Tag--I'm it

The "8 Things About Me" meme has morphed into a "4 new x 2" meme. Christine M. over at The Simple and the Ordinary has tagged me. Here's the deal:

You have to share four things that were new to you in the past four years. Four things you learned or experienced or explored for the first time in the past four years. New house, new school, new hobby, new spouse, new baby, whatever. Then you have to say four things you want to try new in the next four years.

Part one (in reverse chronological order):
1. Moved to Geneva, Switzerland, along with my husband and son. I'd say that's a pretty big one.
2. Got my MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. Another big one, don'tcha think?
3. Saw my daughters graduate from high school and go off to college. (sob)
4. Re-learned how to crochet.

Part two:
1. Get Into the Fire published, or at least accepted by a publisher. (I know how slowly the wheels of publishing can turn.)
2. Establish a regular yoga practice. It makes me feel so much better.
3. Run more races in fun places. Notice I didn't say run marathons. They're tempting, but I always end up getting injured. Half marathons are half the distance and twice the fun.
4. Finish the volcano scientists book.

And now I tag
Cara at first efforts
Lu at "Speak"

I should tag more people, but I'm too lazy.

Madrid/Barcelona/Venice

It's hard to believe, but we only have a little over a month left here in Geneva. Which explains, I guess, our heavy travel schedule. So much to see! So little time! Two four-day-weekends in a row! So the weekend before last it was Madrid/Barcelona, where we finally got to see au pair daughter Caitlin (hooray!) and the whole family was together again. We met her family, or at least the mom and boys (check out the Madrid/Barcelona album at Innocence Abroad for pictures) and saw a little of Madrid, a lovely city. I took the picture on the left on our way to a late dinner (is there any other kind in Spain?), near the royal palace.






Barcelona was essentially a Gaudi-fest. We saw the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's amazing, as-yet unfinished cathedral, one of the apartments he designed, and a Gaudi park. This is one of those places where you think: what would it be like to live next door to an architectural landmark? (Same goes for living next to Roman ruins, or anywhere in Venice--more about that below.) When you live, work, and play amongst tourist-worthy sites, do you become jaded?










And then there's Venice (a few photos posted here on our web album--more to come). What an improbable, audacious, lovely and, sadly, sinking, city! No matter how many times you've seen pictures of Venice, you're still not prepared for the dreamlike quality of the city. Water buses (vaporetti) provide the main form of public transportation; no cars--not even bicycles!--are permitted in Venice. Narrow pedestrian streets end in blind alleys. It's like a real-life Disneyland, with all of the tourists. I heard one old Venetian lady giving a guy working on a crowded vaporetti an earful about the "touristas", but the sad fact is that without the tourists Venice would probably be nearly empty.

And in fact, it's hard not to hate the tourists when you visit a place like Piazza San Marco. The basilica is breath-taking, a wedding cake of a church, but the crush of tourists and the pigeons--the pigeons!--sort of ruined the experience for me. Apparently it's supposed to be good luck if a pigeon craps on your shoulder, so tourists buy pigeon food to entice them (filthy, disgusting boids) to land on their shoulders and make them lucky. Ever hear of salmonella, anybody? 15% of the pigeons in Venice carry it. Now that's what I call luck!

And now I'm making plans for one last major trip before we return to Champaign; this one is actually work-related. I've arranged to interview a volcanologist who works at the Vesuvius Observatory in Naples for my new extreme scientist book. She was one of the co-authors on a paper published last summer showing that there was a Bronze-age eruption of Vesuvius 4,000 years ago that devastated a village just 15 kilometers from Naples. It would have been much more powerful than the one that destroyed Pompeii in 79 CE, and they say that hazard planners should increase preparations for a similarly catastrophic eruption. I plan to visit Vesuvius, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Archaeological Museum in Naples, which is supposed to be awesome, as well as the new Nola site.

BTW, if you look Nola up on Wikipedia, you learn that today most of its "territory and economy are well under control of the camorra" (the local mafia), and that one of the major activities of the camorra is the "illegal treatment of urban, chemical and industrial wastes in the countryside located in the region between Nola, Acerra and Marigliano. This formerly rich and green countryside is sometimes now called the 'Death Triangle'."

Gulp.

Blackbird

It is one of those truisms you hear so often that you begin to dismiss it as meaningless: that living or traveling abroad can make you understand things in a different way.

I've been thinking about this lately. Our apartment has a balcony that looks out on a small yard with several trees. There are lots of birds that we just don't see or hear in the Midwest: magpies, giant pigeons, and blackbirds. I often work at the kitchen table with the door to the balcony open, with birdsong (as well as traffic noise and children playing) as background music. For a long time, Tony and I were puzzled by the fact that we would often hear the birds singing long after the sun went down. Don't Swiss birds (with the exception of owls) sleep at night?

And then we finally understood the lyrics to the Beatles song:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night.
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

Oh. So blackbirds really do sing in the dead of night. I guess it's just because they were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Musical phonetic punctuation

Punctuation made fun! Victor Borge was a genius. (Thanks to Adventures in Daily Living for the link.)

Physics in the news

There was a nice article in today's NYT by Dennis Overbye about Tony's experiment here at CERN. He is on the ATLAS experiment--one of the big ones mentioned in the article. I hope to get a guided tour before I leave! Here's the link: "A Giant Takes on Physics' Biggest Questions."

I interviewed one of the guys quoted in the article--Joe Lykken--for an article I wrote for Highlights for Children about the search for the top quark. Nice guy. I interviewed my husband for the article, as well. He is also a nice guy. This was one of my first pieces of science writing for kids, and I'm still happy with it. I like the challenge of writing about "difficult" topics for kids. Meaning, nothing to do with dinosaurs or cute furry animals.

Not that I have anything against dinosaurs or cute furry animals. In fact, in my Antarctic Scientists book (just submitted!) I devote an entire chapter to paleontologists and most of another to a guy who studies Weddell seals. (They are unbearably cute.) But I also have a chapter about astrophysicists working in Antarctica. I think that too many people underestimate kids when it comes to science writing. I'm not sure if Stella Brite and the Dark Matter Mystery was a complete success or not--there are some things I would do differently if I were to re-write it--but I mean, holy cow, think of the kid appeal. Did you know that we have no clue about the stuff that makes up most of the universe? The stuff you can SEE, that's peanuts. Cool? Cool.

Antarctic Scientists

I sent off my manuscript for the Antarctic Scientists book today, part of Enslow's Extreme Scientists series. It was a little late (sorry, Ben, if you're reading this!), but it was sure nice to get it out. After a lot of angst, I think it turned out pretty well. It turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined to do some of the supporting research here, and there were family issues that complicated things. I still need to round up photos (and permissions, I suspect).

Writing this book reminded me of why I really love writing nonfiction, and in particular, about science. There is only so much I can experience in my lifetime, and I want to do it all. I'd love to travel to Antarctica, Madagascar, India...well, the list goes on. I dig scientists (hey, I'm married to one!) and their boundless curiosity about the natural world.

In the process of writing the Antarctic Scientists book, I got to learn about what it's like to camp out in -40 F weather for weeks at a time, stumble across dinosaur bones, build a telescope that can take us close to the big bang, or dig in the mud off the Antarctic coast. And I get to learn about the science while I'm at it.

Frustrated scientist? Well, maybe. But when I got out of grad school with a MS instead of the planned-for PhD, I reminded myself that some people like to learn a lot about one thing, and other people like to learn a little about a lot of things. I'm the latter, a butterfly, for sure.

To come...Volcano Scientists.

Yes

I've decided to jump in the Poetry Friday pool! I chose a poem by the late William Stafford, titled "Yes." William Stafford and I are both originally from south-central Kansas. This poem is for the survivors of the Greensburg tornado.

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

Link to the rest of this short poem here: Zen in American Poetry (Nebraska Zen Center)