There once was a man who danced in the streets.
    Rap-a-tap-tap—think of that!
He didn’t just dance, he made art with his feet.
    Rap-a-tap-tap—think of that!
                                .    .    .
He danced many rhythms that were seldom the same.
    Rap-a-tap-tap—think of that!
Dance was his passion and it brought him fame.
    Rap-a-tap-tap—think of that!            
                  from Rap a Tap tap Here’s Bojangles, Think of That! 
                           written and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon
                                         Blue Sky Press/Scholastic, 2002
                                        accessed on YouTube 12/27/2020

    My new cat Wilson has not adjusted to Standard Time. It’s been almost 2 months. I think he’s on his own time. He doesn’t care about clocks or when the sun rises. He wakes me up between 2:00 and 3:00 every morning for a cuddle. I tell him it’s still night time, but he doesn’t care. After a little while, he goes away, I guess to sleep some more. He calls me to fix his breakfast a couple of hours later. 
    Frances, my old cat is much more laid back. She sleeps all night, lots of times at the end of our bed, and wakes up when Wilson tells her breakfast is ready. 
    Just like us, they have their own sleep/wake patterns, times when they would rather play and times when they would rather not. Eating times, cuddle times, relaxing times. Ahh, to be a cat!
    Since the Winter Solstice has come and gone, I’m noticing longer days and shorter nights which got me thinking about schedules, patterns, and plans. And circadian rhythms.
    Circadian, from the Latin circa + diem, to circle + day, refers to our earthly spin as we orbit the sun each day. Animals and plants, too, have a built-in system to regulate physical and mental activity levels, eating patterns, and sleep/wake cycles. I’m sure plants rest. They nourish themselves. They probably think, too, but that’s a topic for another day. 
    Our body's temperature and hormone levels are tuned to a cycle. When our bodies are working as they are supposed to, even without a clock, even in a dark space, those functions occur regularly on an approximate 24-hour, internally regulated cycle. Most humans are on a diurnal cycle, awake in the daytime and asleep at night. This is our circadian rhythm.
    Our body’s clock (and the clocks in other mammals) is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) located in the hypothalamus. Melatonin, the hormone that regulates the sleep/wake cycle of our circadian rhythm, is directed by the pineal gland found in the middle of our brains. At the end of the day, our pineal gland releases the hormone driver of our sleep/wake cycle, melatonin. Sleepiness is encouraged in humans by the increase in melatonin. It circulates in the blood all night but gradually decreases until morning. When light enters our eyes, the pineal gland directs the stoppage of melatonin, and we wake up.
    If the SCN is damaged or compromised, the result is the absence or disruption of a regular sleep/wake rhythm.
    And although the sleep/wake cycle in our circadian rhythm is the most commonly known,  circadian rhythms regulate our how aware we are, our reaction times, blood pressure, and body temperature. We are also tuned to other less-known but no less important rhythms. 
    Ultradian rhythms cycle more than once in a day. Hunger is an example. 
    Infradian rhythms take more than 24 hours to cycle. Menstrual cycles, hibernation, and migration are examples.
    Recurring patterns, plans, and schedules are all important. Lots of that seems to be either missing or hard to find in our pandemic days of seclusion and social distancing. The other day I heard the word Blursday to describe the days of the week, all kinda the same. Sounds about right to me. 
    So how do we get from Blursday to the regular seven? That’s a problem I’ve been wrestling with for several years. My natural propensity to procrastinate coupled with the lure of an interesting rabbit hole or two, get me to the end of many days asking myself, What did I even do all day?
    While lots of my plans and schedules find the nearest window and escape into the ether or biosphere or just disintegrate, I think lists will help me keep a little control.
    Being in love with words, I really do love the sound of Blursday, I just don’t like the feel of it!
                               -—stay curious! (and make a list or two)
Notes:    
https://kids.kiddle.co/Circadian_rhythm 
https://www.endocrineweb.com/endocrinology/overview-pineal-gland 

    The music floats and rises. It sings and dances from violas, violins, cellos, double basses, flutes, a piccolo, bassoons, clarinets, oboes, French horns, trumpets, trombones, a tuba, a harp, drums, cymbals, chimes, and one thin silver triangle.
    It is 8:30 on Friday night, and the one hundred and five men and women, dressed completely in black and white, have gone to work turning the black notes on white pages into a symphony.
    They are the members of the Philharmonic Orchestra and their work is to play beautifully.
                              from: The Philharmonic Gets Dressed
                                               written by Karla Kuskin
                                           illustrated by Marc Simont
                                                   Harper & Row, 1982
                                   accessed on YoutTube 12/21/2020

    My grandson texted me the other day to let me know his pre-recorded band concert will be shown on his school’s YouTube channel this evening. It won’t even come close to a “being there experience,” but we’ll save a bunch of travel time and well, I can’t think of another up-side to being apart. I miss him and his brothers and their parents like crazy. My granddaughters and their parents, too.
    Lots of performers have moved on-line. On-line platforms beefed themselves up and lots of us users learned a little more about how to navigate our high-tech, virus-filled world. 
    But that’s not what this is about.
    I was a piano student when I was young. Although I sometimes enjoyed practicing, and I practiced a lot, I did not improve much, even after many years. 
    One of my early piano books was called The Three Bs: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. In it were simplified versions of important piano works by those very famous composers. Playing something I could hear on the radio or find in a record shop inspired me and gave me undeserved confidence.
    But that’s not what this is about, either. It’s about the music, and in particular one musician and composer.
    I tuned my Pandora app to "Beethoven’s Favorites" for some inspiration. 
    Born in Bonn, Germany in December, 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven began performing at the age of 8. By age 11, he had to quit school, and by 18 he had become his family’s sole support due to his father’s alcoholism.
    Beethoven spent most of his adult life in Vienna, Austria.
    In Vienna, he fell in love with a young countess, Giulietta Guicciardi, but he was not allowed to marry her. Beethoven, for all his talent, was still considered a commoner. He dedicated his well-known Piano Sonata No. 14, “Moonlight,” to her.
    Beethoven never even published a song that has become even more famous. Ludwig Nohl, a German musicologist, found a piece of music in the back of a dresser drawer, so the story goes. “Für Elise” was scrawled across the top in Beethoven’s distinctive handwriting. Nohl found the music and published it in 1867, 40 years after Beethoven's death. Some theories claim to identify Elise, but no one really knows who she was.
    Ludwig van Beethoven, claimed by many to be the greatest composer who ever lived, may have studied for a short time with Mozart and was tutored by Haydn. He composed throughout the French Revolution and wrote some of his best and most famous peices right after, between 1803 and 1811.
     More than possibly any other composer before or since, Beethoven used his music to express emotions. He stretched the limit of contemporary musical norms and became a bridge between Classical music whose form and structure were well-established (Bach, Handel, Scarlatti) and Romantic music’s more dramatic, emotional, and individualistic flair (Chopin, Debussy, Tchaikovsky). 
    Including his nine symphonies, Beethoven’s body of work is comprised of 722 individual works. He composed his first piece when he was only twelve years old and completed his last the year before he died. He composed in every genre: symphonies; concerti; sonatas; overtures; quartets for various instruments including piano, woodwinds, and strings; chamber music; solo piano music; fugues; rondos; bagatelles; vocal music; choral works with orchestra; and dozens of songs, folksongs, and dances. 
    He composed when he could hear. He composed while his hearing was slipping away. He composed when he was deaf. His “mind’s ear” was still finely tuned. 
    On May 4, 1824, Beethoven debuted his Ninth Symphony at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna. Completely deaf, Beethoven could not know the audience’s reaction. They were cheering. One of the singers turned him around to see their applause. “[T]hey hailed him with five standing ovations, raising their hats and handkerchiefs in the air.” https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/beethoven-ninth-symphony-debuts-vienna  Beethoven shed tears of joy. He never conducted again. 
    A chorus sings the words of Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy” in the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony. It is said to be the most famous piece of music in history. 
    Beethoven’s actual birth date is controversial. He was baptized on December 17, so the middle of December gets me close enough. About where we are now.
    So just now, as we celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday, we put the Winter Solstice in our rearview mirrors and look forward to more hours (okay minutes) of daylight. We eagerly wait our turn for the Corona virus vaccine. We look forward to a new political climate. My own Ode to Joy. 
                         -—stay curious! (and keep a song in your heart)   

When day is done there goes the sun
but somewhere day will break
and while our side is fast asleep,
the other side’s awake.

​The world takes turns at day and night
and each side has its share.
The sun is shining all the time.
The sun shines everywhere!
                                      from: The Sun Shines Everywhere!
                                          written by Mary Ann Hoberman
                                             illustrated by Luciano Lozano
                                         Little, Brown and Company, 2019

    Just like fashion trends, the economy, and political elections, our sun’s activity is tuned to a cycle. During each 11-or-so-year cycle, the sun’s magnetic activity increases and decreases and generates more or less sun spots and intense solar flares. Scientists believe the sun is entering the most active phase of its current cycle, the solar maximum, and expects it to peak in 2025. Then, solar activity will begin to decrease.
    Solar flares, eruptions that send powerful bursts of energy and material into space, cause the aurora borealis and other auroras. Scientists are working out ways to better predict the frequency and strength of solar flares. 
    When I first read about solar flares, I wondered what are they? Are they dangerous? What causes them? Turns out, predicting the sun’s weather is trickier than predicting our own Earth’s weather. It all has to do with electromagnetism. 
    Although I had heard of electromagnetism, I thought electricity and magnetism were each its own thing.
    I plug in my coffee pot and hit the start button to begin my day. I flip a switch to turn on the light to find the cat food and dishes. I open my iPad and sip coffee in my green reading chair. Always, in that order. 
    When the water pump on our 20-year-old dishwasher blew last week, my requirement for its replacement was a magnetic door. I have two magnets, a D for dirty and a C for clean. I stick the D closest to the sink and keep loading. When the dishwasher beeps, I know it's time to empty. I move the C to the closest spot. The letters are leftovers from when the grandkids were first learning about letter-sound connections. We had lots of magnets (numbers and letters) that we used to spell out their names and objects like cat and refrigerator. Or we just played with the sounds. They stuck to the refrigerator like magic. 
    But it turns out electromagnetism is one thing.
    It is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, acting on subatomic particles, such as protons and electrons, holding all the matter in the universe together. Protons with their positive charge cling to electrons with their negative charge. As current flows through matter, electricity is generated. Electromagnetism, over simplified, I know, but there it is.
    It is the electromagnetism of the sun that causes solar flares. The sun is not a solid, liquid, or gas. It is made of the fourth matter, plasma. According to Dr. Eoin Carley, Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College Dublin and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS), “The solar atmosphere is a hotbed of extreme activity, with plasma temperatures in excess of 1 million degrees Celsius and particles that travel close to light-speed. The light-speed particles shine bright at radio wavelengths, so we're able to monitor exactly how plasmas behave with large radio telescopes.” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190524094320.htm 
    By studying the behavior of plasmas, scientists are trying to discover how to harness the energy from plasmas to create a fusion reactor, much safer, cleaner, and more efficient than the fission nuclear reactors we are using now. 
    A solar flare is a sudden, intense, bright light usually occurring close to sunspots. The flare spews plasma outward from near the surface of the sun. Powerful flares spew plasma outward into outer space. Besides plasma, they emit lots of radio waves, as Dr. Carley has shown. It can take up to three days for this ejected plasma to reach our upper atmosphere where the charged particles react with oxygen and nitrogen to create the colorful displays at Earth’s poles.
    The electromagnetic disturbances, called solar storms or geomagnetic storms, vary in intensity. The stronger the storm, the farther south (or north) the auroras can be seen.    
    Last Thursday (12/10/2020), NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, issued a geomagnetic storm watch. A particularly strong flare was expected to spew electromagnetic material directly toward Earth, rather than outer space. It would have produced auroras that could be viewed as far south as Seattle, Detroit, Chicago, and Boston. www.MercuryNews.com (December 10, 2020) and probably would have caused disruptions to tele-communication systems, created satellite disturbances, and affected GPS monitors.
    As it happened, the plasmic material shot into outer space, and other than astrophysicists, meteorologists, and a few interested science professors, life went on as usual. 
    NOAA uses ground-based instruments and satellites to monitor solar weather events, but solar weather events are hard to predict. 
    Several atmospheric layers protect us from the sun. Active ions in the ionosphere absorb radiation. The magnetosphere, our surrounding magnetic field, also protects against the potential damage of solar flares.    
    And we protect ourselves and our families with sunscreen and sunglasses. I’m not worried. I’ll just smile at my new solar panels on (infrequent) sunny days during this upcoming northeastern Ohio winter.
                                        -—stay curious! (and shine brightly)

Long and graceful, the queen glides across the combs.
Two thousand times a day—the queen stops to drop
a single egg into a single cell.
  Pearly white.
    Half the size of a grain of rice.
      Each will grow into a bee.

                  from Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera
                                          written by Candace Fleming
                                           illustrated by Eric Rohmann
                                                    Holiday House, 2020
    Several summers ago, I was stung by a bee. It was my fault. My thyme was draping itself beyond its square foot of my square-foot garden, flowing into the parsley and tarragon. I like the wild-ish look of a slightly overgrown garden. The plants are showing me they are healthy and strong. 
    But even I have limits. I got my pruners and began snipping away, parting the leaves and tiny flowers as I went. My bees must love thyme flowers, because they were in there buzzing around, doing the work they do. I was an intruder.
    I felt something tickle my neck below my right ear. Silly me for not connecting the tickle with the bees I disturbed. The first bee sting of my life was sharp and fast. The severity of it lasted only a second. I felt a dull pain for the rest of the afternoon. 
    But I was not deterred.
    Last summer, I put up a bee house. I had heard how useful they are for attracting backyard bees. After searching several stores, I found one at my local garden shop. I hung it, well, my husband did that, in a sunny spot on the east side of my house and bees came.
    The bees that come to my bee house are not social. Each only needs space for herself. Social bees, like honeybees build hives. Bumblebees make nests.
    Honeybee hives are home to 20,000 to 100,000 individuals. Each honeybee has a specific task. The queen lays eggs, 1,000 to 2,000 every day. Worker bees are female. They do all the work outside the hive; gathering pollen and nectar and communicating to their sisters where to find the best sources for nectar, and inside; building the hive, cleaning the hive, making the honey, storing the pollen, grooming the queen, caring for the baby bees, watching over the drones.
    Drones stay in the hive, waiting around for a turn to mate with the queen. That’s it.
    As a honeybee (or other pollinator including butterflies and moths, birds and bats, beetles, and other kinds of bees) travels from flower to flower in her search for nectar, she inadvertently collects pollen. Pollen is is the fine, powdery, yellowish grains necessary for a plant to reproduce. When the bee visits the next flower, she collects more nectar, and inadvertently leaves pollen from the last flower. In this way, plants depend on insects (and birds and bats…) to create their next and next and next generations. 
    Nectar, the sweet liquid secreted by plants to attract bees and other pollinators, is collected by the honeybee and delivered to an indoor worker bee. It is passed mouth-to-mouth from bee to bee until its moisture content is reduced from about 70% to 20%. This changes the nectar into honey. 
    Each bee makes several one to one-and-a-half hour trips per day and visits about 1,000 flowers each trip. Bees visit over 4,000 flowers to make one tablespoon of honey.     
    But bees need pollen, too. They transport the pollen that does not get knocked off when they flit from flower to flower, back to their hives to nourish themselves and their youngsters. Pollen is essential to the bees. It is the principle source of protein, fat, and minerals. Nectar provides necessary energy.
    Pollen is mixed with nectar and is fed to the larvae.
    When it’s not needed right away, worker bees pack pollen tightly into the cells of the hive, add honey, and seal the cells with wax. It is stored in readiness for the arrival of newborn baby bees. Baby bees need protein-rich pollen too, for the bee community to flourish.
    Now, with the summer gathering frenzy behind them, the hive can rest. The bees who worked so hard during the spring, summer, and fall, have died off. The males have all died off, too. The winter bees are plumper to hold more heat and have much longer lifespans, several months, instead of several weeks. The the whole hive-full of winter worker bees clusters tightly together, holding the queen in their center, the warmest spot. To sustain themselves and their heat, the cluster moves about the hive as one, to reach the stored honey reserves. 
    For a variety of the regular reasons, (climate change, habitat loss, pesticides) bees, especially honeybees, are in decline.
    A newly-created global map showing where the more than 20,000 species of bees exist now, will serve as a baseline for populations of bees as they continue to decline around the world. Michael Orr, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Zoology at Chinese Academy of Sciences says, “This is an important first step for [conservation], and in the future we can begin working more on threats to bees such as habitat destruction and climate change, and to better incorporate pollination services into ecosystem service analyses.”
    Our own USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) reminds us “One out of every three bites of food we eat exists because of animal pollinators.” 
    Protecting the pollinators will help secure our own future, too.
                       -—stay curious! (and find sweetness in your life)
https://honeybee.org.au/education/wonderful-world-of-honey/how-bees-make-honey/
https://www.mdbka.com/bee-information/ 
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/plantsanimals/pollinate/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/19/world/first-global-map-bee-species-scn-trnd/index.html 

I wrote to the zoo to send me a pet.
They sent me an… 
elephant! 
He was too big!
I sent him back.
      .    .    .
So they sent me a… 
frog! 
He was too jumpy!
I sent him back.
      .    .    .
So they thought very hard,
and sent me a…
puppy!
He was perfect!
I kept him.
                                                       from Dear Zoo
                             written and illustrated by Rod Campbell
                                               Four Winds Press, 1982

    By now you know my dad was a philatelist. I’ve mentioned it often. I like the mouth-feel of the word and I’m proud of myself for being able to spell it correctly without looking it up. All us kids knew what one was. It was a little piece of knowledge we had that most of our friends did not.
    My dad was not a letter writer. He was a stamp collector. The stamps were incidental to the mail. They were the purpose for his collection, his and his group of like-minded friends. 
    When I saw a small article in my local paper about a new documentary about a United States Postal Service program, I wanted to learn more. Dear Santa is a film from IFC. You can see the trailer and find out lots of info about the film at https://www.dearsanta.movie It comes out on December 4, and will be available in theaters and VOD (Video on Demand) 
    From its website page https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm I learned that the USPS has been receiving letters to Santa for over 100 years. (If you’re curious about the history of the USPS itself, check my blog from July 28, 2020.)
    In 1913, then Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock decided to formalize the hundreds of thousands of requests the Post Office received each year. Most were for toys, but many did (and still do) not fit into a box. Things like a necessary surgery, a favorite food or any food, a sibling. A blanket. Shoes. Well, blankets and shoes do fit in boxes, but you know what I’m after here. Hitchcock authorized local Postmasters to allow postal employees and regular citizens to respond to the letters. This was the beginning of a program that became known as Operation Santa.
    During World War II, the volume of letters increased so much that the Post Office invited local charities and corporations to join in. They provided small gifts and responses to the letters until Operation Santa gained a life of its own. With its own mission statement: “…to provide a channel where people can give back and help children and families — enabling them to have a magical holiday when they otherwise might not — one letter to Santa at a time.” (source of quote is in the above link)
    When I was growing up, Hanukkah (Chanuka, Chanukka, Hannukaah, …) was a pretty important holiday. We lit the candles in our Chanukkiah, one more candle each night to symbolize the growing light and goodness in the world. We sang songs. We played dreidel, we ate potato latkes with applesauce and sour cream. But presents were not the mainstay of our holiday. My girls will tell a similar story about the gifts. They did receive a gift each night, but most tended to be practical. Underwear, socks, a board game we could play together…gloves. Where did all those single gloves go?
    So when I found out about Operation Santa and read some of the letters, and felt their sincerity, I decided to join in.
    This year is the first year Operation Santa is nationwide. Letters addressed to Santa will be accepted from November 16 through December 15. If you or your child or someone you know would like to write a letter, all the information you need is here: https://www.uspsoperationsanta.com/getinvolved/letterwriting 
    If you want to fill a request, start here: https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm Letters can be viewed beginning December 4. You can read them and choose to  answer one or more. All identifiable markings such as full name, address of letter writer and letter responder and even the zip codes will be removed by the Postal Service before the letters are uploaded to their site. For security reasons, all adopters will be vetted by the Postal Service. The forms, the FAQs, the letters will all be uploaded December 4. Once a child’s letter is chosen, that letter is removed from the site. Letters will be continually added until December 15. The Postal Service keeps track of all the letter-writers and letter-responders. If you send a gift, the USPS will track it and send you an email when it arrives. All anonymous. On both ends.
    This is where you can read letters from previous years. https://www.uspsoperationsanta.com You will also find Santa’s address, forms to fill out to be vetted, sign up, and beginning December 4, read this year’s letters. You can keep checking back until December 15, and choose to adopt a child, some children, or a whole family. 
    Hanukkah or Christmas, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, Bodhi Day, or the Birthday of Guru Nanak Dev Sahib, all are causes for celebration. After all the turmoil of this American year, 2020, I want to celebrate them all! 
    Whatever your religion, or no religion, I hope you find your own causes to celebrate, large and small.
                            -—stay curious! (and spread good cheer)