travel
aardvarchaeology | June 26, 2008Got up early this morning, six thirty, and slipped out for an hour's walk. The sun was already pretty high but still veiled in mist. I walked past vineyards and olive groves toward a farmhouse until yapping guard dogs made me turn on my heel, and then I left the road.
The area is heavily altered by agriculture, but still there is quite a lot of woodland and brush. I descended into the valley of a little stream, dodged bushes and a large spider web, and found water trickling at the bottom of a deep-cut little channel, like a ditch among the bushes. Stepping over, I entered untouched greenery.…
sciencewoman | June 24, 2008In a few days, I'm leaving Mystery City for a whole month. Wow, that's a long time. It's a trip combining visits to family with a workshop and some field work, and Minnow will be along for the whole incredible journey. Fish will be with us for a week and then he'll return home to care for the Princess Pup.
Needless to say, I've got a lot to get done before we go. In lieu of real content today, below the fold, I've got a partial to-do list for today. Maybe I'll update this as I proceed through the week, maybe not.
Set up bill pay to cover the household bills while I'm gone.
Fix the Endnote…
skookumchick | June 23, 2008This is another excerpt from our travel journal to Isle Royale. The first day is here; second day here; third day is here. Photos by me, text by my husband.
Wednesday May 28
Rock Harbour to Lookout Louise, and return
So let me digress to the future again. [What was going on again? Oh yeah.] I write today from the point of Raspberry Island, looking out over the big lake, having just practiced Alice and my Rule #1: everything tastes better outside. The writing is better outside too - a good view, a comfortable rock, and a warm sun to heat my toes, still a bit chilled from wading in the…
skookumchick | June 22, 2008I'm finally home from my two back-to-back conferences. I confess, somewhere in the middle of the 2nd conference, I just wanted to go home. But it was good to stick it out. Of course, the lack of Internets starting Friday morning through today wasn't great, but it means I have some session blogging still to do before I leave town again on Friday for my next conference trip. In the meantime, here are some photos of a few things that caught my fancy in Cincinnati.
The house looks okay, the plants haven't died, and I have my headache back. All in time for a busy day at work tomorrow. At…
omnibrain | June 18, 2008I haven't been blogging much lately... here's why:
There are some dirty pictures in this set (safe for work...don't worry) - can you spot the theme?
If you don't want to futz with this little widget feel free to check out the park pictures on my flickr site or some of the other great ones like Big Bend National Park, Russia, or Nepal.
skookumchick | June 13, 2008This is another excerpt from our travel journal to Isle Royale. The first day is here; second day here. Photos by me, text by my husband.
Tuesday May 27
Rock Harbour to Mt. Franklin and return
I write this on the night it actually happened [hah], with Alice slowly peeling the tape off her feet behind me. [What can I say? My boots tend to give me blisters. You know, perhaps I should edit these more to avoid the TMI factor...] We're both beat from a long hike today, but her foot tape was a success. Sore muscles, but no blisters. [Yay!]
We slept in this morning, I think mostly out of fear…
sciencewoman | June 12, 2008The view from a friend's house. If you look closely (or embiggen) there's a snow-capped peak in the background.
Early this morning, Minnow and I returned to Mystery City from a week-long trip to Utopia, land of my former inhabitance.The trip was a fully-integrated mixture of business and pleasure.
The ostensible purpose was a to write a paper from work that I did during my post-doc. Not a single word was actually written, though we certainly did work hard on refining (making more exciting?!) the project. I also got some materials to use for my new prep next semester and a chance to meet with…
skookumchick | June 10, 2008This is another excerpt from our travel journal to Isle Royale. The first day is here. Photos by me, text by my husband.
Monday May 26
Copper Harbour to Isle Royale
Writing is often a bit behind. [No kidding.] Today's entry starts on the day advertised, but I am under few illusions that I will finish before the light kicks out. The sun sets very late here on the extreme northwest edge of the US part of the Eastern time zone -- 9:45 pm and I'm still on natural light, streaming in through our large picture window overlooking Tobin Harbour. They definitely set up the cabins right, and also…
skookumchick | June 7, 2008Note: When we travel, we keep journals. My husband writes, and I take the photos; he skips the back of every page, and I put in photos. The next few posts from me will be from our journal of our trip to Isle Royale at the end of May. Note also that the "I"s are my husband, and the "Alice"s are me. :-)
Sunday May 25
Madison to Copper Harbour
The trip begins today, as we move from the real world into a few days of removal. We're up to getting away -- forgetting all of the issues and troubles of home. No thoughts this week of the job(s), the new job at Purdue for me (maybe) the impending…
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2008
After some culling and editing, I've put 74 snaps from my visit to Orkney on-line. Comments and questions are most welcome!
[More blog entries about orkney, photography, Scotland; Orkney, Skottland, foto, fotografi.]
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2008I'm in Kirkwall on the Orkney islands for a conference on maritime societies in the Viking and Medieval periods. It's a lovely sunny evening, which is apparently a rare and precious occurrence around these parts. The dialect is also something to experience: the waitress at the fish & chips shop I'm in took my order and then asked "Ta se' en?". On the third try I managed to understand that she wondered if I wanted to sit in, that is, to eat my fresh skate on the premises. I do.
And now I'm outside on the dock, smelling the sea, hearing a blackbird and the occasional seagull. Hardly any…
sciencewoman | May 13, 2008I'm in the airport about to board my plane. I'd forgotten how wonderful it can be to fly without a child. I'm looking forward to actually getting some work done on the flight rather than just trying to appease and entertain a squirming baby in a cramped middle seat. I think I may even have an aisle seat. Heaven!
But of course, I am tugged by a nagging feeling about leaving my baby behind. What if something happens to her while I'm away? What if her babysitter forgets to pick her up at daycare today? What if she won't take a bottle? (a likely scenario). What if she doesn't sleep at all?
My…
skookumchick | May 12, 2008Okay, so I've been keeping this under my hat for the last six-eight months, scared of jinxing things, but it's becoming arduous to keep hiding, so I'm sharing.
Purdue submitted a proposal in December for an NSF-ADVANCE institutional transformation grant - the purpose of these grants are to improve the lot for and of women in science and engineering academia, particularly faculty positions. I'm listed as a co-PI on Purdue's grant.
NSF hasn't awarded anything yet, so we are in official limbo, waiting for word. However, the waiting game has now bumped into the annual ADVANCE PI meeting,…
sciencewoman | May 9, 2008I'll be in Atlanta next Tuesday and Wednesday to help judge the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a collection of the brightest and most dedicated high school science students from around the world. I'll also be blogging about my experiences there (h/t PZ), so look for an uptick in posting next week.
There's still the opportunity to help judge the fair. Judges are still needed in lots of areas, because they try for a ~1:1 ratio of competitors to judges and there are >1500 finalists. It is a substantial committment: you need to register on Tuesday afternoon and then work all…
omnibrain | March 28, 2008charleston 001
Originally uploaded by jshiggins
Over spring break I headed down to Charleston, South Carolina for the week to enjoy some nice sunny weather and forget about school for a little while. What a beautiful and historic city! But it never ceases to surprise me how much some people continue to make fun of Yankees and hold onto their history - their horrible racist, sexist, bigoted history. One day while wandering through the open market looking at sweet grass baskets we stumbled on 'The Confederate Store' or whatever it was called. It had everything confederate, flags, money,…
aardvarchaeology | January 23, 2008
Took a walk around the local geocaches, ended up trapped for half an hour in a nightmarish retirement community. Endless identical white single-story houses with garages and immaculate lawns, the streets deserted in the baking January afternoon. I was half-expecting octogenarian Stepford wives to come hobbling after me with trays of synthetic cookies. Many of the houses appeared to belong to retired military men, there were a lot of star-spangled banners (not many people know that it actually got its name from a Jimi Hendrix tune!), and a memorial garden at one end of the grizzled ghetto…
aardvarchaeology | January 23, 2008
Descending toward Ft Lauderdale airport this morning, I was shocked by the expanse of suburban sprawl stretching to the horizon below me. A huge drained swamp, all flat, covered by an intricate pattern of canals and streets and plots with low single buildings, broken only by a few golf courses and one or two cluster of skyscrapers. And nothing in sight older than a few decades. I suddenly realised that the reason the cities in Sim City look so artificial is that they model actual American urban areas. Nothing in this area has arisen organically. Everything has been planned, block by block,…
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2008
I just popped out for a burger at Arbee's, and I chose a seat with a good view of the full moon riding high over a Shell gas station. On the wall of the station was a large luminescent white sign bearing the words "Build Your Life on Eternal Truths". Chapel Hill has a huge number of churches, most being very small and privately run by their pastors, so I guess what the Shell proprietor really means is "Make sure to follow a culturally sanctioned subset of the many commandments in the Bible". Or perhaps "Spend a lot of your time participating in church rituals and talking about Christian…
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2008
Above is a candid pic by Nathan L. Walls, showing yours truly at Saturday's hum & soc sci session. The teeshirt is from the Swedish Skeptics and reads "I am skeptical" in an obscure North-European language.
Yesterday's highlights were
An informal brunch with congressman Brad Miller, who came across as low-key, thoughtful and friendly, with a serious interest in science policy and gender equality issues. Few US politicians ever come across as half as trustworthy in the media. I wonder if I've ever actually talked to a Swedish congressman?
A sunlit 7 km walk into Chapel Hill along a six-…