Wildfire Weather

Years ago, I worked on a NASA RESAC project to study wildfire at the urban/wildland interface. I can instinctively feel wildfire weather coming on. See what I mean?

I write about wildfires often. Click on the Wildfire tag below to see all the posts.

the toughest period of your life?

Professors used to say that grad school should be the most intense and toughest experience in our lives. Umm, were any of them juggling kids, career and with a field scientist for a spouse? I don't think so. (A field scientist is someone who is out in the field and thus, not at home.)

Sudoku ate our household

We were blissfully ignorant about Sudoku until Sandra Tsing Loh's NPR piece about it. Why, oh why, didn't we turn off the radio? DH searched through the recycling bin for a puzzle and became hooked immediately; he has an obsessive personality. I looked over his shoulder and helped him fill out a few squares. Fast forward and our marriage suffers as he beats me to the LAT puzzle morning after morning.

For our anniversary, I bought him Will Shortz's Sudoko 2 and asked him not to write the solutions in the book. He saved the marriage by creating a printable blank Sudoko template.

Testing Blogger Photo

Just wanted to see if blogger automatically sizes the thumbnails for me. This is my daughter walking through a patch of desert gold in Death Valley NP last March. My husband outdid himself when composing this picture.

Here is the same daughter walking on the shores of the ancient dry lake Manly. It sure wasn't dry this March (2005). Yes, that is a kayaker, and there were 30 more out there that day along with a windsurfer and several canoers.

Moving

When I started this blog, I had intended to keep my fiber arts stuff on my sister's blog, Fiber Musings. But an unexpected event has caused my sister to take a hiatus from blogging. So my future fiber arts stuff will be shown right here. This is the kind of stuff you will see in the Fiber Musings archives.

Recurring Themes

I notice recurring themes in my reading material. Two years ago, I got into a globalization reading jag. I read the Lexus and the Olive Tree, Globalization and its Discontents and the Corrections. Last year, I read several one word titled books including Middlesex, Salt and Cod.

[My all-time favorite one word title book remains, Home; a short history of an idea. Witold Rybczynski remarked on page 160 that, when men wrote about home design, they were more concerned with comfort--the passive enjoyment of a home. When women wrote about home design, they were more concerned with workplace ergonomics!]

Lately, I have read two books told from the point of view of a woman contemplating divorce, How to be Good and The Wife. Then I started reading books about the Indian diaspora, Interpreter of Maladies and The Arranged Marriage. Do I see recurring themes because my english teachers trained me to look for them? Or am I unconsciously crafting syllabi when I choose my reading?