end of August update

Life continues to be rich and full around here.  Once again, my weekend was jam-packed with excitement, and so once again, this update is a tad later than usual.  

My guy is off in Europe for about a month.   As a PR guy, he really knows how to hype a place, and so I can understand if this description makes you want to jump on a plane and fly across the ocean yourself:

Lisbon:

Clean, beautiful subway station. Clean subway with cork seats.

In other family news, I just got a beautiful picture of my newest grandchild.  Kinderling writes, 

We were able to catch baby opening her eyes. The doctor was concerned because they were finding increased complications in development with women who had covid during pregnancy, but he saw no problems, and we don't have to return. Yay!

3d ultrasounds are wild and I wanted to share. Pic of baby's face (opening her eyes- upper left) ”

For me, the highlight of the previous week came Friday afternoon, when we had a party to celebrate my new endowed chair-ship.   We designed the party to emphasize fun, listing these rules on the invitation:

1. If you talk about a person [including yourself], it must be about how awesome they are.

2. If you say awesome things about 'Snough (which is way too easy), you must also say awesome things about two other people. They need not be present.

3. If you can’t think of any awesomeness, you may talk about (a) math, (b) books, and/or (c) chairs.

4. Before we cut the cake, we will all sing the chair song. Together. Lip-synching is allowed. 

As you might guess from my resigning my Associate Dean job and heading back into the faculty for another year or so, there could have been lots of griping and gossip, but people took the rules to heart and the event was really peppy and happy -- we got to celebrate being together with people who bring us joy and happiness.  

My friends went all-out in decorating the math department; it was gorgeous and cheerful. 

Rice Crispy Seats.

Jelly beanbag chair.

My beautiful chair cake!

Everyone singing the chair song.
As you do.

That was a great way to close out the summer and get ready for a new year.  The next day, Saturday, the new students showed up on campus, and as a House Don, I spent the weekend in a variety of fun (and sometimes mysterious!) welcoming ceremonies.  The new students are lots of fun to be around, and it's good to be around so much energy, where I feel like I can be of use and encouragement.  

So that's (some of) the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

I'm being swallowed by a dinosaur

I've been traveling a bunch, and consequently my schedule is all out of whack.  Here's me getting swallowed by lots of good stuff, and trying to catch back up . . .  

National Geographic has been sending me lots of pictures of Utah, which feels surreal, because that's actually where I've been, hanging out with my family (my "upper family": dad and sisters and such, although also a few of my "lower family": children).  

The beauty of the landscape in Utah is surreal and amazing.

My granddaughter is an amazingly fearless hiker.

My sister is also a great hiker,
and strong enough to carry grandnieces just for fun.

Even the little arches were fun to look through!

It was so good to hang out with (some of) my daughters and my sisters.
I love walking around with other people, and these are really good people for me to be with.

Inkling went from Utah to Washington state, where she (and her sock) encountered quite different creatures than dinosaurs.

At the Mermaid Museum

Dipping into the Pacific Ocean

Now that I'm back home, the upcoming semester is doing the avalanche thing, in which I keep numbering things on my to-do list from 1 through 11 or 12, but getting only to number 2 or 3 because of new stuff and long meetings dumping themselves into my schedule.   I have to admit that I do love being back with students, even though I thought I'd given that up, so I'm going to try to make the most of this, my last year [once again] in the classroom.

Back to work now . . . 

Bug stories (but not mine)

 Catching up with my sisters this past week, while we've been on vacation together, has been a blast.  

My youngest sister told us about her latest adventures with carpet beetles in her home in San Diego.  The irony is that the infestation happened months after they'd removed all carpet from the home.  At first she couldn't tell what these creatures were, or even that they were creatures -- she says they were flea-sized specks of dirt that moved around a bunch. 

Everything she read on line said that you could eradicate them by vacuuming regularly, and so she did, every single day, for weeks and weeks.  And still, the bugs didn't disappear.  The online advice said that you really needed to get rid of the nest, but eventually she realized that the trail of carpet beetles led to a particular crack between the baseboard and the floor; the beetles were in her walls, and who knew how to get at the nest, wherever it might be there?

So, for weeks, daily vacuuming.  

Then came a hard rain, rare in San Diego, of course.  As often happened after a hard rain there, she got ants in the house soon after.  Double pestilence!   Even worse, she eventually noticed that the ants were using the same crack, following the same trail as the beetles.   She figured she'd have to eliminate both.  

But another quick foray online alerted her to the fact that ants and carpet beetles are antagonists.  The ants weren't finding a new home; rather, they had just discovered their new favorite restaurant.  After weeks and weeks of daily vacuuming with no effect, the carpet beetles disappeared entirely within two days of the ants' arrival.  

We've since learned that this approach is called "integrated pest management".  Go, Mama Nature!

More motorcycles, less hair

 Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  Or, perhaps this week I should say rich and empty, since there are three things I usually have a lot of, but that I had much less of this week:

1. Heat and humidity. The weather broke and the temperature in the house is now 15 degrees cooler than at the beginning of the week.
2. Exercise buddies.  Every single one of my running and biking friends went AWOL on me this week, and so I didn't run or bike even once.  This is, like, a new PR for me, in a backwards sort of way.  
3. My hair.  I finally had enough of it hanging around my neck and going all wispy/fried around my ears, so I took the trimmers and my sewing scissors into the bathroom with me, and I emerged a shorn woman. 

I warned several of my children, but not all of them.  Apologies to all the kiddoes I blindsided.  Neslon was one of these.  After he recovered from his shock (with the help of his siblings), Nelson pinged me, to say:  "Got to take some pictures with some of the performers last night at a concert metro Hope put on". 

I wonder if they need a drummer?

I don't often get to see a ballgame, and this week I didn't get to see one again, although this week I didn't see a ballgame in a much more active fashion.  Inkling had tickets to a game and invited me, but a late afternoon shower left the field so soggy that the 6:30 start -- which we showed up for -- was delayed quietly to 7:30.  We did get to see the players warming up, which was lots of fun, and then we saw dark clouds roll in, and then we got out our umbrellas and walked home.  It was one of the more enjoyable ways to not see a game (although I would have been happy to see it, had it actually happened).  

Ofsnough has moved from packing little IFAKs (Individual First Aid Kits) to packing large medic kits that are so heavy he can't move them.  He got a haircut, too, but it wasn't as dramatic a change.

Sizzling has been touring up and down the East Coast, and so she got to visit my sister-in-law, who sent me an email with the subject line, "Family news letter", and containing this update:  "Inkling's and K’s peregrination brought them through North Conway, NH.  We were able to spend some quality time together and enjoy a nice dinner, good conversation …and desserts. "

Looks sweet and sweeter!

Sizzling and her fiancé visited here briefly, also, and we got photos of them on their motorcycle that has a larger engine than our Prius.  

My own motorcycle -- or rather, the motorcycle that I helped Xavier buy in Haiti -- has a smaller engine, but I love it anyway, because I'm hoping this will help him support himself and his mom.  Cross fingers!  

It's been a long, long time since I've heard from Jason.  The last time I spoke with him, he was deep in existential quandaries, trying to figure out the meaning of life in general and of his life in particular.  He'd been thinking about moving, or about taking up boxing again, or both.  I've reached out once or twice since then, leaving messages and encouragement.  Last night, he finally left a message on OfSnough's Facebook page.  Rather than summarize what he wrote, I'll just reproduce his update in its entirety.  He wrote,

Yo

So, that's the news from Jason.  

And, in fact, that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous, yo.

A testimony

I don't talk much about my faith in this blog.  It's really important to me, but I have a twitchy aversion to speaking out loud about it.  I don't expect either of those things will change any time soon.  Still, two weeks ago, in church, I shared a bit about how I came to faith.  Since I had to write out my testimony in advance, I have it written up, and figured I might plop it in here.  I changed the names, because [anonymous], but here it is.

***

I was raised in a loving atheist family. My dad was a nuclear physicist, and my mom a solar astrophysicist who worked at NASA. They believed in a life and values bigger than themselves; our home was open to neighbors and visitors from other countries; our parents regularly led giant Girl Scout camping trips; volunteered with our summer swim league,  the PTA, and our neighborhood civic association. They had both been raised in faith traditions, but had gradually drifted away.  It wasn’t so much that they actively opposed a faith in God (in fact, my dad, at 86 years old, is only now looking to re-home his  81-book collection of Anchor Bible Commentaries and Reference); it’s just that an active faith in God never seemed to be particularly relevant or necessary to our lives.  

My main exposure to church as I was growing up came through my best friends, the Smiths, whose family lived a very different kind of life.  They followed strict, old-fashioned rules:  girls wore dresses to school and had hair down to their waists; the boys, even in the 1970s, had crew cuts.  Mrs. Smith had taught elementary school until her first child was born; she once tried to volunteer with our Girl Scout troop, but had to give that up when that meant that she couldn’t have dinner on the table by the time “Daddy” came home. Their home was a whirlwind of unfinished projects, with the 700 Club on the television as we played.  Mrs. Smith was frequently losing things in the clutter of the house, and it was common for her to call all of the children into the living room where we would hold hands in a circle as she would pray “dear Jesus, please help me find the car keys.” And when she did eventually find them, she would whoop delighted hallelujahs; a miracle had occurred, yet again.  On Sundays, I’d sometimes join the other Smith kids in the back of the pick-up truck as the family headed to church.  I loved the exuberance of the household, and I knew enough Christians to know that the rules that hemmed my best friend in weren’t a necessary part of the faith package.   But the older I got, the more it seemed to me that Jesus was a crutch for the superstitious.

Fast forward past college, and then graduate school, a marriage, a child, an amicable divorce, and my first job.   Through all of this, I was what I might call “faith curious”, but never in a serious way.  My life was good, and I already had pretty much everything I thought I wanted.

And then came OfSnough.  I was a single mom;  he’d been one of the few to reach out and offer childcare help. He took my young daughter to church on Sunday mornings so that I could actually sleep in one day a week.  That was a Godsend, in many senses of that word.  OfSnough told me he wanted to marry me, which immediately freaked out many of my friends and family.  They warned me, “He’s going to try to convert you!”  My sister was so concerned that she drove seven hours to check on me; she told me her therapist reassured her that “Snough sounds like she’s too happy for counseling.”  As for me, I was faced with this thorny question that I couldn’t wrap my head around: OfSnough seemed like an intelligent person, who cared for the life of the intellect.  How could a person who seemed so rational actually believe something that seemed so irrational?  

I talked to a friend of mine who is both an astronomer and a Christian. I read a bunch of books including Fraser and Campolo’s “Sociology through the eyes of faith”. I went to church to meet his friends, and it reminded me of how much fun I’d had hanging out with the Smiths. OfSnough and I married, I got tenure, and we set out to adopt what we thought it would be a young sibling pair, but what turned out to be an infant, born in late November, who at the age of six weeks moved into our house.  We heard about the baby Nelson on December 23, and he moved into our home on January 4: I called it, my 10-day pregnancy. 

And then some time, in the middle of one night in the epiphany season, rocking this child on my lap with the Christmas lights the only light in the room, this baby boy who was not my child and yet who was my child, I believed.  I can’t explain it more than that.

I did not come to faith in Christ as some do, out of a sense of desperate need for him.  I already believed I was doing fine as it was.  In fact, when Jesus accuses the crowds of following him only because they want the bread or the miracles, sometimes I reflect that my own besetting sin is that what I really want is for Jesus to point me out and say, “hey, y’all.  That one there; she’s doing it right”.  I know -- and I claim I know --  I’m a sinner in need of a savior, but if you squeeze me too hard the attitude that comes out is “I’m a paragon of virtue, and it’s fine if Jesus wants to come along for the ride.” 

My moments of deepest faith have not, then, come from the times that He has lifted me up out of trouble.  It’s the times I’ve gotten knocked down enough to realize my utter dependence on him.  A flat tire during an IronMan.  A series of huge bills coming in, followed by even bigger bills.  The week in 2013 that my whole family still calls “The Horrible week”.  In those times, He has reminded me that I am not invincible . . . but that He is. 

 It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it, that Jesus would even want to hang out with me, and even more amazing that he could find a way past the shiny mirrored walls that I thought were the fortress  of my soul.  It’s why the ending Psalm 51 means so much to me.  

God, my sacrifice is a broken spirit;

You, God, will not despise a chastened heart.

Painting the shark

When I retire, I want to be a rubbish rescue artist. At least, that's what I told my husband a week or so ago. I walk down the city streets or run through the suburban neighborhoods on trash days, and I see too, too much interesting stuff at the curb headed unnecessarily for the landfills. It's not just that people are throwing perfectly good, useful and serviceable objects "away", although they do that, too; it's that so much of the broken (?) stuff that people put out seems to be things that I think deserve be reincarnated in fabulous ways. The dining room table with one broken leg that was exactly -- I mean exactly – the amount of lumber that I needed for a set of bookshelves in my command center: that is just one such example.

Maybe I won't actually become a rubbish rescue artist, but the act of declaring that particular aspiration out loud has made me a little bit bolder about snagging things from the side of the road (and frankly, I was fairly bold before this). That is probably why, this past Monday, I was painting a shark at 3:14.

Great white terror of the deep?

This is a shark that had toiled away much of its life decorating somebody's aquarium, and was now sitting curbside. The shark is missing a lower jaw, and much of the paint had dissolved away. It just so happens that I've been thinking ahead to our annual Pirate Dinner, and I figured a shark would be an excellent decoration near the cake, so I rescued the lower-jaw-less shark, ran it through the dishwasher, and decided to paint it again.

Because this particular shark has retired from its aquarium job and has decided never to go back to work in the tank ever again, I'm not particularly worried about underwater durability of the paint.  So at first, I used some blue paint left over from a furniture project, since that seems to match the shark's original color. But after I put on the first coat, I realized that I think of sharks as "gray", so I nabbed an adorable, tiny little jam jar, and combined some left-over gray paint with a bit of blue paint to mix up my very own batch of shark paint.

My teensy jar of shark paint.  

I think it came out really well!   A bit of black permanent marker for the eyes, and the shark looks sleek and menacing.

Also, if it's on a table so that you're looking down toward this ferocious creature, it's not so obvious that the shark is missing a jaw.  

That makes this particular shark much safer from the point of view of the pirates, I guess!

Rocky and Harry and the famous guy

Life continues to be rich and full in Enoughsville. 

I've had the joy of being in touch with several young men who are dear to me this week, starting with a fabulous Harry Potter birthday party hosted by my six-year-old dog park buddy, G. (Apparently, HP turned 42 last Sunday?) The party was highly multigenerational, with a bunch of people my age doing research that allowed us to pretend we knew what we were doing -- a friend of mine, for example, took a younger colleague out for a beer to ask about what to bring, and was advised to bring round chocolates with golden wings and call them "snitches". I had quite a few jars of peaches, and I was advised that HP drinks pumpkin juice, so I brought pumpkin juice made with no pumpkins but instead with peaches. (Well, I tried).  We also had out-in-the-open conversations about the ethics of celebrating one part of a person's ouvre when another part of their public speaking is problematic; it was good to have those conversations together, too).  

Yummy pretzel wand.  (Is that in the book?)
Lots of fun wearing a robe and scarf in 90-degree weather!

I also got to have some good telephone chats with Nelson, who asked me to share what he's up to in this family letter.  He's had a few up-and-down adventures, and so he's quite proud that he made his own arrangements to check into Metro Hope.  He's very happy there; it's a Christian-based organization where he's taking two classes a day, attending devotionals and vespers, and is working in the kitchen.  He's made a lot of friends, he says, and working on keeping his diabetes under control. In about a month, he'll have surgery to remove a cyst on the back of his neck; it's large and ewwwwy enough that he'll go under general anesthesia, but apparently not so scary that the surgery is scheduled immediately.  

And Xavier is getting ready to buy a motorcycle (cross fingers) that will allow him to earn money (cross fingers) by giving other people in his town in Haiti rides.  This will be the first time I bought a motorcycle, even by proxy, and I'm very excited. 

Gosling made my frugal heart proud by making signs (very funny signs with pop-culture references) for her church yard sale, which ended up raising $624 for the church.  Way to go, Gosling!

For example.

Inkling says, "I finished a shawl! (Which I will wear in a few months when it actually gets cold enough)".

Sizzling is on the road, attending a wedding in a nearby state, and rumor has it that I might get to see her tomorrow.  Yesssss!

Ofsnough spent much of the week packing up these kinds of things to send to Ukraine.

Chest seal kits, scissors, and (?) slings, I think.

Tourniquets, ace bandages, and gauze.  

Those things get bundled together into "IFAKs", in which the "F" is not an army "F"ing word, but rather these are Individual First Aid Kits:

His group has made nearly 90,000 of these.

And me?  I went to Philadelphia for MathFest, which is the most wonderful math meeting of the year, and this year was especially heartwarming.  From my hotel room, I had a lovely view of William Penn in his famous hat.

He's standing astride Independence Hall,
bits of which I could see from my room.

I got to give a minicourse, and to go to a bunch of amazing talks, to meet up with some of my best friends (who are also mathematicians), and to meet people who could become new friends.  

I have a long-standing (long-running?) tradition of going for a run with the Membership Director.  This year, we did a short run.

Him:  How does a 5k sound for tomorrow (up to the art museum and back)? 

Me:  Sounds great!   My friends and I have a run that we call the "Goat Run" (because one of the houses we pass used to have goats in the yard).  We end the run by running up the 3 stairs of Old Main on my campus, and I always sing the Rocky theme song.  So I feel like this will be a good run for me to tell my friends about.  Maybe I'll run up the stairs and sing.

Him: I’m thinking I should alert local media.

And so, that's what we did.  But no local media.

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.  

Walking from one building to another at 3:14

To prove that I haven't entirely given up on observing the moment at 3:14: last Thursday, I was walking back from a meeting with my students to my new office.  Here's a photo.

Looking up

The weather is hot enough that I often choose my walking route based on trees. This is the view looking up from the middle of that particular walk, looking into the canopy of some sycamore trees. Likewise, the bark of the Sycamore tree never fails to captivate me.



I have a friend and colleague who is a birdwatcher; about 20 years ago, I decided that instead, I would be a tree watcher. It's much easier to come back to the same tree an hour or even several days later to try to identify it. I got a little field guide book that I carried around with me regularly so that I could get to know the names of the trees that I passed. It was a lovely way to turn the ordinary into the surprising – an example of we don't know what it is that we don't know.





Billy Collins describes this wonder of discovery in a poem called  What I learned today.  Here's a snippet:

Of course I know what flannel is,

but that French flannel is napped only on one side

Is new to me and a reminder that

no matter what the size the aquarium of one's learning,

Another colored pebble can always be dropped in.

Love you sew much?

My young friend G is starting to get a bit bored of the dog park.  (Like many of the people in my life, G has an amazing ability to focus on whatever catches our attention at the moment, which translates into restlessness with things that had held our attention a week, day, or hours ago.) 

I myself would love to have G continue to relish the dog park, if for no other reason than there are not a lot of things for a wild child to disarrange there.  Ditto for the playground.  But what I myself would love and what G actually feels can be two different things, and so I am doing my best to find ways to love this kid where they're at.  I'll have to find a way to bring novelty to the dog park/playground in future weeks, but I've also started following the widely-swinging spotlight of temporary focus.

Here's where it led us a few weeks ago: sewing lessons. G had made a flag to celebrate Harry Potter's birthday:  the flag was fabric held together with tape.  I suggested that we might actually have a sewing lesson, which G immediately fixated on (of course! who wouldn't want to sew?). 

So we trundled off to my house.

I let G take the lead on design, within a range of options that was limited only by my stash of scrap fabrics.  G wanted a heart, not red.   I snipped a heart out of fabric from an old seat cover and helped G pin it to some navy blue fabric that used to be a pair of school uniform pants.  Pins are not easy to use, G discovered, but the pin cushion itself offers a range of creative quests.  This, I remembered from many, many kids "sewing" with me:  rearranging pins in a pin cushion is a mesmerizing activity.

When it came to actually sewing things together, the part of the machine that G was fixated on was the pedal: there seemed to be nothing more intriguing in life than stomping on the pedal, and could we please, please do that?  

(For those who do not sew, please note that stomping on the pedal as hard as you can does not usually lead to excellent sewing outcomes, however emotionally satisfying it might be in the moment).  

Fortunately, I could share with G the secrets that there are other awesome parts of the sewing machine over which a young person, sitting on my lap and not stomping on the pedal, could have control.  

• There is the wheel on the side that we use to turn the needle down into the fabric before starting, or when preparing to turn a corner, and that we use to turn the needle up out of the fabric at the end.  
• There is the presser foot, with its secret lever hiding under the belly of the machine, that needs to go down, and then come up.  
• There is the . . . okay, I don't know what it's actually called, because my family calls it the "Loch Ness Monster" . . . the thread guide that bobs up and down to maintain tension on the upper thread, and that needs to be up and visible before we cut threads.  
• There is the fabric itself, that we guide through the sewing process, with our fingers gently on it like it's a ouija board.

G very much liked adding the heart to the fabric, and we agreed that in the future we'd turn this into a bean bag (I happen to have a bunch of cherry pits from this year's cherry picking/pitting, ready for such a purpose).   The week after we added the heart, we used my newer, fancy machine, to add words to the design.  But G's focus had already shifted from sewing to our train tracks, so I'm guessing that sewing lessons have lost their luster already.  

Which is, frankly, a tiny bit of a relief.  I'm figuring if I offer to take action photos, I can encourage G to re-engage long enough to help finish the project together, but then we can move along to other momentary obsessions and adventures. Phew!