Ten Days of Little Celebrations - January 2015

Noticing something worth celebration each day is an easy thing for me to do. The habit of writing it down reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. This month has been full of ‘little celebrations’ - as had been the usual for the past few months. Here are my top 10 for January 2015.

Winter

Snow in Tucson. The year started off with a pictures from my daughter of the snow they got --- on the palms and cactus near their apartment. It was a beautiful scene to celebrate the New Year.

Fox. A healthy looking red fox walked through our back yard then trotted behind several other houses before turning into the forest. I watched from the window of my office - celebrating the grace of the animal as it moved through the winter landscape.

Fog. The forest and our neighborhood filled with fog. The temperature was in the upper 30s. It seemed like the fog damped sound as effectively as it did sight - celebrating a warm house in the isolation of winter.

Snow. Snow that falls when I can simply stay at home until it melts or the streets are cleared by the plows is my favorite kind of day. It is the classic winter scene worth celebrating.

Other

Dishwasher. Our dishwasher became very loud so we arranged for servicing - anticipating that it would have to be replaced. Hurray! It was quickly fixed and our kitchen is a quieter place.

Zentangle® class. I saw a blurb about a Zentangle class offered at the local 50+ Community Center. It was a good incentive to investigate the place! I’ve been to the first of four class sessions and am enjoying daily ‘tangling’. I’ll post a slide show of my creations once I’ve accumulated a few more. I’m celebrating both the class and learning about the 50+ Community Center.

Arizona and Tucson

Bald Eagle. In recent years, the bald eagle population has increased on the east coast and we see them more often….but when I saw one as we drove into Grand Canyon National Park - settling into the top of a pine tree - it was a first sighting in the west for me. Hurray!

Grand Canyon. Awesome place. I’ve been there before --- it is worth celebrating again and again.

Painted Desert/Petrified Forest. The times I’d been before were in summer and late spring. This time it was decidedly cool/cold. The colors were deeper in Painted Desert because it had snowed/rained. The Petrified Forest glistened when the sun came from behind the clouds. Both places are special…and worth celebrating.

Tree Ring Lab. I’m celebrating that the place lived up to my expectations - interesting from scientific, architectural and historical perspectives. If I lived in Tucson - I’d sign up as a volunteer docent.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 24, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Is it possible to reset our biological clocks? - I have just started a Coursera course on circadian clocks so am paying more attention to articles on the topic. This one is from ScienceDaily.

Wild pollinators at risk from diseased commercial species of bee - Honeybees, bumblebees, and social wasps  are all colony living insects that makes the transmission of disease within the colony very rapid…and now there is evidence of transmission between colonies, even colonies of different species.

Google Talking To Automakers about Building Autonomous Cars - I would like to see autonomous cars…but is it just wishful thinking for the near term (say 2020)?

This Ancient Pigment Could Soon Be Used to See Through Your Skin - Egyptian blue (calcium copper silicate). And now it’s becoming a medical technology too. Other applications of Egyptian Blue in an article from Antiquity Now.

How to Uncover a Skeleton’s Secrets - From National Geographic. The examples in the article is from a project in northern Peru

One Scientist's Race to Help Microbes Help You - There has been a lot discovered about the human microbiome…but translating the new knowledge into treatments has been slower. This is a story about the American Gut Project - a massive citizen science experiment - which is focused on accumulating enough data to enable the move toward treatments sooner.

Humanity Is In the Existential Danger Zone, Study Confirms - Scary stuff. Are we engineering a wave of extinctions on our planet that will eventually include ourselves? We are pushing against and past several planetary boundaries.

A Smart Grid Infrastructure Demands Increased Engineering Smarts - One of the skillsets needed for the future. The article is about the program in Syracuse University’s College of Engineering.

Counties Lag Behind National Recovery, Report Finds - A breakdown of ‘recovery’ at the county level reveals key economic indicators on a more granular level that we usually hear about. The clickable version of the map is available here.  I found that the county where I live has recovered 2 of the 4 indicators (which is considered ‘recovered’) but where my daughter lives in Tucson has not recovered any of the 4; having visited Tucson for the past 3 years, I do notice that things have improved - but they are not back to the levels prior to 2008.

Breathtaking Frozen Bubbles Look like Elegant Glass Ornaments - I hope we have a cold day soon so I can try making frozen bubbles like this! I’m pretty sure it takes lots of practice to make them look as good as these!

Tucson Sunrise

January is a great time of year to observe the sunrise in the US since it does not require getting up inordinately early. The added advantage in Tucson is that is it not overwhelmingly cold. We wore hoodies and headed out one morning last week - driving to the parking area in the eastern district of Saguaro National Park at the end of Speedway.

It was not a great place for sunrise because the mountains made for a tall horizon. But I liked the soft light on the desert scenes.

Then I started taking closer views of the plants. There were two kinds of Cholla

A prickly pear with colorful thorns

A wounded saguaro

And young saguaros with their Palo Verde nurse plant.

And finally - just as we were leaving - the rocks of the mountains caught the morning color.

Tucson Butterflies

It was warm enough for butterflies to be active on the lantana on the University of Arizona campus week before the last but the bigger butterfly treat was at the Tucson Botanical Garden’s Butterfly and Orchid Pavilion.

The pavilion is a warm, misty place where the butterflies are numerous enough to get some good photographs - after the camera acclimates to the steamy environment. The exhibit gets new additions each day a pupae in the building next door hatch and are brought into the pavilion. We saw a glass wing being released and then a very large moth - a cecropia. I included two pictures of it in the slideshow below.

The butterflies only live about 2 weeks. Some of them don’t eat in their adult phase - others are active on nectar plants. Caterpillars and their food plants are not part of the exhibit (all the pupae come from the native countries for the butterflies).

What a delight of warmth and color in January!

3 Free eBooks - January 2015

There are so many good eBooks available these days. My favorite source is the Internet Archive because it brings together other repositories and displays them in several formats. I like the ‘Read Online’ format when I am read on my laptop and PDF when I reading on my tablet. The Kindle and Full Text formats often are not as good because the transition from the image to digital text is not corrected….and I prefer to have the illustrations inact!

Bezold, Carl. Ninive und Babylon. Bielefeld und Leipzig: Verlag con Velhagen & Klafing. 1903. Available from the Internet Archive here. I wondered as I looked at the black and white photographs how many of these items were still whole and close to where they were originally found. In the early 1900s archaeologists carted items back to their native countries. The trend now it to keep items of material culture closer to where they are found --- although that is problematic when wars erupt and the museums and sites are caught up in the destruction such as in Iraq and Syria in recent years.

Burn, Barbara (editor). Masterpieces of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2006. Available from the Internet Archive here. So many treasures….a ‘coffee table’ book with lots of wonderful photographs. Last month I included a Degas ebook from the museum (and from their site); I was surprised, and thrilled, that so many of the museum’s books are also on the Internet Archive!

Bois, D. Atlas des plantes de jardins et d'appartements exotiques et européenes. Paris: Klincksieck. 1896. Available on the Internet Archive here. I can’t resist books of botanical prints. Many are easily recognizable - like the hibiscus below.

Touring the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research

I enjoyed the docent led tour at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at University of Arizona last week. The Bannister Building, where the lab is located is quite distinctive - with a scrim of articulated metal tubes. The wind was not blowing on the morning of our tour so we didn’t hear the sound of the tubes in motion.

Inside we wondered around the lobby before the tour. I was looking for various ways the large tree cookies were labeled. I liked the simple white arrows that showed the semantics used: pith, early wood, late wood, branch trace, fire scar, cambium and bark.

Here is a closer look to understand what a tree ring is (the center of the tree cookie is to the lower left of the image). Note that the rings are not all the same…their width reflects the growth conditions for the year they were growing.

And some trees live for a very long time. The labeling on the tree cookie from the Giant Sequoia that lived 1704 years is labeled with more information.

When the docent arrived, we were invited upstairs into one of the labs to talk with one of the researchers who showed us how the sample cores from trees are collected and mounted. The tree-ring lab is multidisciplinary; many specialties are required to glean the information from the samples. I was intrigued by the cross section on one of the upper floors that was very different than concentric rings. This would take a lot of finesse to interpret!

I’ve included two close ups to show the dates labelled on the specimen.

One other tidbit I picked up from the docent: on the elementary school tours, the children are given a small tree cookie (~3 inches in diameter) and the children sand it to reveal the tree rings! That would certainly be a memorable learning experience!

Sustainability - Choosing Organic Food

Foods that are labelled ‘organic’ are produced to a USDA standard…and that labelling is the best proxy we have for ‘sustainably produced’ so I choose to buy organic food when I can.

Organic products are often more expensive although there is not as much cost delta as there was a few years ago and there seem to be more organic products available in the stores. More farmers are turning to organic methods if they are in the business for the long term because it is the most sustainable way of farming.

So I buy organic to avoid contributing my purchasing power to non-sustainable farming practices:

• Pesticides and fertilizers may temporarily increase crop yields but they degrade soil (by killing soil organisms and encouraging poor soil maintenance practices, with less organic matter in the soil there is faster runoff of moisture) and pollute water (the runoff carries the pesticides and fertilizers into streams and rivers causing algae blooms, changing reproductive capacity of fish, and dead zones as the mouths of rivers).
• Factory farms (dairy cows, pigs, chickens) cluster animals into tight quarters creating waste disposal issues (terrible smells and high potential for polluting water) and requiring the use of antibiotics (which causes antibiotic resistant bacteria, which can make people sick too).

Buying organic is a good step toward living more sustainably!

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 17, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Under-the-Radar Environmental Stories for 2015: The Furtive Five - Five stories and some comments about trends in environmental reporting in mainstream media. Did you know that 33% of the children living the Tehran have asthma or air-pollution related allergies?

Technology to recycle all type of plastics without using water - This sounds like a good technology for the future…and in areas where water is already scarce.  The research/development was done in Mexico.

Chitosan: Sustainable alternative for food packaging - Chitosan is made from shells of crustaceans. The process for manufacturing is not currently economical but could become so….and the material biodegrades much faster than the 100-400 years it takes for most plastic packaging today. I wondered if the packaging would cause people with allergies to shellfish a problem. The research/development was done in Spain (Basque Country). This and the article just above caused me to wonder if countries other than the US are surging ahead when it comes to enablers for a sustainable Earth.

Sweet potato leaves a good source of vitamins - I just discovered that sweet potato leaves are edible from my CSA last fall. It’s thrilling that they are very nutritious as well. I liked them a lot in salads; they are best if eaten within a few days of being picked so I don’t anticipate they will find their way into grocery stores very often.

6 Birds That Are Champion Flyers - Champion flyers from different perspectives: Arctic Tern, Bar-tailed Godwit, Peregrine Falcon, Grey-headed Albatross, Hummingbird, Purple Martins.

The Chemistry of Decongestants - This was a timely post on the Compound Interest site.

Lose Yourself in These Photos Of Europe's Most Magnificent Libraries - Books and buildings….what will they be in 100 years? They already have a museum quality.

The 19th-Century Photography Trick That Changed How We See Snow - How William Bentley made his famous images of snowflakes….spurs me on to try more snowflake photography next time in snows in my area. I may add a feather to my supplies!

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Charted - Is your daily pattern similar to any of these ‘famous creative people’?

‘Kitchen of the future’ here, now - I like the idea of a high definition backsplash! There is a film available from the location of the materials for the Science Daily story here. I already use my ceramic cooktop as working surface when I’m not cooking on it…so I agree that there are certain components of the ‘kitchen of the future’ that are now.

Six ways city landscapes can be more flood resilient - in pictures - With rising sea levels - more cities will be looking at flooding mitigations. These are some beautiful solutions. In our area of Maryland - rain gardens are often included in new housing developments.

Zooming - January 2015

The zoomed images this month are more varied than usual. There were some images from very cold days (mostly in Maryland) and some mild days in Arizona. I’ll be posting about our travel to Arizona in the weeks to come but I could not resist including a little prelude here! Can you find…. 

• Ice eddies
• A rabbit
• Elk eye
• Snowman
• Crow feet
• Star Trek Enterprise pictograph
• Petrified wood knots
• Red thorns
• Baby toe cactus

Packing for Travel - the Layers Strategy

As I packed for my vacation to Tucson, I realized that the January weather there required more varied clothes that the majority of the year when it is simply hot, hotter, or hottest. Daily temperature swings of 25-30 degrees are not unusual. And Maryland would be cold both when we departed and returned. Packing layers of clothing is the only strategy that can work.

The innermost layer has to be comfortable in the mid-70s. A tunic over leggings was my outfit for the first travel day. I added a scarf as a first layer since it would help me feel warmer snugged around my neck if I got cold.

I wore two additional layers on the way to the airport in Maryland because it was in the low 30s and snowing: a hoodie and then my coat. Once we got into the airport, the coat went into a bag that I checked and the hoodie went into a tote bag that I carried onto the plane….congratulating myself on applying the layers strategy to my luggage too (lightening the carry-on) as I changed planes in Little Rock.

When I got to Tucson it was in the low 70s….and I loosened my scarf.

Sustainability - Join a CSA

Joining a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm is often a good step toward living more sustainably.

• Generally the farms are already certified as organic or heading in that direction because their customers demand it….and “organic” is the closest we get to sustainable farming.
• I found that I had less waste with the CSA because the veggies were ‘just picked’ and remained edible for longer once I got them home. I also learned that parts of plants that I used to throw away were actually edible (carrot tops and sweet potato leaves, for example). This is even more important in households where composting is not possible and food waste is part of the trash headed for the landfill.  We should all be striving to minimize our contribution to the landfills.
• Generally the packaging done by the CSA is minimal. Mine provided reusable bags at the beginning of the season and I could use my own mesh bags for things like spinach leaves, green beans, and small potatoes.  Sometimes the cherry tomatoes came in pulp paper bins; they are recyclable but I think next year I’ll transfer them to my own bag and just leave the bin with the CSA for them to use again. The only ‘trash’ I haven’t quite decided how to avoid are rubber bands they used for portions of onions, carrots, beets, etc.
• Another aspect that makes the CSA option more sustainable may be fuel costs for transport and post-harvest processing. The farm is less than a mile from my house. The veggies are harvested and picked up on the same day so there are minimal costs for refrigeration. The barn where the shares are picked up by participants is not air conditioned.

My first experience with a CSA was last summer and I am now a huge fan of the concept…and my particular CSA. It supplied produce from June through October. Maryland is too far north for it to operate year round (like they do in Arizona, for example). I really am missing it this winter. There are more CSAs popping up all the time; joining one is a way to begin living more sustainably (and most likely eating better too).

Life’s Decades - The Sixth 10 Years

Today I am focused on the sixth decade of life. For me - it was mostly in the 2000s and included the melded joys of career transitioning to post career and the growing independence of my daughter.

My sixth decade started with my daughter still in high school. The family enjoyed vacations - trying to see as many states as possible before she graduated. After she got her learner’s permit for driving, we made a big loop road trip from Maryland to Chicago. She handled a driving experience I had never encountered: a blown out tire on the freeway. I suppose a child learning to drive is a ‘white knuckle’ time for most parents. The only technology that might change the scenario in the future would be self-driving cars.

Visits to college campuses with my daughter were a vicarious treat. Being part of her decision making process helped my husband and I realize just how ready she was to be independent - not financially but in the way she took ownership for decisions about her future. She applied to 4 colleges and was accepted to all 4 - and went off to Cornell.

Some parents may suffer from ‘empty nest syndrome’ but I didn’t. I was still too busy with work and my daughter called us frequently enough (using time when she was walking some distance on campus) that we knew quite a few details about her college life. The advent of cell phones (and ‘plans’ that have unlimited minutes) have made a huge difference for families that want to communicate via telephone. Long distance used to be an expensive luxury. Now easy and inexpensive telephone calls are transitioning from a luxury (a ‘want’) to a need; it is coming close to being part of basic infrastructure in the developed world. They continued past her graduation from Cornell.

Pretty soon my daughter established a relationship with the young man she would marry before the end of my sixth decade. They were in the same dorm building and then apartment. When it came time for graduate school applications - they both applied to some of the same schools and decided to go to University of Arizona. As soon as they were financially independent (with graduate student funding), they got married. It seems that my daughter’s experience finding a life partner was very similar to my own; it happened early and marriage became the obvious choice very quickly.

Shortly after my daughter become financially independent it because obvious that I could retire and my husband phase down on his workload too. We both rekindled interests we’d left behind in our 20s: biology for me and astronomy for him. It took me a year to settle on some volunteer activities that were focused on areas I where I wanted to make a tangible difference in my community: Neighbor Ride to provide transportation to senior citizens and environmental education offered to students by the Howard Country Conservancy. I also realized just how much I enjoy being a student; the advent of Coursera was perfect for me.

Life’s Decades - The Fifth 10 Years

Today I am focused on the fifth decade of life. For me - it was mostly in the 1990s and included the melded joys of motherhood and career.

My career required long hours and some travel. Most of the time I could adjust the attention and time for the job to mesh with the needs of my family. There was always an underlying tension between the different aspects of my life but it didn’t seem to escalate to unhealthy levels of stress. I had decided to keep a journal when I first became pregnant in my fourth decade; the original motivation was to record what was happening to me…but a side benefit was that l inadvertently learned to ‘write it down, let stressful aspects go.’ In retrospect - journaling was a key part of my maintenance of well-bing in the most stressful time of my life: the fifth and sixth decades. I still do it (in my seventh decade now) but its primary importance is as a record of my life.

Do people always learn a lot from their children? I certainly did. When my daughter was in kindergarten and first grade, I realized that I was holding her to higher standard of learning than I was myself….and I made some changes. Being a linear thinker (inclination and education), I started using tools like mindmaps to change my pattern. I started reading a wider variety of books and taking notes. The growing content available through the Internet over the decade helped too. In the end, I don’t know that I ever did reach the delta that we expect of children as they learn to read, write and compute in their early school years. It is awesome how much they change in a few short years.

While every working mother probably experiences guilt from not being in the right place at the right time for some incident in her child’s life - the incidents where my daughter made her acceptance loud and clear stand out in my mind more. One such incident was when she was in first grade and there was a parent visit day in her classroom. I told her I was leaving work early to come home and change clothes to be dressed like the other moms rather than in my business suit by the time I arrived at her school (I was working for IBM and wearing a lot of dark blue suits/white shirts at the time). She told me to come in the suit! I did…and looked different than the other parents…but she was accepting (maybe even pleased) with the difference.

The decade seems like a blur of kite festivals, aquariums, museums, national parks, hikes, gardens, ice shows, and music lessons….there were times that we all decided a weekend at home was absolutely required. There were projects to. We finished our basement which was quite a learning experience for us all.

The activity level of my fifth decade was driven by having a child in my fourth decade. Women that have children earlier - or later - could have a different trajectory because of where they are in their career and their level of health. It surprises me to realize that I happened upon very good timing for me!

Life’s Decades - The Fourth 10 Years

Today I am focused on the fourth decade of life. For me - it was mostly in the 1980s and included moving half way across the country from my family for careers (mine and my husband’s) and having a child.

Moving away was wrenching but I was kept so busy - both by work and long commutes - that I didn’t have time to worry about it. Many in the family came for visits. There was a lot to see and our guest room was comfortable. The immediate family was computer savvy enough that we started exchanging email rather than snail mail before the decade was out. Telephone calls were still expensive.

I finally had time to read for pleasure and set a goal to read a book a week (and quickly discovered discount books stores and used book sales at the local library). Now most of my reading is ‘free’ and electronic either through internet resources or the public library. The majority of physical books I read are via paperbackswap…and then I donate the books to the used book sale.

The ten years of education (and ten years of work experience) set the stage for a very productive fourth decade. It included the most technical years of my career and then the step into management of people and projects. The semantic changed from management to leadership sometime during the decade but the core of the job didn’t. The career never was a “9 to 5, leave work at work” endeavor but the increasing responsibility and advances in technology meant that work was not as tied to a location. It happened at home too. The ‘always on call’ happened to me earlier because I was in a technical field. Now the technology is so pervasive that just about every professional feels the integration (sometimes forced) of all parts of life. I remember being incredibly grateful to my husband for buying  a laser printer for me rather than a bouquet of flowers as he had been doing during a particularly rough project. As a woman in a technical, very competitive field - I benefited from supportive family relationships.

When I had my daughter midway through my fourth decade, I took a year off before I returned to work full time and though that would slow down my career trajectory. It didn’t as much as I thought it would since I was promoted about 6 months after returning to work.

Looking back - having the same day care person for 3 years and then Montessori school for my daughter was better and less traumatic than many of my peers. It helped that my daughter was a happy child. We shorten her day away from us by using flex hours (they were new at the time); my husband would flex a bit later in the day to take her in the morning and I would flex earlier to pick her up in the afternoon. We managed to combine some business trips (either mine or my husband’s) with vacations. My daughter actually was puzzled that other children in her Montessori school did not go to Colorado like she did!

One serendipity event that occurred near the end of my fourth decade was on my daughter’s fourth birthday. I came home early to get ready and discovered a water pipe had broken! We got it turned off before too much damage occurred but the muddy path in the front yard that resulted from the repair was so much fun that my daughter often says it was her most memorable birthday ever.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 10, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Birding in the National Parks: Return of the Snowy Owls - It looks like this winter will be another one for seeing Snowy Owls in the northern states of the US! There were some sightings in Maryland last winter so I am hoping…

Did Venus Once Have Oceans of Liquid Carbon Dioxide? - Maybe the geological features on Venus (rift valleys, river-like beds, and plains) were may be liquid carbon dioxide rather than water like they are on Earth.

From the Feature Well - This is the summary of 2014 special issues from The Scientist. Looking back at them provides a good review of Biology issues and progress for the year.

The "Rule of 50" Helps You Know When to Give Up on a Book - How do you know when to quit reading a book? Usually I decide via scanning before I every start reading rather than determining ahead of time a number of pages I’ll read before deciding. I can’t remember the last time my scanning failed.

Monarch Butterflies May Soon Be an Endangered Species - The population has declined by 90% since the 1990s. It’s very sad. The agricultural changes in the mid-90s killed the milkweed (food plant for the caterpillars) at the edges of fields. Now there needs to be a concerted effort to increase the availability of milkweed.

The Most Amazing Meteorological and Space Observatories Ever Built - Beautiful and functional architecture from around the world.

Top Planning Trends – 2014 - A look at traffic data on Planetizen…popular tags overall and popular posts for each state. The most popular post for Maryland was about high-rise, mixed-use suburban developments.

Significant link between daily physical activity, vascular health - These type of studies come out frequently…with some nuance defined a little better than before. Hopefully no one is waiting for another study to transition some sedentary to active time every day. Now that I think about it - do these studies prompt people to become more active?

A Look Back at Our Most Popular Photos of 2014 - From the National Wildlife Federation. The very first one (a snowy owl) caught my attention.

National Park Service Launches Website Honoring 22 World Heritage Sites in the United States - Did you know that there are 22 World Heritage Sites (a UN designation) are in the US?  Most of them are National Parks…but now all. The list can be found here.

Life’s Decades - The Third 10 Years

Today I am focused on the third decade of life - typically the decade to finish a college degree and get started on a career. For me - it was mostly in the 1970s.

In my case it was done concurrently. I worked full time and went to school part time while my husband continued in school full time. It took me most of the decade to get an undergraduate degree in Biology and then a masters in Mathematics. I don’t remember reading for pleasure or watching very much television; there wasn’t any extra time. For a few years, my husband and I would meet for dinner so that we’d see each other during the week before late night!

The big pivot point in the decade was deciding to not continue in Biology for graduate school but to switch to Mathematics (Computer Science) which was the field I was working in for the whole decade. My employer paid most of the cost of the masters. Within a few months of my decision make a career in the computer field, we bought our first house.

We were on quite a budget the whole time. I made almost all my clothes and a good portion of my husband’s shirts; in those days it was a good way to save money. The flood of discount clothes from third world countries had not started yet. Sewing was no longer a money-saving endeavor by the next decade and is not a strategy to economize now.

Most of our vacations were between semesters or long weekends. We went camping in national (Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, and Grand Canyon) and state parks - cooking our own food over campfires. When we first started we simply took blankets and pillows and slept in the car! Sometime we had to share the space with a telescope. Foods were simple (hot dogs, cans of pork’n’beans, cookies) but later we got fancier (steak, corn on the cob, baked apples)….and all along there were s’mores. Later in the decade we acquired a tent, better sleeping bags, a Coleman stove and lantern. And we enjoyed canoeing on the Brazos and Guadalupe Rivers. Camping is still a viable way to vacation frugally and I’m sure there are people in the third decade of life that enjoy it still - but I realize that it has not kept up with population growth. Why is that?

Both of my grandfathers died while I was in my 20s while the grandmothers continued on. The grandfathers had both lived into their mid-70s. Demographic statistics tell us that people are living longer now but many people have their children later like I did. My daughter is in her 20s now and still has one grandfather (who is in his mid-80s); her husband only has one grandmother left and she is 90. What a boon of modernity in the developed world to have a high probability of grandparents living to see grandchildren reach to adulthood!

When I sum up my 3rd decade I think: 10 years for me to get a masters and, concurrently, start my career…and my husband to get a PhD. 

Life’s Decades - The Second 10 Years

Today I am focusing on the second decade of life. I think of it as the growing up decade. For me it spans the end of elementary school to the first years of college mostly in the 1960s; it also includes getting married near the end of the decade.

In the US the whole K-12 structure is still in place. The public schools I attended did not have air conditioning until my senior year. I assume that all schools in the hotter part of the country are air conditioned at this point. There are also more options in the classroom. The tools and resources available to teachers are dizzying to an outsider.

But even when I was in school there were experiments. I participated in an Up with People high school that traveled across the US during my junior year of high school. There were written evaluations rather than grades…and a musical show to perform several times a week. It was my first time away from home and probably the most perspective broadening year of life.

My senior year I was back home and in another experimental school - this time a public high school that was just opening that offered clusters of focused instruction. I spent three hours focused on biology and three hours learning to program (Fortran and Cobol) in the afternoon. I took an English course in-between the two.

There was also some self-paced learning although it was mostly in reading/comprehension and all paper based. Now computers make it easier to provide enriched and self-paced lessons on a wide variety of topics.

Is there a shifting of emphasis that has occurred over the years? The technology may push students toward faster pacing and shorter duration tasks. But maybe that is what is needed for their future work environments. I hope critical thinking is still underlying the other content.

I don’t remember a lot of teen age angst.

Part of it was my mother going back to college when I was in my teens and sharing her experiences with the family. That sharing resonated with me. It became a natural introduction to college life years before I went myself. A similar thing happened with my own daughter and myself when she was in her teens but focused on women in technical fields (like I was).

Being away from home during my junior year was another factor. Whatever chafing might have developed during that year had I been at home, didn’t have a chance. By the time I came back, I was mature enough to get along with both my parents.

But then came an unexpected pivot point. As soon as I started thinking about college in my middle teens I assumed I would wait to get married until after I finished. But I met the right person for me about mid-way through my senior year and we married a year later.

I used my computer skills to start a career to support us. He worked one semester and then became a full time student. I worked full time and went to school part time…but that story is better told in the next installment about the third decade.

Life’s Decades - The First 10 Years

Now that my life has spanned more than 6 decades - I’m thinking more about my own history (what was typical…what wasn’t) and how growing up has changes over the years. Today I am focused on the first decade of life which, for me, was mostly in the 1950s.

My earliest memory is of a shadow made by a Venetian blind on the wall of my bedroom. I don’t remember being frightened (although I’ve read that something frightening is usual for a first memory)…only the image. My mother thinks it was the first night in a new house when I was about 2 although she didn’t realize I was frightened. With the advent of baby monitors - do parents detect the frightening first memories of their children more often?

We did not have air conditioning at home until I was 4 or 5…and the schools were not air conditioned at all. It was very hot during the Texas summers! Strangely enough - I don’t remember melted crayons. When my daughter was growing up we had a couple of instances of melted crayons. Is air conditioning so pervasive that the crayons have a lower melting point now than they did 50 years ago?

There were lots of children in the neighborhood before I started school. There were swing sets and shady porches…popsicle trucks on hot afternoons (although Mom had made our own in the freezer most of the time) ....getting wet with sprinklers or in small pools. In the neighborhood where I live now, the density of children has always been less during the 20 years I’ve lived here and many are in day care during the day before they start school.

Kindergarten was in a local church basement - across from the public elementary school. Both were within walking distance. Dresses were the mainstay of my school wardrobe. I had enough clothes to last between laundry days…not extra. Jeans were not the norm although I don’t know whether it was a rule or just tradition. I don’t think I had a pair of jeans at all during my first decade. Now the clothes for elementary school children usually includes jeans…and lots of other fashions that was ‘too causal’ for school in the 1960s!

Probably everyone remembers some trauma they remember vividly from their first decade even though it might not have been all that import to their parents. For me it was falling down on the boundary between vinyl flooring and carpeting when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. The carpet nails did a multi-streaked scrape across my shin. It was not deep or gaping. It did not get infected. But - I picked off the scabs several times and still have the scars.

In fact - maybe a lot of ‘scars’ we carry along with us for the rest of our lives have an origin in the first decade of life. I must have been frightened by a dog very early - I don’t remember it - but I do remember having to learn to remain calm around them and I still don’t want a dog as a pet.

First Day Hike

It was a cold January 1 in our area of Maryland and my husband was just getting over a cold --- he didn’t want to hike. So I took a very short hike from a two lane road near us down to the Little Patuxent River. I want to try out my new monopod/hiking pole. It turned out to be a good idea since I managed to unscrew the bottom section completely!

All the leaves were brown and brittle. The sycamore leaves were still largely intact and quite large from the trees growing along the river.

I was not fast enough to photograph the great blue heron that was evidently fishing in the river when I arrived.  There were some deer that were on the opposite bank - white tails flashing by the time I saw them.

The places where the water was still enough were still frozen from the previous night’s temperature drop into the 20s.

I looked for shelf fungus on the downed logs but only saw tiny ones but this moss with sporophytes add some color to the otherwise drab colors of winter.

On the way home I stopped at the storm water pond in our neighborhood.

The stumps from a visit from a beaver a few years ago were still visible near the short - and punctuated the ice at the pond’s edge.

And a surprise from my daughter in Tucson - they had snow on January 1! She sent the pictures below.

Sustainability - Reusable Bags vs Single Use Plastic Bags

Single use plastic shopping bags are not part of a sustainable future. They:

• Are made from a non-renewable resource
• Can only be recycled if they are clean
• Do no biodegrade very rapidly
• Are hazards to wildlife - both on land and in water

Here is how I’m avoiding the single use plastic shopping bags completely.

Avoiding plastic shopping bags from grocery shopping has been a story of ongoing improvement for me. The first step was to remember the ‘bag-of-bags’ for the major grocery shopping trips. I’ve been doing that for a few years now.

Then I started carrying a thin fabric bag folded in a pocket of my purse and that enabled another reduction in the rate of plastic bag accumulation in my home over the past year or so. My husband started carrying a bag in his car but kept forgetting to take it into the store until we got one that was a brighter color that folded flat to fit in the pocket of the driver’s side door of his car. Now he uses his reusable bag the majority of the time.

Recently I started the next reduction in plastic bags: using reusable mesh bags for veggies (like the potatoes, sweet potatoes, and parsnips in the picture). In the past, all the reusable type bags I tried in the produce section were a failure because the labels from the scales would not stick to the material. Now I am used some large safety pins that I’ve had for over 20 years to hold the labels in place.

I know I’m making progress because it takes me a very long time to collect one small bag of plastic bags for recycling. Most of them are not shopping bags (they are bags from flyers/papers delivered to the driveway, bread wrappers, or plastic bags over boxes delivered to the doorstep on a rainy day).

Ultimately - my goal is to have no single use plastic shopping bags to take back to the grocery store for recycling…and I’m getting very close to that goal!