To Vienna I write this while sitting on a plane flying just south of Ottawa. We are early in the flight. We departed Toronto a little behind schedule and will land in Vienna, Austria around 08:30 local time tomorrow. The in-flight meal has not been served, and we are in […]
Journal
50 posts
When I step outside, it’s 81F and humid. 10am on a Sunday morning in July in Texas is brutal. It doesn’t matter to me. I need some variety in my workout routine, and I need to go outside and run. I set out west. I avoid people on the narrow […]
“Don’t forget your mask.” I haven’t been in a place where people are actually expected to gather since March 6. I have so much to remember as I re-enter the world. I have to remember to get all my keys. Where are all my keys? My car keys are on […]
We are taking our home garden a bit more seriously this year. The pandemic, and poor health practices by shoppers at the local grocery store, have made it more important to offset time spent in the aisles by planting at home. If C-day was the day Texas’ leadership abandoned its […]
One of my daily activities in the last 20 days (or so) has been to scoop up the COVID-19 case and death data for my county from the Texas Department of Health’s (DSHS) information center [1]. I’m not an epidemiologist; I’m a physicist. I’m not trying to make predictions; I’m […]
I found myself recently standing on the shores of Lake Michigan, reflecting on the connections between these human spaces and the most vast spaces of the cosmic shores. The lighthouse on Cana Island in Door County, Wisconsin stands on the shores of Lake Michigan. At a height of 87 feet, […]
By the end of 2016, I was running 10 miles at my longest stretch. Then I injured my hamstring. Then 2017 came. I was on sabbatical, which sounds like “academic vacation” but isn’t. My exercise schedule was disrupted. My teaching schedule in the fall of 2017 was a mess that […]
Bombogenesis. Noreaster. Bomb cyclone. Polar vortex. These are none of the words you can use to describe the first day of our return trip to Texas. After a wonderful 5 days of play and rest wtlith family in northern Wisconsin, Jodi and I loaded up the car with bags and […]
This weekend is drawing to a close. I write this not from Dallas, where Jodi and I finally returned home 2 weeks ago after a brief (and originally unplanned) vacation in Wisconsin, but from the SMU campus in Taos, NM. It is Sunday morning. The past week – the first […]
The first half of the summer was packed with a bunch of stuff, including a busy travel schedule followed by the death of a beloved pet. The second half of the summer has been a little bit more sane, involving more focused travel followed by a break in work-related travel […]
There has been too much happening this summer to stop and write about it. Instead, here are scenes and some short verses describing this summer so far. Needless to say, if there wasn’t even time to write… it was one heck of a ride.
This week Jodi and I left for Washington D.C. on Monday for an event at the Canadian Embassy on Tuesday night. She had been invited to attend an evening celebrating science in Canada, especially Nobel Prize-winner Art McDonald and projects at SNOLAB, that nation’s premiere underground science facility. In addition, […]