This blast from the past was taken in the mid-70’s and features a much younger (but no less geeky) yours truly, his squirt of a sister, and our dad.

Me

• Just turned 50
• Just celebrated 24 wonderful years of marriage to a woman I couldn’t have dreamed of meeting when this was taken
• Have a 19-year-old son, making him quite a few years older than me in the picture
• Work in computing (not much of a surprise to someone who knew me then)
• Teach for a living (probably a lot less obvious when this was taken)
• Have more than a little gray hair to document the years in between :-)

Misty

• About to turn 46
• Turned out to be the actual outdoorsperson in the family (we were a little slow to figure that out – gender stereotypes weigh heavy in the world)
• After traveling through an undergraduate degree in music history, got a PhD in biology and now teaches animal behavior and conservation at UW Oshkosh
• Is biking this summer (with her awesome dog in a trailer behind her!) from Ann Arbor, MI, to Ithaca, NY (I consider biking the 15 minutes across the Mississippi into downtown Minneapolis without dying an accomplishment)
• Also turned out to be a teacher for a living, and an exceptional one at that (I suspect our mother has something to do with that)
• Got to do field work in cool places like the Galapagos and Turkey (yeah, I have biologist envy)
• Also has more than a little gray hair to document the years in between :-)

Dad

• About to turn 83
• After living for decades in Wichita Falls, TX (where Misty and I essentially spent our whole lives before going away to college), moved to Houston for roughly a decade
• Then retired to NW Arkansas, where our folks still live an incredibly active life
• Got really involved in the NW Arkansas jazz scene and knows all the celebs
• Rediscovered (with Mom) his love for bridge, and they get invited to play with some pretty serious heavy hitters which is super cool
• Joined with a submariner veterans group in NW Arkansas and has become a lot more connected to his experience on subs during the Korean War
• Fishes as much as circumstances allow, but physically managing the boat and the truck and the gear, etc., etc., is proving tougher. Luckily he’s got friends that help a lot.
• Has beaten cancer twice, but it hasn’t been easy and those battles have definitely left their marks

The crazy thing, though, is how much this old picture resonates with now. My sister and I have changed a ton, but my Dad still looks a lot like that. Thomas, Dad, and I went trout fishing on the White River in Arkansas last week, and it was pretty much just like I remember events like this picture. A few weeks before that, he and Misty went fishing in Lake Michigan near Green Bay. While we were in Arkansas, he and I took the recycling to the recycling center. He came with me to the car place while they looked at a rattle. We went to a picnic hosted by his submariners group. We listened to live jazz over a Sunday brunch. A lot of the details have changed, but the broad brushstrokes are still very recognizable; it’s definitely our strange, happy family.

Since she’s not in the picture, I end up pretty much ignoring my wonderful mother in this, which isn’t really cool. She just turned 75 and totally rocks, and is the rock of the family in so, so many ways. I suspect that while we were fishing she was back at the camper, bravely enduring the “great outdoors” when she would have much been somewhere with indoor plumbing :-). Love you Mom!

Here’s hoping that everyone out there is having a happy winter break, however that plays out in your life.

We’re spending an excellent week and a half in Arkansas at my parents’, enjoying the company of the family and a gluttony of food and books. Best wishes to all!

Our friend Jenny Nellis had a really nasty fall recently, and Jess Larson suggested we send her a happy photo or two. I thought a few shots of WeatherGirl and Jess when we were at the Tate Modern might help :-).

The photo above is the two of them being silly and fun with their hard sweets. The one below is WeatherGirl (on the right) photographing her bare foot with Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo, while Jess is photographing WeatherGirl. We had way too much fun with Shibboleth, which is a wonderfully experiential piece of sculpture, and took a gazillion photos. As you can see, WeatherGirl even took her shoes off in the name of art :-).

After a long day of being cultural and scientific in London with Kildegaards a few weeks ago, we got on the Tube back to Liverpool Street and the train back to Colchester. Looking across into the next car on the Underground, I was surprised to learn that a volcano was expected to erupt in Rome!

Turns out it’s a reference to a rugby player in an international match. And here I thought it was gonna be Pompeii all over again, but with more automobiles.

I realize that I’m fashionably late for Darwin Day (12 Feb), but I offer cool-scary dinosaur skeletons and flesh-eating beetles in apology!

We were in London Friday to see the Kildegaards who (a) are friends of ours from Morris, (b) are living in Denmark this year on sabbatical, and (c) were in London for a week. We had a wonderful day, which included time in both the Natural History Museum (NHM – where the photo above was taken) and the V&A.

As part of our time in the NHM, we toured the wonderful Darwin Centre. (See the nifty connection? See? See? :->) This included amazing cool things such as a giant squid in a tank, loads of great big animals (mostly fish) preserved in equally big custom-made glass jars (including a Coelacanth and a whole jar of platypi), and flesh-eating beetles! They have a whole room of incubators of flesh-eating beetles that they use to clean specimens without damaging the skeletal structure. And to top off this festival of biological delights, they have a real-time beetle-cam where you can watch the little critters roaming around over the carcass of the moment (in a grainy, low-res format, to be sure), busily contributing to the scientific process. I suspect, in fact, that they will, in their oblivious fashion, will probably contribute more to science than someone like Huckabee.

I want to thank our tour guide (whose name I, sadly but predictably, have forgotten), as she did a great job. She was full of useful information, and handled our numerous questions gracefully and informatively.

On my Twitter stream this morning was this from kjell_:

“The disappearance of age-old pleasures and privileges is the first unmistakable sign of progress.” -Bernard Rudofsky

followed by this from Vaguery:

scanning an 1850 Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, just ’cause. And for the Agassiz

Of course it’s convenient that Vaguery’s Twitter things have a very high proportion of “scanning some cool old document to save it for the world”. Still, I thought it was cool :-).

And I don’t know what the rest of you are doing this evening, but we’re going to the British Museum to see the Chinese terra cotta army (or the bit of it that’s on display there at the moment)! You never know, I might take a photo (or 200).

The mother of a good friend was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (Wikipedia, National Cancer Institute). They don’t know much about her situation yet (she’s down at the Mayo Clinic undergoing tests), but pancreatic cancer generally has a very poor prognosis, so this is likely to be a tough time for them all.

Our thoughts are with you.