They’re just giant chickens!

I’ve got this stupid thing stuck in my head… Whenever I see a T-Rex (you know, cause I see them nearly every day wandering around in the valley), I see a giant weird looking chicken with tiny wings. You can’t deny many dinosaurs have bird features in their skeletons. I mean look at those legs and wings! I also wonder how many T-Rex skeletons are found without their drumsticks.

Imagine the size of those drumsticks!!!

Seriously, people have been known to kill black rhinos just for their horns making them nearly extinct. Maybe this is how dinosaurs really became extinct! Growing up when a roast chicken was brought to the dinner table I’d always considered myself really lucky to get a drumstick. And drumsticks are sold without the rest of the chicken bodies for a good reason – they stop family fights! So our ancestors may have hunted dinosaurs like the T-Rex just for their drumsticks! I think I would have because you’d only need one to feed the tribe.

And imagine how much spice you’d need to make Spicy Rex Wings! Okay, maybe not so much – those things are tiny compared to the rest of its body. Haha.

Oh, and breaking the wishbone (because they did have them) would be like a tug-o-war game. Tribes could have kept them to resolve disputes rather than attacking each other.

Another thing that gets me wondering is the sound of a male T-Rex crowing every morning. With a chest cavity that size it would have to be loud. COCK-A-DOODLE-ROAR! Good morning world!!!

Root Bound

I’m back studying again. Partly because I need this to make a change in the right direction, and mostly because I physically can’t work. I’m still waiting for surgery.

[Side note: nooooo, let’s not share a huge paragraph of negativity and gory details of my agonising state. You’re welcome. Although you’ll never know how thankful you should be that I just deleted that bit]

But I’m here to discuss the pain of learning new things at my age. I liken learning with a tertiary institution to the pain endured by Ashton Kutcher’s character in ‘The Butterfly Effect’ every time he altered his past. When things changed, his mind had to catch up with the newly formed past timeline, a full on rewiring of memories and more. So much so he’d have seizures and nose bleeds. When I’m studying I pretend to check for blood coming out my nose sometimes just for fun because I feel like my head is about to explode. Haha

I now figure the old dog, new tricks thing wasn’t just some dumb thing someone said one day and everyone repeated it because it sounded cool. It’s actually bloody hard!

Another way to look at it is like plants in pots. You’ve got 2 plants in exactly the save sized pot. One is a new sapling of a plant, the other has been sitting in that pot quite a long time. The new one has a few roots stretched out comfortably. The old one has a tangled ball of bound roots that have been restricted by the pot size.

Now, say both these plants are looking to expand their roots into new soil. They are pulled out of their pot and placed in a new larger one with a refresh of nutrients. The younger one with free roots can immediately dig into the new soil and soaks in all those new nutrients with ease. The older one can’t stretch its roots out because they’ve grown thicker over time and are all caught up in each other. To reach out and soak in those new nutrients is a lot harder for it. Of course for real root bound plants there are ways you can fix that a bit – see end of blog.

Neuroplasticity isn’t so “plasti” when an older brain has what seems like a whole new language suddenly thrown at it to learn in 5 months.

[Linda checks her nose isn’t bleeding again from just thinking about it all. Haha.]

The crazy thing is, even though it seems so incredibly hard in the moment, I can look back a week or two later and see that I’ve learnt something new and technical (as opposed to the stories in all 4 seasons of For All Mankind which i “studied” in the 2 weeks prior). It makes me want to spin around to the no one beside me and excitedly proclaim, “Hey, look at me! I CAN do this stuff!”

Well, here you go, a little video with one method of helping root bound plants get those nutrients it needs to keep on growing. Some of these instructions sound like exactly what I really need 😉. Haha.