Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Calendar

    Everybody is cheap about different, weird things. I’m cheap about calendars. I balk at purchasing a calendar in December when one can be had half-price or better in January. I am the calendar-buyer in the house. Each year I pick up a few in January, one for the house, one for my husband’s work, one for my work…

    A couple of charities sent me tolerable calendars this year – the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, the Nature Conservancy – so the only calendar we needed was the one for my husband’s office. Well, I have been fooling around a lot with taking aerial photos while my husband enjoys his pilot’s license. And I have been posting some aerial and some candid photos onto Flickr.

    Flickr has all sorts of relationships with vendors who will happily slap your photos onto business cards, mugs, t-shirts, calendars, and whathaveyou. So I decided not to cheap out this year; I’d custom-make a flight calendar for my husband for Christmas.

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  • Wanderlust hangover

    We went to my former employer’s holiday party last night. Even though it has been two years since I worked there, my husband and I still go to catch up with the people and enjoy the celebrations.

    My old boss’ wife is a trained opera singer, and each year she brings in live music. She sings Christmas carols with the pianist and bassist in that rich voice of hers that finds you wherever you are at the party and invites you to join her. The food is spectacular, the drink plentiful, and the company whip-smart and funny.

    From pretty much everyone, I got the inevitable question, “so where are you working now?” and bemused surprise that I’m actually on my second place since I left, 1/year. I learned they’re again advertising my old job, and some of the wives asked me if I was thinking about returning. I hadn’t known, and I’m not, but, it was great to catch up and feel the warmth and affection of the very familiar group. Maybe it was the Christmas carols, those bittersweet songs of longing and hope for holiday perfection, or, maybe it was all the champagne they poured me, but I got nostalgic.

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  • Ethical food | Good food? | Economist.com

    Ever since we lived in England in 1996-7, we have maintained a subscription to the Economist magazine. We appreciate its international coverage and clever sense of humor. Its photo editors/photo caption writers get me laughing quite often–I still chuckle over the “Greetings, earthlings” cover of Kim Jong Il.

    Anyway, I typically disagree with their political and environmental perspectives, but somehow feel more informed and not quite so knee-jerk liberal by somewhat tolerantly reading them. This week’s opinion piece on organic, local, and fair trade foods got me thinking. Ethical food | Good food? | Economist.com and Food politics | Voting with your trolley | Economist.com

    They generally bashed organic farms for being more land-intensive than factory farms (demanding more habitat destruction), bashed people trying to save energy by eating locally with a finding that a great part of the petroleum/energy used in the food process is in local consumer transit, not shipping. The editorial argued that New Zealand lamb, even when counting transportation to Britain, requires less energy than British lamb (something about the agricultural practices, or maybe climate). In support of this contention, I did hear an NPR commentary about an Ann Arborite who was trying to “eat local” for Thanksgiving (no foods from more than 100 mile radius of his home), and in fact he did end up doing a lot more driving than usual (including driving to Windsor to purchase salt mined under Windsor/Detroit).

    The opinion piece basically said, if buying this way makes you feel good, great, but don’t confuse “voting with dollars” with actual voting and political activism. Shoot, now I actually have to go stand with the crazies on the corner and not just hide out at the fancy grocery stores.

  • Good examples

    We just got back from Indianapolis where we visited with my in-laws and my grandparents-in-law. Both of my husband’s grandmothers have had some form of Alzheimer’s Disease. With his late grandmother Olympia, it progressed from repeating the same stories over and over, to forgetting which language she was speaking, to a wordless confusion. His grandmother Jane has exhibited a similar disorientation and repetition of stories. She’s not always sure who we are, but she still follows along as we chatter and makes her famous sarcastic comments.

    As Grandma Jane gets in her funny barbs about how cheap her husband is and how long winded and boring we are, we laugh. At brunch, as her husband helped her finish her meal, she commented he only helped her because he didn’t want to pay for an additional plate of food for himself. Dave’s grandfather looked at her and laughed, and then he looked at me and said “I think she’s cute.” He’s losing her and caring for her all at the same time, and it is heartbreaking, and they’re still laughing.

    My mother-in-law asked Dave’s grandfather “when I’m in this state, do you think your son will take as good care of me as you take of Jane? As good care of me as my dad of my mom?”

    Of course he will, he’s had such terrific examples.

  • Colleagues

    So, a week ago already, I met two friends/former colleagues for coffee/tea. I joke that we’re all refugees, having left the same place when it had very little work. The three of us caught up on our current situations, shared a few successes, and commiserated over challenges. It was great: it helped me gain some perspective on what had been a challenging week at work, on the old place, and the transitions we had all made.

    Two of the three of us are on long-term contracts ending in December. I remember my own uncertainty last December, while there’s a part of me that misses that feeling of potential and that feeling of freedom, a larger part is relieved not to be revisiting that particular set of anxieties.

    Two of the three of us are maintaining some relationship with the old place. One is a current client, and I was fascinated to hear about life on the other side.

    None of us expressed regret about having left that particular set of problems

    • not enough work
    • no path for advancement/growth if there was work (cog mentality)
    • non-scalability of certain essential pieces of the process/team (we were all interchangeable and replaceable except for those that weren’t….)

    for our new problem sets, variously

    • insufficient process maturity
    • too much work/too little time
    • unrealistic expectations

    It’s not as if there are fewer challenges now, but I think that, at least for me, the new set is more palatable. Why is this? The only thing I can think of is that we each in our own way have a bit more agency in these new situations, and that we’re growing and learning different things, so it feels better.

    Anyway, it was great to catch up and feel the support and understanding of old friends.

  • Dead Composers

    So, on a lark I attended the Dead Composers Society event on Saturday evening. It was dinner at Cottage Inn followed by tickets to the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra‘s concert at the Michigan Theater. Husband was otherwise committed so I went solo. And though I’d planned to meet a friend there, I saw only strangers when I entered the downstairs banquet room at Cottage Inn. (Gulp, flee!!)

    Happily for me, the strangers were quite friendly and not unusually strange, and there was a non-goofy ice-breaker that got the tables talking and got folks mixing, so by the time my friend Dara arrived, I was doing just fine.

    I am embarassed to say that before Saturday morning, I had no idea that Ann Arbor had a professional orchestra. The program was interesting–the first piece was a world premiere composed by a current UM music student, two of the other three were by actual dead composers (Beetoven, Gershwin), the last was by another living one (Peter Maxwell-Davies). The bagpipes in the Maxwell-Davies piece were affecting (first time bagpipes have ever made me tear up, ever), perhaps some of it was just the surprise of them coming from the back of the Theater. Overall a nice evening, and nice folks.

    Anyway, I have twisted Dave’s arm hard enough that he’s coming with me to the next items in the series. The more the merrier if anyone else wants to join. The next one is January. Let me know if I should arrange additional tix.