they settled quickly, and he fed some kindling and a hearty log to the fire.
Charles lit the lamp by the bookshelf and turned to the grandfather clock: quarter past five, in the morning, he assumed. Grabbing two washcloths from the floor, he pulled out the crusty, burnt Christmas Eve meal. A mewling from the nest. Charles jabbed the charred ham hock with his thumb, licked it. Definitely ruined. More mewling. He grabbed the lamp and crossed to the bedroom door.
Maggie was still buried beneath the comforter on her back, arms atop the blanket with her pale palms upturned. Her head fell to one side on the pillow, her lips barely parted; she would have looked peaceful, if she had ever been the type to sleep on her back, but she always slept on her belly with her elbows hitched out at awkward angles that threatened to oust Charles from the bed. He thought she looked clinical, exposed. Dead. Charles touched her lips. She rustled.
"Shush. It's okay. You're okay." He rubbed her shoulder and stroked her arm. "You're okay, Maggie. How do you feel?"
"I feel awful. Is our baby okay?" Maggie opened her eyes and her mouth danced a quavering line between hope and desolation. "Can you tell? There was so much blood."
Charles stared at the comforter. Maggie was much better at getting stains out of the wash than he was. He wasn't sure if it was okay to put a down comforter in the washing machine. The machine wasn't working, but never mind that, was it okay to soak a blanket filled with feathers?
Maggie touched his arm. "I lost the baby, didn't I?"
"There isn't a baby. Get some rest, honey. You rest up. I love you." Charles fetched another muscle relaxant from the bathroom for Maggie, tucked her in. When her eyes shut, he closed the bedroom door.
His hand rested on the cool knob; blood crusted his nails. It would be different if Maggie had agreed to see the doctor when Charles first asked. And he hadn't just asked. He had begged her to go, but she replied that her body was the dominion of her husband and God alone. Humbled by Maggie's pure convictions, flattered by those words, Charles had backed down, but he now understood how weak he had been. He hadn't protected his wife.
And what now? A pillow pressed deep into the blanket-nest until nothing moved beneath his weight? A systematic wringing of soft little necks? Charles couldn't back down this time, couldn't fail as the protector and provider, so when he turned to the growing fire, and the five fuzzy shapes within the nest, he thought: food, clothing, shelter.
Charles scooped more snow into the water pot and set it above the flames. The mewling was louder. He pulled two pink onesies from the baby closet and some scissors from Maggie's craft box and cut off the leg and arm sleeves at the shoulders and thighs. He folded the remaining torso sections of the tiny outfits and laid them in the craft box. Charles fetched bottles and nipples from the baby closet and hesitated by the simmering water, fairly certain he was meant to sterilize them first but aware of a yipping near his right foot. He dropped the bottles in the pot and stepped over the nest to search the laundry room pantry for powdered formula, where he found that the box provided detailed instructions for mixing formula according to human nutritional standards, but lacked a conversion chart for his current needs.
The omission seemed negligent—but why on God's green earth does that seem so, Charles stopped to think, and into this pause slipped a memory. When Charles was a boy he had a little beagle mix named Bratwurst who survived on table scraps alone and never ate a kibble, and he was the happiest, healthiest dog—
And Charles stopped thinking just as quickly. He stirred the powder into a jug of water and grabbed the five cutoff sleeves. The puppies' faces were tiny pink things, eyes glued shut, ears just miniscule flaps. They squeezed and looped into one another like fuzzy gray and white intestines, with one pup jet black. Charles picked that one up first. It was the runt—he carefully turned it in his palm—she was the runt. He guided her into one of the pink sleeves and set her in the nest. The next puppy had a smushed face and steely coloration about his head and tail, and he arched his back and cried and cried as Charles slid him into another sleeve. He rubbed the puppy's tummy as the others began to cry. The water was boiling. Charles fitted the rest of the puppies into their sleeves.
Their mouths wouldn't open wide enough to take the bottles' nipples in fully, so Charles had to cradle each puppy on its back in his hand and let the milk dribble past their thin lips. The meal quieted them, and they drowsed together in a warm pink lump.
Charles pried open the front door. Snow. He tore back the curtains in every room. Snow. He thought about dousing the fire and wriggling to the rooftop but the passage wasn't wide enough; he would only lodge himself and suffocate, and assuming he snapped his skeleton apart to fit through the chimney and somehow came out operable on the other side, the ATV and tractor would still be buried in that thick, ungodly pallet of snow, with no way to locate them or get them to the surface. He opened the front door one more time. Snow.
He remembered playing outside during winter breaks as a child, digging deep in the snow and channeling through the compressed powder, carving intricate webs of frosted passages invisible to anyone on the surface, and how his mother used to call him back inside each day to peel away his wet, frigid clothing and warm his hands around bowls of soup or chili. And now, Charles saw the impenetrable white wall beyond the doors, the windows, envisioned the four-mile journey to the pass and the twelve-mile stretch to town, and there was no one, there would be no one, to call him to the surface.
Charles had been on a vigil, feeding the puppies every couple hours, kneading them into releasing themselves atop open cloth diapers he'd spread in a mat on the floor. He had plucked a scant meal of burnt potatoes for himself and fallen asleep on the rug. He moved to stoke the fire.
"Charles—what are these?" Maggie stood in the middle of the room, her hair limp with sweat, the gray nightgown stiffened into wrinkles around her bloody groin. She wrung one hand about the opposite wrist and curled and uncurled her toes, awakening into her numbed body's sensations.
"They're puppies."
"Well…okay. Good." Maggie struggled to open the front door. Her hands were weak. She stared, and the snow glared back, as concrete and impassable as before save the laughable dents made by Charles to boil up water. "Well…" Maggie scratched the corner of her eye. She glanced at the puppies, swaddled in their nest and makeshift cozies. "They're cute. They're little, aren't they? Look like newborns. So you got the back open."
As Maggie walked to the kitchen, Charles stood and said, "No, Maggie," but she continued to the back door and tugged it open: white.
"You crawled out a window? What were in those pills, anyway?" Maggie returned to the den and carefully lay down by the fire, wincing and pressing a hand to her abdomen. She took a deep breath and reached out to stroke the black puppy's neck. "Puppies on Christmas. You're amazing." She smiled.
Charles sat by Maggie and put a hand on her knee. "They're not strong. We only got that powdered formula, and I don't know that it sits well." He paused. "I've been up with them most of the night. They're hungry little guys."
Maggie turned to Charles and asked, "Where's their mom?"
Charles shook his head.
"Well she got in somehow and she got out somehow, where'd you burrow out? The bathroom? Is there a way out the laundry room? Did you get to the ATV?"
"Snow's got us piled in. We're buried. There's no way out."
"But—" she waved a hand at the puppies, "there's a way in! Way out, way in."
Charles closed his eyes. "It's only been you and me, Maggie. It's only been a day." And he looked at the puppies. He looked at her stomach. "No way in or out."
Maggie stood, steadied herself against the wall, and clapped her hands. "C'mere girl." She whistled. "C'mere girl." She weaved window to window to door to window, just as Charles had done. She looked under the couch and bed and in the dryer and oven and even the toilet tank. "Where's the dog?" Maggie dug her nails into Charles's shoulders. "Where?"
"There's no dog. I didn't know how to tell you when it happened—"
"—And you were scared and all that blood, I couldn't tell you when they," he motioned weakly to her hips, "well, when they came out."
"You're not saying that."
"It's gonna be okay." He paused. "It's like you say, when God gives we receive, and we love. He works in mysterious ways, and He gave you these to give to us, and…they're healthy. I love you, it'll be all right."
Maggie clenched her nightgown in her hands and released it and touched her belly and snapped her hands back and then held them away like a poison. "I lost our baby not my mind. Oh God I lost our baby—" Maggie sobbed.
Charles picked up the dappled puppy and held it out, "But you didn't. You didn't lose our babies."
When Maggie collapsed, Charles carried her to the bed and put a glass of water on the nightstand.
As the grandfather clock ticked away the final hours of Christmas, Charles constructed the bassinet by the fire. It had been dissembled into slats and legs, stored by the dryer to save space until the baby came. He tried to nail the pieces together quietly, shaking the bassinet to test its sturdiness before lining it with yarn blankets and depositing the swaddled puppies. They looked content in there—they wriggled less. Charles fiddled with an old fishing vest and, between awkwardly stabbing himself with a needle and stopping to reassess the logistics, succeeded in jerry-rigging a nursing vest. The malleable bottle liners dropped into the vest's many pockets to attach to sewn-in nipples poking through holes in the pockets' bottoms. With the puppies in a pile on the rug, he could lie on his side and guide them to the nipples. Their little paws kneaded the pockets and dinner was served.
They looked so fragile in the orange glow—their soft bellies, their tiny awkward legs, their blind, squirming movements. Charles had to make sure that the smallest, the black one, had her fill of milk each time. She tended to get jostled away from the teats. The puppies were back in the bassinet and Charles was just unbuttoning his vest when the bedroom door opened.
Hollow-eyed, Maggie looked at the bassinet, but Charles wasn't sure she really saw it. She had changed into her pink bathrobe.
"Maggie, you're up."
She walked to the kitchen, picked up one of the pitchers of cold water—Charles had been melting containers of snow throughout the day—and turned into the bathroom. Charles heard the water splash into the tub. She brought a kettle of water to the tub, then a mixing bowl of water.
Charles touched her arm as she returned for another pitcher. "Let me warm you up some bath water, Mags. Just a few minutes, let me get you a warm bath ready, that's all cold."
She put the pitcher down and returned to the bathroom. Uncertain, Charles put two big pots of water into the fire and checked the puppies, whose chests rose and fell in slow unison. He finally took a deep breath, picked up the lantern and went into the hall. He felt Maggie's bathrobe under his feet as he stepped into the dark, chilly bathroom. There were only a couple of inches of water in the tub; she sat there naked, knees pulled to her breasts. Her skin looked shiny, her hair gooey. Charles saw an empty body wash bottle cast aside on the tile and realized Maggie had poured its entire contents on her head. She rubbed the gel up and down her arms, up and down, up and down. She hadn't wet her skin first. The gel spread around like jam.
Charles knelt by the tub with a cup from the sink and dunked it in the shallow bath. He tilted Maggie's head back and carefully poured water along her scalp line, letting it run through her hair. "Come on, help me rinse this. You got too much soap here." He poured cups and cups over her head and tried to massage the soap out with his other hand, but the water quickly turned to pure lather and her body was still sticky all over. "You're freezing, this ain't working, I'm getting the pots off the fire, you stay here."
As Charles wrapped towels around his hands and reached in to grab the first pot, he heard laughter. It was almost like the laugh she had when she looked out the window in spring and the fat squirrels were clinging to the chickadee feeder, rocking it around, shaking seeds to the ground to fatten themselves up even more. She'd laugh and say "Poor chickadees," but what could be done? And it was kind of like the laugh she had the time she was knitting a cardigan for an older lady in her church group who'd fallen ill and she got through nearly the whole sweater and realized she had somehow counted ten more stitches per row into the left sleeve than the right sleeve, and Charles assured her you couldn't tell—you really couldn't tell—but Maggie kept imagining that poor old woman tugging and picking at the smaller sleeve wondering why she felt so lopsided, and on top of being sick? Maggie had no choice but to laugh as stitch by stitch and row by row she undid the entire sleeve, winding the yarn back into a ball as she tugged her work loose. It was almost like those laughs.
But it wasn't. It wasn't those laughs, and the difference iced Charles's blood even with his hands plunged into the fire. Naked, legs dripping, the soap crusting on her breasts in white scabs, Maggie laughed and laughed as she returned to the bedroom, pills rattling in her hand.
On New Year's Eve, one by one, the puppies opened their eyes.
The dappled gray girl with the white feet was first. "Well look at you," Charles whispered. He was sitting in a rocker beside the bassinet with a bowl of stew in his lap, chewing hunks of beef and cabbage. He rubbed her ears with his thumb as she looked around with quiet cries. "A lot to see. Those are your brothers and sisters." Charles held up a spoonful of stew. "This is cow. It's good, but you can't have cow just yet. You'll like cow. And who are you?"
Charles knew Maggie had to have left the bedroom during the past week, but he never saw her. She had to be sneaking out when he was asleep on the couch. There would be a pitcher of water missing from the kitchen, or a box of crackers. Sometimes he heard laughter, but not often. He was grateful for that. Other times, if he pressed his ear to the door, he heard her voice, low and rapid, but he couldn't make out her words. The relentless rhythm could be prayer, it could be nonsense, or madness: he didn't know. As the days passed he grew thirsty for contact in the buried cabin, and he hadn't named the puppies he was mothering through the hours. He tried to think of them in abstract terms but that wasn't working in the slightest as he cradled them and mixed formula and revolved about them in his isolation, so when that dappled puppy finally opened her eyes and blinked as Charles licked his stew spoon, a deep piece of his gut seemed to snap, and he was able to say, "You're Addison."
A few minutes later, one of the boy's eyes peeled open. "Welcome to the party, bud." His pewter fur gave way to a creamy face and belly. "Lot quieter than Addie. Sister's got a lot to say. What about you?" Charles set his bowl on the floor and put the puppy in his lap. "Little guy, you seem like a Fred. Wanna be Fred? Yeah, you'll be Fred." Charles picked up the boy with the steel-colored tail and head. "You're Raoul. Raoul? What kinda name is that?" Charles laughed. "You'll grow into it. And you," he said, wiggling the paw of the girl with muted gray and brown stripes across her back, "you are Lindsey. Lindsey's a pretty name. Pretty name for a pretty girl."
That left only the black runt to name. Charles grimaced to think of her as the runt, but she was: so weak compared to her brothers and sisters. Charles ached watching her shiver when she accidentally rolled away from the others. She worried him. He nursed the puppies on the rug—Raoul opened his eyes. A couple of hours later, Lindsey followed suit.
Fresh logs crackling in the hearth, Charles checked the grandfather clock: ten 'til twelve. He couldn't be certain, hidden from the sun, locked in the lantern-light, but he thought it was about to become a new year. He waited five more minutes and knocked on the bedroom door.
"Maggie? I might've lost track, but," Charles swiped at a tear rolling down his cheek, "but, it's New Year's, I think."
He closed his eyes and flattened a palm against the door. Four years ago on this night Charles and Maggie had plans to go to a New Year's "black tie" gala in the village, but the truck's engine wouldn't turn. Charles had known how silly the event was going to be—the same handful of folks from church who always put on potlucks and bingos, most likely wearing the same dresses and jackets they put on for services each Sunday and just calling it "black tie." Maybe some streamers and punch. But Charles fidgeted and fussed with the truck engine for twenty full minutes in the freezing wind, willing it to kick over, because Maggie was inside and she'd had her hair in rollers the whole day so it would lay in soft, dark curls around the shoulders of the dress she'd bought just for New Year's. It was deep emerald, a velvety material that showed her curves. Charles thought she looked so sophisticated. The one thing he'd always thanked God for was giving him such a wonderful wife, and her beauty that night made him realize the whole Bible's worth of praises couldn't capture how lucky he was.
He gave up on the truck when he looked down and saw a gash on his finger, bleeding heartily; his hands had grown so numb that he hadn't realized he'd sliced himself against part of the engine, likely against the exhaust manifold bolts, long rusted.
"I tried, baby. Truck's not going anywhere tonight."
Maggie had shut the door behind him and said, "I figured as much. Good thing we got a bottle of wine and some records right here, huh?" She handed him a glass and said, "Let's dance."
And they danced. They rarely drank: a glass of wine on Thanksgiving, a drink at New Year's, so as the bottle emptied their desires grew warmer until they stripped off the fancy clothes and touched and licked and caressed one another on the rug by the fire like a couple married for six hours as opposed to six years. They had stumbled to bed naked and talked and giggled for an hour until they fell asleep, well before midnight.
Charles rubbed his palm against the door. One of the puppies whimpered. He thought it was Raoul.
"Did you hear me? It's New Year's. We got about three minutes to midnight." Charles wanted to sob. He wanted to scream. But he spoke quietly, evenly. "Maggie, you have to talk to me. You've gotta come out. Come on out, now, and have New Year's with me."
It was muffled, but she responded.
"Wh—Mags, what was that? What'd you say?"
"When he brings darkness, it becomes night, and all the beasts of the forest prowl."
"Maggie?" Charles pounded on the door. "Open this. Right now!"
"Test the spirits."
"Right now, Maggie!"
The door opened. She had properly cleaned herself: Charles knew because she stood completely nude before him. She grinned. "Many false prophets have gone out into the world, Charles."
Trembling, Charles picked up Maggie's bathrobe and draped it over her shoulders, trying to tuck her arms into the sleeves. "It's freezing in here."
Maggie struggled out of his arms and closed her eyes. "My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place."
"Stop it."
"When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body."
Maggie fell back on the bed and grabbed one of her breasts, slowly running a finger between her legs. "She said to herself, 'I am the one! And there is none besides me!'" The grandfather clock chimed midnight and Maggie moaned, then laughed. "What a ruin she has become, a lair for wild beasts!"
Charles yanked her hand from between her legs and pressed the bathrobe over her body.
She lashed at his face and screamed, "All who pass by her scoff and shake their fists!"
His lungs froze and he slapped her. He slapped her right across the face, and when the madness didn't leave her eyes, he slapped her harder.
Maggie looked up at Charles, crouched atop her, and whispered, "It's cold, Charles. It's really cold."
"Come on under the blankets." He pushed a bag of oyster crackers off the comforter, and, with a moment's hesitation, shoved Maggie's Bible to the floor as well. "There you go, snuggle in. Warmer?"
Maggie nodded, clutching at her shoulders with trembling hands. "Did you make a resolution?"
Charles shook his head. His blood was exhaustion. His skin was exhaustion. There were no words. When Maggie pulled back the corner of the blanket and patted the mattress, her eyes were wet and scared and something closer to normal. He pulled off his jeans and sweater and climbed in beside her. His eyelids felt magnetically compelled to close; he knew he'd have to be up in a few hours to check on the puppies, but the fire was strong, and he was so tired. His wife was warm, and close, and he was so tired.
Maggie kissed his cheek, murmured "Happy new year," and Charles was gone.
It was dark when Charles opened his eyes. That didn't tell him anything. It was always dark. For weeks the world had been shadow and fire and lantern-light. Maggie wasn't in bed. He kicked off the blankets and felt his skin tighten in the frosted air, pulled on his clothes and crept to the door.
The fire was almost dead, just glowing coals across the den. Charles heard scraping in the kitchen and turned the corner to find Maggie furiously working at the wall of snow blocking the back exit. She wore a puffy coat over an old pair of overalls and scraped and pawed at the snow as high as she could reach, madly diving into it with her mittened hands, pulling chunks to the floor where a puddle was spreading around her feet.
"You're gonna ruin the floor," Charles said. Maggie didn't stop to acknowledge him. Charles returned to the den to rebuild the fire and tend to the puppies, who were loud with hunger. He strapped on the nursing vest and plopped the puppies on the rug, taking care to ensure the runt got her fill, as always. Cradling the little black puppy, Charles decided to name her Dora. It was the name Maggie planned to give their first daughter, after her great-aunt Dorothy, who meant a great deal to her, but also because the name meant "gift." He heard Maggie grunt as she fought against the snow. Dora hadn't opened her eyes yet.
Charles took off the vest and left the puppies on the rug. He stood behind Maggie in the kitchen. "What are you trying to do?"
Maggie pawed out a few more handfuls of snow before laughing and saying, "To do? What's it look like I'm trying to do, Charles?" He could see her wrists between the coat and mittens each time she reached up; the skin was red and raw.
"It looks like you're trying to escape."
"That's a good word for it."
"Suicide's a good word, too. That's all it is. You get out there, how you planning to get anywhere? You think someone's waiting for you up there? Think you're a rabbit, just gonna hop across the snow and up to town? You're just making it damp and awful for us in here, can't you hear them crying? They were starving. Didn't you hear them?"
Maggie panted, "I heard them," and kicked the snow. She sank into the icy puddle at her feet. "Hear them all the time. I feel them."
Charles crouched. "It's two boys, and three girls." He paused to gauge Maggie's reaction, but her face was blank. "There's Addie. Fred. There's, she's beautiful, with these stripes…she's Lindsey. Will you please come meet them? Please?"
"I always said, I always thought, that no bad could come our way 'cause you'd beat it off with a shovel or run it over with a tractor or something." Maggie smiled. "I believed it, I really did, that Beelzebub himself could come knocking and you, your goodness, would make it so he couldn't step in the door." Maggie pulled off her mittens. "But, it's been told, we can't give the devil a foothold. We can't give him that."
Charles had trouble speaking. "I don't understand."
Maggie looked him in the eye. "He warned Jerusalem. Did we miss it? Did He warn us?"
Charles pulled Maggie out of the doorway and latched the exit. "You need to get by the fire." He nodded at her overalls. "You'll catch a cold in those."
Maggie stayed crumpled on the ground. She said, "He shoots with deadly and destructive arrows of famine. He shoots to destroy." She stretched out, extending her arms, pointing her feet. "Dogs surround me. A pack of villains encircles me. They pierce my hands and my feet."
She pulled in her legs, clutching them to her chest. As Charles dragged Maggie to the bedroom to strip her, drug her, and put her to bed, she began to cry. Her words were too soft to hear, but Charles caught enough to know the verse plaguing her mind.
I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will leave you childless.
The grandfather clock had chimed three more days when Dora finally opened her eyes. It had chimed perhaps twelve more days, or twenty, when the puppies began to walk. They'd doubled in size, and their ears were open. The muscles grew in their legs, and in their throats: they learned to love the sounds of their voices barking in high pitches. Charles set up the playpen to give them room to romp. A detachable bracket suspended a mobile of colorful smiley faces above the playpen. Charles would wind up the mobile, and as the red and blue and yellow faces began to circle in time to the tinkling music, Raoul, Addie, Lindsey and Fred darted about, yapping at the faces and clawing at the sides of the pen. Dora stood in the middle, teetering uncertainly on her tiny legs before plopping down time and again. Again, and again, Charles wound the mobile, delighted as the puppies ran and ran and ran in dizzy puppy circles before falling into woozy naps. Smiley faces. Smiley puppies. Smiley Charles.
Charles started soaking kibbles of hard cat food in saucers of formula to transition the puppies into eating solids. He apologized each time he fed them, feeling like a failure because cat food was the best he could do.
Maggie always had a soft spot for the strays that hung out by the shed, so they'd kept a bucket of cat kibble in the house for years. He'd never cared for the cats. Mangy, whining, flea-bitten things, not that it was their fault.
But he was so proud of his puppies: only one month old, and already walking!
When the puppies tired themselves out, Charles often took the opportunity to nap. Other times, though, he lit a cigar and sat down to read about parenting. Unlike Maggie's friends, who passed along the onesies and bottles and books when they started trying for a baby, his friends had passed along a box of cigars and some old Playboy magazines, assuring him that once the children arrived, his wife would never put out again. Charles and Maggie had a good laugh over those skin mags; Maggie was beet red when he first showed her, but it only took some kissing and compliments to convince her to strike a few poses for him to enjoy. She didn't let him take pictures, of course, but he cherished the memory.
Now he sat reading about the unique challenges of raising multiples: feeding regimens, sleeping schedules, travel safety. Charles glanced at the plates of soggy kibble littering the floor, and the puppies drowsing in a comatose lump in the playpen. He tried to picture the world above the snow: was a smoke-belching hole, where the chimney poked through, the only indication that he existed? That they were all alive? He turned back to the book. The individualized attention bit concerned him. All of the experts recommended finding ways to spend one-on-one time with each multiple in order to develop their unique personalities, and to form a stronger parental bond. Charles had been homogenous in his fathering thus far, but he could work on that. Maybe walk Fred while the others ate, or read to Addie while her siblings napped. He would figure it out.
Cigar perched between his lips, Charles took the book into the bathroom to do his business. The plumbing had been frozen since the blizzard hit, so Charles had worked the bathroom window open, scooped out some snow, and poured hot water down the side of the cabin to melt a chute where he could dump the contents of the chamber pot, which wasn't a chamber pot at all but a regular cooking pot that he relished the thought of someday destroying. Charles squatted and read a "Helpful Hint" enclosed in a little box: "Don't be ashamed if you can't tell your multiples apart at first—this is normal! Put a small dab of nail polish on each baby's toe and create a color key so you know who's 'Aqua Blue' and who's 'Sassy Silver'!"
Charles ashed his cigar in the sink with a self-satisfied flourish; he knew how to tell all five of his apart from day one. He never had to paint them. Who paints their kids? He took his time finishing the cigar and flipping through chapters, making a mental note to revisit the selections on teething and circumcision. As Charles jimmied the window open, he heard a squeaky yip: Lindsey. A throatier bark followed: that had to be Raoul. And then nervous whining, frantic yelps, and Charles forgot about the chamber pot and raced out of the bathroom, nearly stumbling over Addie in the hallway. He quickly snatched her up and hugged her, put a finger to his lips and shut her in the laundry room. From the hallway, he saw Lindsey cowering in the kitchen, a shivering ball of soft stripes with big brown eyes, and then he was in the den.
Maggie rocked on her knees before the fire, naked, her arms submerged to the elbows in the cat kibble bucket; the kibble was strewn all about the room, lodged in the floorboards, dotting the rug. Maggie's hair ran in long, black waves down her back. Her face was pale, and her blank eyes fixed to the bottom of the bucket, to the bottom of the water lapping her forearms, lapping as she rocked and whispered frantically.
"Even from birth the wicked go astray, even from the womb they are wayward and speak lies, and women will be saved through childbearing, if we do not give the devil a foothold, if we watch for those evildoers and mutilators of the flesh—"
Charles leapt on Maggie, slamming her head into the brick hearth. The bucket toppled, and the water washed across the floor. Charles gently turned the bucket and reached in. The body was sodden and dense, and her legs dangled inert, paws limp. Her little square head lolled as he laid her near the flames. He rubbed her side with two fingers, and water trickled from her lips. The tiny black chest didn't rise. She was soaking, freezing, dead.
Charles looked away from Dora's drowned body to the playpen. The netting. The other puppies had been able to climb the playpen's netted sides and jump out when Maggie reached in to grab one of them, but Dora wasn't strong enough to run yet. She hadn't learned to walk.
And she hadn't known to close her eyes.
Maggie didn't scream when she woke up tied to the rocking chair, her wrists and ankles bound to the armrests and glider posts, duct tape wound thick across her stomach. Charles had expected her to scream. He'd wanted her to scream.
For the next week he let the puppies run amok. Raoul tore the heads from pastel stuffed animals. Addie loved rattles. She'd toss them in the air and whip them back and forth, shake shake shake, until she was too tired to move, and then she'd wake up and shake shake shake some more. Lindsey and Fred were wrestlers, intent to gnaw each other's napes and growl and pounce all throughout the blended days and nights. Charles lounged on the couch reading fairy tales aloud, or he sprawled on the floor and let the puppies dance across his chest and face.
He gave Maggie water and fed her potatoes. She started whimpering on the second day, when she couldn't hold her waste in anymore. Charles didn't untie her. Maggie soaked in her mess, and Charles lit more cigars to amend the den's thick odor.
On the third day, Charles pressed the puppies' paws in finger paint from Maggie's craft box and guided them across sheets of paper. He pasted the sheets into the baby memory book he found on the "MOMMY'S CORNER" shelf, and held the book close to Maggie's face so she could see each of their little paw prints.
On the fourth day, Maggie begged for the Lord to intervene. Charles duct-taped her mouth.
On the fifth day, Charles boiled gallons of water and took a long, luxurious bath.
On the sixth day, Charles removed the tape from Maggie's mouth and let her have a sip of water. He replaced the tape.
On the seventh day, he moved the puppies to the bedroom, and when the grandfather clock struck twelve, Charles cut Maggie free. He wielded the butcher knife with a light, loose touch.
He pressed the broad side of the blade to Maggie's lips and shook his head.
Charles stepped into the bedroom and latched the door. He doused the lantern, and in the darkness, he tried to remember his wife in an apron scrambling eggs, knitting scarves in the passenger seat of the truck, meticulously sorting coupons from the Sunday circular, but he couldn't overcome that vision of a ghoulish woman sticky with the residues of tape and vacated bowels, her hair a den of greasy black snakes shielding a face that Charles no longer recognized.
The government didn't finalize the death count until early summer. All told, they said, the blizzard claimed eleven thousand lives. The elderly and the poor crowded in the unheated apartments of the tri-state's big cities made up a small slice. Carbon monoxide poisoning peacefully swept away some suburban families as they slept. Would-be heroes died in attempts to rescue stranded motorists. But the bulk of the corpses came from deep in the Kentucky hills, from the forgotten Appalachian villages, the inaccessible hollers. It was a winter catastrophe the likes of which the States had never seen. The cities were chaos; resources couldn't be wasted on the scattered, hidden populations of the hills.
Charles found Maggie's body in mid-March, frozen and partially submerged in the last two feet of snow. She'd made it a quarter mile from the cabin. The tunnel she dug had collapsed before Charles awoke on the day of her escape, and he had closed the back door against the crumbling white chunks and latched the deadbolt. He reported her passing as a stir-crazy accidental suicide, and the sheriff nodded, and the coroner jotted "hypothermia" on yet another death certificate before signing off to have Maggie dumped in an icy plot beside the hundreds of other corpses pouring in from the surrounding hills.
Charles felt the years, their definition and passing, evolve with the breadth of his family's sorrows and joys—the outrage when Addie became pregnant just past her second birthday, and the complete dissipation of that anger when Charles greeted his dappled grandpuppies; the unrelenting heartache of losing Raoul before he turned ten, but the wonder of watching Raoul's own grandpuppies flourish, then his great-grandpuppies, darting about the yard with drool flying from their tiny, smushed faces.
It wasn't a bad life. If he couldn't speak of it, couldn't rationalize it, then that only proved the folly of words, he reasoned.
When Charles turned ninety and the succession of years began to erode his mind's inhibitions, he told the nurses in the home about the winter the snow fell so thick that it erased the cabins in the valleys, erased thegravestones and the churches. He held a dog close to his side, the dog the staff allowed him to keep as a therapy pet, stroking her jet-black ears as he silently prayed for his memories to survive, praying the love he felt and miracles he remembered wouldn't be lost to the insurmountable whiteness just over the horizon. Charles hugged the dog, and he told the nurses of a storm so vicious that God Himself was blinded, the winter so cold that God broke the rules of His creation and sent forth His precious creatures to be born in new ways, hopeful for His children, testing the faith of the little human creatures spiraling smoke and prayers unto the heavens.
Thank you to Alice G. Otto for sharing the complete text of her story "A Test of Faith" for free on the web. The complete book, Best of Ohio Short Stories: Volume 1, features seventeen additional stories. Click here to find the book on Amazon. E-books are also available from all major digital retailers, click here for links.
Alice G. Otto lived in Bethel, Ohio, a small town outside Cincinnati, until graduating from high school. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A. at the University of Arkansas, where she has received the Walton Family Fellowship in Fiction and the Carolyn F. Walton Cole Fellowship in Poetry. She holds a B.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Evansville. Alice's work has appeared in publications including Harpur Palate, RiverLit and Yalobusha Review.


text:
Difference between revisions of "CISM governing equations and numerical solution"
(→Practical differences between shallow ice models and higher-order models)
(→Higher-order Glimmer/CISM)
== Higher-order Glimmer/CISM ==
[[Image:GIS.png||left|400 px|Balance velocities for the Greenland ice sheet (left) from Jonathan Bamber and modeled velocities from higher-order Glimmer/CISM (right) with basal sliding tuned to match balance velocities.]]
[[Image:GIS.png||left|400 px|Balance velocities for the Greenland ice sheet (left) from Jonathan Bamber and modeled velocities from higher-order CISM (right) with basal sliding tuned to match balance velocities.]]
As mentioned above, there are currently two higher-order dynamics (Blatter-Pattyn) schemes being implemented and tested in Glimmer/CISM. They are discussed in varying amounts of detail [[Higher Order Physics|here]] (Univ. of Montana implementation of Pattyn's model by Jesse Johnson and Tim Bocek) and [[Blatter-Pattyn model|here]] (joint U.K./U.S. effort by Tony Payne and Steve Price). Boundary conditions for the two models are discussed [[Boundary Conditions for Pattyn 2003 Model|here]] and [[Blatter-Pattyn Boundary Conditions|here]] and the numerical solution is discussed [[Integration of Pattyn 2003 Model|here]] and [[solution of the Blatter-Pattyn model|here]].
The higher-order dynamics scheme currently implemented in CISM is discussed in more detail [[Blatter-Pattyn model|'''here''']]. Boundary conditions are discussed [[Blatter-Pattyn Boundary Conditions|'''here''']] and the numerical solution is discussed [[CISM higher-order dynamics: model solution|'''here''']].
Relatively recently, Frank Pattyn organized an extremely useful higher-order model intercomparison, [http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~fpattyn/ismip/ ISMIP-HOM], which compared the results from numerous higher-order and full Stokes models in an attempt to define a set of "benchmark" experiments for higher-order models. The results of that study are published in [http://www.the-cryosphere.net/2/95/2008/tc-2-95-2008.html Pattyn et. al (2008)]. A nice feature of Glimmer/CISM is the ability to run the higher-order codes through an [[Validation and Verification#Higher Order Isothermal Flow|automated test suite]], which generates nice figures for comparing model output to the ISIMIP-HOM benchmarks.
An extremely useful higher-order model intercomparison project was organized by Frank Pattyn from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. The homepage for that exercise can be found [http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~fpattyn/ismip/ '''here''']. The result from that project was a set of "benchmark" experiments for higher-order models that are discussed in [http://www.the-cryosphere.net/2/95/2008/tc-2-95-2008.html Pattyn et. al (2008)]. One nice feature of CISM that we will take advantage of in the [[CISM exercise II: run diagnostic test cases|first set of exercises]] is the ability to run the higher-order model through an [[Validation and Verification#Higher Order Isothermal Flow|automated test suite]] of experiments.
== Exercises using higher-order Glimmer/CISM ==
3 Available schemes
4 Practical differences between shallow ice models and higher-order models
5 Higher-order Glimmer/CISM
6 Exercises using higher-order Glimmer/CISM
Topics mentioned below that have additional detailed discussion at their own pages include:
The primary higher-order dynamics scheme used in CISM
Boundary conditions for the higher-order dynamics scheme in CISM
Solution of the higher-order dynamics scheme in CISM
Solving for thickness evolution with a higher-order dynamics scheme
The main distinction between so-called "higher-order" models and "0-order" (or "shallow ice") models is that higher-order models attempt a closer approximation to solving the non-linear Stokes equations. In general, this usually means incorporating some approximation of horizontal-stress gradients - along-flow stretching or compression and across-flow shearing - in addition to the vertical stress gradients that are accounted for in shallow ice models. This is important for several reasons:
The gravitational stress available to move the ice is the driving stress, indicated in green. Because the ice is assumed to be in equilibrium, the sum of the other stresses is equal to the gravitational driving stress. In the 0-order model (shallow ice approximation) only drag at the glacier base is included and the driving stress is assumed to be balanced by basal drag. In higher-order models, this restriction is relaxed, and the balance of stresses now includes lateral and longitudinal stresses. Note, however, that these stresses must be computed from conditions outside of the basic computational cell, which increases the complexity of the model.
For parts of the ice sheet that we are the most interested in - e.g. ice streams, ice shelves, and other regions of fast flow - horizontal-stress gradients are as or more important than vertical stress gradients. To model the flow in these regions accurately, higher-order models are required.
Shallow ice, applied to situations in which there is basal sliding, gives rise to a singularity in the the vertical velocity. Models compute the vertical velocity by integrating incompressablility
If there is a "jump" from no-sliding in one grid cell to sliding in the next, the horizontal velocity gradients at the bed will be entirely dependent on the grid spacing; the horizontal gradients (and through incompressibility, the vertical velocity gradient and thus the vertical velocity) will become increasingly large as the grid spacing decreases. Obviously, this is nonsensical and to be avoided.
Incomplete knowledge of the stresses near the grounding line makes it unlikely that shallow ice models will ever be able to accurately simulate grounding line advance and retreat.
In some regions of very slow flow, horizontal-stress gradients are important or dominant. For example, ice cores are often recovered at ice divides. Flow modeling is important for interpreting ice core records and using information (such as layer thickness) to infer something about the past flow history in the region. In order to model that flow correctly, one must include horizontal stresses (At an ice divide the surface slope is ~0, in which case vertical stress gradients that drive deformation in 0-order models are also ~0. In reality, deformation is not 0 at ice divides it is simply controlled by horizontal stretching).
The term "higher-order" comes from scaling analyses of the Stokes equations for which a scaling parameter λ=H/L - the ratio of the thickness to the horizontal length scale of interest - is used to assign importance to the various terms (see the references at the bottom of this page for a more detailed discussion). Shallow ice models retain only terms of order 0 while "higher-order" models also retain terms of order 1 (and possibly greater).
The constitutive equations before and after the terms of order higher than one are dropped. Modified terms are indicated in blue. Note that all derivatives of w are gone, eliminating a degree of freedom from the equations. Another degree of freedom can be eliminated by integrating the simplified vertical stress balance in the vertical and taking account of incompressibility, as shown here.
The most basic and fundamental higher-order scheme is a solution to the full non-linear Stokes equations. Because of the computational burden, many 3d, large-scale models solve lower-order approximations to the Stokes equations. However, a number of groups are making significant advances in this area and it seems likely that 3d, nonlinear-Stokes ice sheet models being used in climate-model applications is not far away (e.g. see the ELMER Ice effort). An upcoming DOE effort will focus on implementing a nonlinear Stokes model on unstructured grids in CISM.
Probably the most long-lived higher-order approximation in glaciology is the "shallow-shelf approxmation" (or SSA) describing flow within an ice shelf. It was made popular by Doug MacAyeal in the 80's and 90's. It's main disadvantage is that it is not fully 3d, as it assumes uniform velocity throughout the ice thickness driven only by horizontal stress gradients. It is, however, adequate for describing fast flow in many parts of the ice sheets, such as on ice shelves and along some ice streams. In this case, not resolving vertical gradients is a computational advantage.
The SSA equations are actually a depth-averaged form of a more general higher-order model, which is commonly referred to as the Blatter-Pattyn model. This model has been around since the mid 90's and has become increasingly popular ever since. Blatter-Pattyn dynamics are currently implemented for the higher-order dynamics in the publicly available version of CISM. For this coarse, we will do several sets of experiments using this higher-order scheme.
Several "hybrid" schemes exist that are computationally cheaper than the Blatter-Pattyn model. These combine solutions to the shallow ice approximation (for resolving vertical gradients) and the SSA approximation (for resolving horizontal gradients) in some clever way so that a fully 3d solution is obtained. It isn't yet known how well these model solutions compare to fully 3d models, or if one approach (hybrid vs. fully 3d solution) is superior to the other. David Pollard of Penn State and Ed Bueler of Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks currently run large-scale implementations of this type of model (see references below).
Practical differences between shallow ice models and higher-order models
The relationship between several common varieties of ice sheet modesl. Complexity increases along the vertical axis.
By "practical differences", we mean (1) how do we deal with solving the momentum equations in each case (the dynamics, or stress balance) and (2) how do we use the relevant information we derive from that solution (the kinematics, or velocity fields) to evolve the ice sheet geometry in time? There are large differences in how both of these issues are handled - in shallow ice models versus in higher-order models - for two main reasons:
The numerical solution of the dynamical equations is fundamentally different in each case. For the shallow ice case, we need only local information (slope and thickness) to solve for the velocity as a function of depth in a single column of ice. We do this pointwise for every location on our model domain (in map view), which is a relatively easy numerical problem; each column of velocities leads to a banded coefficient matrix that is relatively easy to invert (to solve for the velocities). This problem is also what we might call "embarrassingly parallel"; in theory, each column of unknown velocities results in its own tridiagonal matrix, which could be inverted for on its own processor. For higher-order models, however, we cannot do this since the solution at any point also depends on the solution at neighboring points (in map plane). The velocity at any point depends on non-local information, leading to an elliptic system of equations, and every velocity must be solved for simultaneously with every other velocity. The result is a much larger system of equations to solve, which is a more difficult numerical problem to solve on one processor and a much more difficult problem to solve on multiple processors. Because large-scale applications of higher-order models (e.g. whole-ice sheet models and coupling with climate models) will require efficient solution and parallelization techniques, this is a very active area of current research.
The equations governing dynamics AND evolution in a shallow ice model can be recast together as a single, non-linear, diffusion equation for ice thickness. A single system of equations is solved to calculate the velocity field and evolve the ice sheet geometry. For higher-order models, we must first solve the momentum balance equations to obtain the velocity field. Then, we need to use some other scheme to evolve the ice thickness.
Both of these differences mean that a model based on shallow ice physics may be built in a fundamentally different way than one based on higher-order physics. Most of the development work on CISM during the past few years has had to do with "upgrading" the model so that it can be used effectively and efficiently with higher-order dynamics schemes.
The equations describing a (2d) higher-order flow that is vertically integrated are
The equations describing a (3d) higher-order flow that is NOT vertically integrated are
There are three differences that you should note
The vertically integrated model includes , or ice thickness in each term. This is a reflection of the integration and does not appear in the first order equations.
Accounting for the thickness not appearing, the only other difference is the presence of a vertical diffusion of horizontal velocities. This is the the third term on the left in the above equations.
The first order equations must be solved on each of a set of horizontal "layers". Layers communicate with each other through the diffusion term.
Both sets of equations are non-linear elliptical equations and much of the same "technology" can be used solve them. Additional complications come in when we account for boundary conditions at the lateral margins of the domain and at the upper and lower surfaces of the flow (note that for the vertically integrated flow, there are no explicit boundary conditions for the upper and lower surfaces; they are accounted for and "incorporated" during the vertical integration).
Higher-order Glimmer/CISM
The higher-order dynamics scheme currently implemented in CISM is discussed in more detail here. Boundary conditions are discussed here and the numerical solution is discussed here.
An extremely useful higher-order model intercomparison project was organized by Frank Pattyn from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. The homepage for that exercise can be found here. The result from that project was a set of "benchmark" experiments for higher-order models that are discussed in Pattyn et. al (2008). One nice feature of CISM that we will take advantage of in the first set of exercises is the ability to run the higher-order model through an automated test suite of experiments.
Exercises using higher-order Glimmer/CISM
We will do two exercise using higher-order Glimmer/CISM:
Run the higher-order code through a number of tests from ISMIP-HOM and use the automated test suite to look at output for various model setups.
Use the higher-order solver to obtain a solution for a simplified ice shelf domain. Then, add a new module to Glimmer/CISM in order to calculate the evolution of that domain.
Bueler, E. and J. Brown. Shallow shelf approximation as a "sliding law" in a thermomechanically coupled ice sheet model. J. Geophys. Res., F03008, doi:10.1029/2008JF001179, 2009.
Pollard, D. and R.M. DeConto. Modelling West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years. Nature, 458, doi:10.1038/nature07809, 2009.
Retrieved from "http://websrv.cs.umt.edu/isis/index.php?title=CISM_governing_equations_and_numerical_solution&oldid=4843"


John Cannon called for what he called a "building impression" and that's exactly what we provide through design and production fulfillment using our divisions of design, signs, fabrication and graphics. Franko Design generated all the concepts that would provide visual appeal and branding while updating the exterior of the building. Then the signs, graphics and structures were produced by US Signcrafters, Building Impressions and The Sign Store.


Comprehensive (legal, financial and organizational) support for all categories of debtors.
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Analysis of legal grounds for bankruptcy applications and possible implications of such applications.
Preparation and filing of bankruptcy applications.
Expertise of the financial status of the debtor.
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Stuttgart, Belser Verlagsbuchhandung, 1st , n.d., Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 98 pages. 45 color photos and text by Albrecht. Translated and edited by Johannes Fuhr and William King Applebough. Thin, flexible green cloth covers. Browning to front and back endpapers. Dust jacket with edgewear to edges, tears to spine bottom, soil and spine fade.


text:
Earther
From the network
How Vibrators Could Help Save Turtles From Extinction
Christie Wilcox
Filed to:animal behavior
Image Courtesy of Donald McKnight
Turtles have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, but they now are struggling to survive, with about half of all species threatened with extinction. To save them, scientists need accurate data on how many males and females of each species are left, but there's a problem—the two sexes can look essentially identical, with the male's penis tucked inside his body when he is not aroused. So, what is a scientist trying to properly conduct research to support conservation to do? Whip out a vibrator, of course.
Donald McKnight, a Ph.D. Candidate at James Cook University in Australia, was studying western chicken turtles for his master's degree. "To really understand what is going on with a population and how to conserve it, you need to be able to distinguish males and females," McKnight told Gizmodo. But he wasn't confident in the published criteria for distinguishing sexes, and other ways of sexing when visible characters aren't definitive are very invasive. One option is to literally cut open the turtle to examine its gonads, said McKnight, a procedure which may weaken the animal, make it vulnerable to infection, or even be fatal. "We weren't doing this because we thought it would be fun," McKnight emphasized. "We did this because we were trying to find a less invasive method of sexing problematic turtles."
That's when McKnight and his colleagues, Hunter Howell, Ethan Hollender, and Day Ligon, stumbled upon a 2013 paper which described the use of vibrators for collecting sperm from turtles. "It seemed reasonable to us that if you could use a vibrator to make a turtle ejaculate, then you should also be able to use it to make a male turtle show you his penis, which would then allow us to distinguish males and females."
"We weren't doing this because we thought it would be fun. We did this because we were trying to find a less invasive method of sexing problematic turtles."
So, the team went online and bought the cheapest vibrator they could find—a small, silver bullet-style sex toy—and went about collecting turtles from four species to test the method. "We held the turtle at an angle so that the bottom portion of its shell was facing the researcher," McKnight explained. Then they "would slowly move the vibrator around to different parts of the turtle and watch how it responded."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the silver bullet wasn't, uh, a silver bullet. Much like with people, the effectiveness of stimulation depended on the individual. Some species were 'easier' than others—softshell turtles, for example, readily responded to attempts at stimulation, while common musk turtles did not. And within a species, individual preferences varied. "If we did something that the turtle didn't like, it would tense up and tuck its limbs and tail against its body, but when we found a position or motion that aroused it, it would relax and stretch out its limbs and tail, so we would keep doing that," McKnight said.
They found that direct stimulation of the tail—where the penis is sheathed—was usually the trigger for erection, but again, much like us, the animals needed a bit of warming up first. "We had to vibrate elsewhere and periodically test the tail to see if they would let us keep the vibrator there without tensing up." The researchers published their findings in a recent paper in Acta Herpetologica.
"Also, it appeared that the turtles responded best when the vibrator had fresh batteries and was on its fastest setting."
The variability between the individuals and species fits with what previous researchers have found when trying to bring turtles to climax for sperm collection, said Brian Todd, an associate professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology at University of California, Davis. "In Sherri-Anne Carter's work, she had a figure caption that literally read "Silver bullet-design vibrator" and "the design was chosen depending on the size of the individual turtle." Apparently, larger turtles need larger vibrators!"
Back in 2010, when he was working on western pond turtles, Todd witnessed firsthand how effective at stimulating vibration can be. "We mark turtles by using a metal file and notching the edge of their shell, and for many male turtles, the vibrations on their shell seems to stir something in them. Imagine my surprise the first time a large male ejaculated all over one of my graduate students!"
Todd told Gizmodo that although the vibration method for ejaculation has been known for some time, it isn't commonly used in the field for sexing turtles. He's not convinced it will be useful for many researchers, as there are visual characteristics that can distinguish males, such as longer tails and curved plastrons (the bottom part of their shells). "Not all turtle species have sexes that are told apart so easily, however, so the method of using a vibrator can be useful in some circumstances," he said. And if the study does want to collect semen, he added, then vibration is by far the least invasive method.
"Imagine my surprise the first time a large male ejaculated all over one of my graduate students!"
James Van Dyke, a lecturer in Ecology at Charles Sturt University in Australia, said he's considering trying the method on some Australian turtle species , although he's uncertain which model to use ("I imagine that size would matter, as a very large vibrator may not be able to reach into the shell to stimulate the best part of the tail, whereas a smaller vibrator could reach into the little nooks and crannies.") Despite McKnight's observations, Van Dyke worries that powerful vibration will cause the turtles to clamp up rather than let loose. "My gut feeling is that it will simply cause them to pull tighter into their shell."
McKnight hopes for further studies will shed light on how well vibration works in other species, as well as the effectiveness of different vibrator models with varying sizes, shapes, pulse patterns, and textures—although for now, he's leaving that work to other curious minds. He emphasized that despite how they might sound, these studies are not silly or for the researcher's amusement. "I think that it is really important to stress that this method is less invasive and less traumatic for the turtles than the alternative methods, and that's why we tried it," he said.
"I know this method sounds weird, but if it works as well as advertised, it needs to be in the toolkit of turtle biologists and conservationists," Van Dyke told Gizmodo. "Being able to tell males and females apart is one of the first major hurdles in assessing and mitigating [threats] to a species."
Christie Wilcox is a science writer, author of Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry, and all around biology nerd. Follow her on Twitter.
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