Small World Images

I have posted some amazing images on my blog that come from the NikonSmallWorld site. They host an annual photomicrography competition of photos taken with the aid of a light microscope. Every day they post an image of the day. This link takes you to the gallery.

This image below is a "Brainbow" transgenic mouse hippocampus taken by Dr. Tamily Weissman at Harvard University in 2008.


The image below is a "Brainbow" mouse brain stem with auditory pathway axons taken by Dr. Jean Livet from Institut de la Vision in 2008.


The image below is of the wing scales of Urania riphaeus (Sunset moth), taken by Charles Krebs of Charles Krebs Photography in 2008.


Below are Discus fish scales, taken by Dr. Havi Sarfaty from the Israel Veterinary Association in 2009.


This next one is a flow pattern in draining soap film, taken by Dr. Tsutomu Seimiya at Tokyo Metropolitan University in 2009.


There are many more astonishing photos; go take a look!

Looking for Leaves

We are now halfway through a fourth consecutive month of rain. Last month, there was more rainfall in the first three days of September than the usual average for the entire month. People who have lived here for thirty or forty years say that they cannot ever recall another summer as rainy as this one. "Consequence of global warming," mutters my friend Robert.

Today around mid-afternoon, the clouds lifted a little and it brightened up. No actual sunshine, mind you -- just high cloud cover and diffuse light. Time for a walk, or, "the W-thing," as I said in front of the dogs in a vain attempt reduce their pre-walk frenzy.

So off we went, the dogs and I. For the first block, Kate ran in tight circles barking repeatedly in a high-pitched piercing manner, and Sophie chased her trying to bite her. The usual, in other words.

Once the dogs settled down, I had time to notice the brilliant fall leaves: yellow of the poplar trees, ranging from cadmium yellow light to cadmium medium, and maple leaves in red, scarlet, and yellow. The big yellow maple leaves reminded me of my annual childhood fall endeavour. I used to go out and collect autumn leaves, the most colourful, unblemished ones that I could find, then bring them home and iron them between sheets of wax paper. Do children still do this?

Perhaps I thought I could keep the leaves forever, preserved this way. Somehow I could stop time and freeze their beauty.

Of course those tattered little squares of wax paper are long gone. Now I am walking down the hill on the other side of middle age.

But when I look at the profusion of autumn's colours, my eyes sharpen as I enthusiastically scan the bushes to either side of the rutted track, looking for the loveliest, least blemished leaves. Turns out, it wasn't the collecting or preserving of the leaves that was most important; it was the looking.

Visual Gifts from the Natural World

I was over at Robot Nine tonight, and I wanted to share a couple of lovely images from that website. Their catch phrase is: "Funny Stuff! Daily Updates!" They do post lots of humorous images, but they also feature images that are powerful and offbeat examples of visual art.




This first image is called Cracked River Stones. It was posted today, September 27. Those of you who read my earlier post about river stones might remember why I am drawn to this photo. I like the way the artist has used chalk on the stones to enhance the spiral, calling to mind the chambered nautilus, the garden snail, and the human cochlea.






This next image was posted September 19 and is called Soap Bubble in Mid Burst. This one pleases me because of the way it has frozen the action, allowing us to see the bubble in a way that we usually cannot. Bubbles are there, and then they are not, and this is one of the things that fascinates us about them. This image is existential. It is about time. And it is about the moment of transition, something I wrote about previously in Rolling Balls of Mercury.





This third and last image, 1.3 Million Birds speaks for itself. This one was published on Robot Nine on September 8. What I see in nature never ceases to fill me with awe. Our little human attempts at creativity and building our world seem so piddling in contrast. Just look at all those birds!

Groceries and the Empty Nest

Three weeks ago, Rob and I took my youngest off to university. We got him all moved into residence, did a major grocery shop at the supermarket nearest to the campus so that he would be well-provisioned for at least a week or two, went out for a special family dinner, and then waved good-bye. Until Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving seemed to this new empty-nester like a very long six weeks into the future.

I was prepared to be sad. I thought that I might cry a little on the seven-hour drive back home. I knew that I would feel a deep need to phone him (or at least text him) daily. I kind of expected the feelings of glumness and irritability. I wasn't surprised, once we arrived back home without him, that the house seemed way too big and unnervingly quiet.

But I was surprised about the groceries. Apparently Rob and I don't eat anything to speak of. When we left to take my son to university, the fridge and cupboards were quite bare. I knew that I would have to shop the minute I returned home.

Well I didn't. And I still haven't. Yes, we've run out to pick up a couple of small items a couple of times: bread, milk, eggs, beer, and cat food. But that's about it.

I used to to be that woman you'd see in the grocery store late at night, racing up and down the aisles just before it closed with a hugely overloaded cart. I'd have all the usual stuff: two big jugs of milk, several packages of meat, four or five types of fresh vegetables, two or three types of fruit, the giant economy slab of cheddar cheese, and bulk sized boxes of breakfast cereal. And, I admit with a blush, there were several kinds of junk food and prepared foods in the cart too: frozen pizza, cola, chips, cookies. A week or ten days later, there I would be, back in the grocery store doing it all over again.

As it turns out, Rob and I weren't eating that much of the cartloads of groceries. Since the end of August, we have been getting along just fine on the frozen salmon in the freezer that we caught during the summer, the various veggies offered up by my little weed patch of a garden, and the apples that are now ripening on the trees. Regular sized boxes of crackers or cereal now last and last. Whatever I buy stays in the cupboard or fridge, and is still there when I go to cook dinner. I look into the pantry and can't imagine how I will ever manage to use up all those cans and boxes of stuff that I see there. I may never need to shop again!

Oh wait. Thanksgiving is coming soon.

Type A Version of Life Balance

What a week! This week at work was like skiing a black diamond mogul run: hard, fast, having to make crucial decisions in rapid sequence with the likelihood of poor choices having unpleasant consequences, and simultaneously needing to maximize my physical, mental and emotional performance. And I loved it.

I thrive on challenge, and languish during times of boring routine. I become downright morose when thwarted in my plans and projects, easily sinking into a state of discouragement and lack of self-confidence. Facing challenges gives me a sense of agency, and so I like to manufacture challenges for myself. This benefits my employers because they get lots of creative, effective work from me.

When people write about trying to achieve a balanced life, they usually recommend pulling back from a frenetic pace at work, and making more time for personal, social, and recreational pursuits. And I deeply value those dimensions too (although I have to admit that I sometimes tend to engage in the personal components of my life with much the same intensity as I do in my work life, like skiing moguls).

For me, I think balance is not simply about working fewer hours or taking a more laid-back approach while working. I think, instead, it's more about finding a rhythm. I fling myself into projects, work my guts out, revel in the intensity of complete immersion, and then bring that project or period of work to a temporary lull or rest time. Using the skiing analogy, this would be the time at the bottom of the hill when I standing sweating in the lift line chatting with others and then ride the chairlift back up, admiring the view.

Type A? Yes, definitely. But I like it that way.

Internet withdrawal

Recently, I have had a lesson in loss of connection. Loss of Internet connection. What I learned surprised me.

While my companion and I were travelling in Europe this summer, our rental car was broken into when we made a short pit stop. The thief got away with both my laptop computer and cell phone. As you might imagine, I experienced many of the emotions common to victims of a crime: shock, outrage, anger, and a sense of violation.

On discovering the smashed car window, we did what I imagine are the usual things. First, in an adrenalin-fueled panic, we pawed through the contents of the car to see what had been stolen. (The idea of being careful not to touch anything in order to preserve fingerprints didn't cross our minds.) Then my partner yelled at me angrily, blaming me for the incident because I had been the one who had wanted to stop at that location. I gave way to hysteria, thinking the thief had also stolen my I.D. (He hadn't.) Then we looked around for the guilty party, questioned others in the vicinity as to whether they had seen anything, and later endured a frustrating morning in the police station in order to make a report to the most bumbling, incompetent officer I have ever met. For the rest of the weekend, I berated myself for having left the car unattended, even for a moment, and for having left anything of value in the car, even though it was all stowed away out of sight. And, then, after a few days, we put the unhappy incident behind us, and got on with our holiday. After all, we had only lost some property, not our health or our lives.

As a result of the theft, we lost not only the two devices, but also our connectivity to family back home and to social media. My partner teased me that I was experiencing "crackberry withdrawal," and, in fact, I was. I was withdrawing from an Internet addiction that I hadn't even known I had. For me it was a shaky feeling of being disconnected, a loss of normalcy, a kind of numb emptiness, and feeling of lack of presence in the lives of others. Three days after the theft, I found a community Internet center, where I spent a happy morning reconnecting with my kids, reading and responding to my email from work, and reading Facebook updates. Oh yeah, I also printed out our flight itineraries and tickets, seeing as I no longer had an electronic way to access this information.

Then we travelled onward, and for the remaining two weeks of the holiday, I did not access the Internet at all, and only used the phone once (a borrowed one) as we waited in the airport for our flight home.

After those first strange days of withdrawal, I rediscovered the freedom of not being connected. For one thing, because I couldn't read my email, I finally was able to fully let go of my work. Usually my email, and therefore my work, goes everywhere with me, and it is as persistent as a cloud of biting gnats that get through every window screen. I also let go of my kids; they were on their own making their own mistakes, which I would not know about until I was back in North America. What could I do about anything anyways from Europe? And the youngest is, after all, eighteen.

Now that I'm back, I've quickly replaced the cell phone, and I'm researching which new computer I will buy. Of course, back at work again, I'm as connected as ever. I'm back to blogging and facebooking in spare time. But, in my non-work hours, I'm not checking my email anymore. . . much. And rather than the dire possibilities I was picturing when I had no connectivity in Europe, my eighteen-year-old seems to have blossomed and matured while I was away.

I'm not going to give up all the things that I love about being connected. But I'm also going to hold in mind the value of all those things in life that happen when I am not online.

Survival of slugs

One afternoon about a year ago, I had stopped at a colleague's house to drop something off, and she gave me a tour of her yard and garden. As we passed a bush, Connie paused and flicked a couple of caterpillars off the leaves.

"They're terrible things; they've completely infested my yard."

Connie looked around and picked up a child's plastic sand pail. She flicked some more caterpillars into the pail. As we walked around her yard looking at her greenhouse, garden patches, and various bushes, she continued to add caterpillars to the bucket.

"I've been paying my daughter to pick the caterpillars off the leaves," Connie said. "A penny for every caterpillar. I don't want to use pesticides, so I am trying to control them by picking them off by hand."

When she had shown me around her whole yard, we ended up down in the back corner where the lawn ended and the wild growth took over. With a flick of her wrist, Connie flung the caterpillars out of the bucket and into the thimbleberry bushes.

"Connie!" I exclaimed. "You're not going to get rid of the caterpillars by moving them from one part of your yard over to this other corner."

She looked at me shamefacedly. She has a degree in Forest Biology. She knows about pest management.

"I just don't like to kill living things. It's the Buddhist principle of valuing the worth of all life."

As I drove away that day, I chuckled to myself, thinking of all the effort Connie and her daughter were expending to move caterpillars from one side of her yard to the other.

I remembered Connie's caterpillars today, and chuckled again, this time at my own expense. We have had a very wet summer this year and everything is lush and green. I was out in my greenhouse weeding, and picking slugs and snails off of my vegetables. As I threw slugs and snails out the door of the greenhouse onto the lawn, the memory of Connie's caterpillars came back to me. I can't bring myself to kill even slugs. Instead, I give them a fighting chance to survive out there on the grass, a little further away from my vegetables. In fact, when I watch a slug looking for shelter, creeping as fast as it can across bare soil recently denuded of weeds, its head up and its little horns quivering, I feel sorry for it. I guess it's that Buddhist principle at work. And I guess I'm not cut out to be a farmer.