The beginning of summer and the escape from class...

Blue skies are coming...

The semester has finally come to an end, and I can look forward to new adventures: a new house to decorate, new classes to organize and more traveling. I still have to shake off the effects of this past semesters students. For the most part, they were wonderful. I've been incredibly lucky with the quality of the students ability and also their personalities. I've been hearing horror stories from colleagues about students who don't pay attention, who horse around, but show blatant disrespect for us as teachers, and I worry that this will become the norm, rather than the aberration.

Higher education has changed from a rare privilege to something that every child is expected to shoot for, if not achieve. Students not long look at college as a chance to prove themselves, to learn, to gain a better understand of the world around them, but instead to party, to socialize and to have fun. While those things are part of the college experience (they were of mine), they should be secondary to learning, which many (not most) students have ignored. Even worse, many don't care, and in my opinion, indifference is far worse than ignorance.

Thankfully, there are many student who are engaged in their own learning experience and want to improve themselves. I can only hope that their desire rubs off on their peers.

*photo of the sunrise outside our apartment May 2008

Transience of Snow

The beginning of winter, at last.

I woke up today, prepared my breakfast, even turned on the television before looking outside to see blue sky and a fresh (albiet thin) blanket of snow. Between arriving home late, and getting up early, the sky had provided this small gift, along with wind and very cold temperatures. None of these bother me too much. Spending quite a few winters in conditions like that have hardened me somewhat, and I don't view these days as negatively as some people close to me do.

I remembered those seemingly few days when I was younger, when the snow would fall in the middle of the night and school would be closed, giving me the opportunity to play outside, breaking through that fresh, even layer of snow to make a fort, or snow man, or sled down the small hill of my parent's back yard. I never fully appreciated then how beautiful the snow was, falling from branches of the surrounding trees, gusting into small devils in the wind, hitting my face and melting almost instantly.

With the last few days and the little bits of snow we've been given, I'm admiring it again, although from an adults perspective. I always thought that six inches of fresh now, a perfect layer was the best, but seeing the vast and numerous field and farms, bent and cut cornstalks, all that is left from the fall's harvest, with the barest hint of white on the bare earth around them, I realize pure white as far as the eye can see may not be all that is wonderful about a winter storm.

Still better is the falling snow itself, best seen through the window, with cup of coffee, or better a good beer in my hand, my wife nearby. We had the fortune of that last week Wednesday, thinking about the good Thanksgiving meal to come.

We should a good snow tomorrow, before the sleet and rain take it away, and I'll hopefully be watching it from the window tomorrow, a mountain of grading in front of me, drinking an Anchor Our Special Ale 2007. (more beer suggestions to come later)

*photo of our Halloween pumpkin with fallen snow, the day before Thanksgiving 2008

The Sad Beauty of Jet Engine Trails

Almost every vista now, regardless of locality or season is marred by the onset of civilization. 

That statement is not meant to be an epiphany, nor some profound criticism of modern society; instead I mean it only as from the point of view of a photographer (an amateur one at that) and a lover of nature.

I constantly try to frame my photos to eliminate any artificial object, namely power poles and buildings, however this is nearly impossible. While these objects do have some artistic value in certain pictures, most often they detract, rather than enhance. Several of my favorite skies from my adventure last year in Washington state have the power lines of Skyline Drive in the foreground, and I tried my damnedest, running up and down the street to eliminate them.

Driving back and forth from Manitowoc to Fond du Lac, I search constantly for an unobstructed view of the blazing sunsets I usually look at through my rear-view mirrors. However each hill usually is near power lines or farms or homes. The last barren country I can remember was that of the west, in Idaho, Montana and the Dakota from our trip back from Washington. I hope that those spaces are left unadulterated.

The same issue holds true for the sky, on most days. Walking up the hill to the Science Building at PDL today, I noticed how many jet engine trails littered the sky (I chose my verb carefully there). So many beautiful clouds, made sparkling my the sun flew by, with the long, straight, white line intersecting them. With the discussion of pollution in class, I almost want to add another category: cloud pollution, but I think that's a little melodramatic. 

*artwork adapted from Stanley Donwood's album artwork for Thom Yorke's "The Eraser"

So the rambling begins...

An interesting start...

It's a wonder how a person can sleep at all, with so many geopolitical conflicts, lead in toys, yammering politicians, changes in daylight savings time and the Red Sox winning another world Series. 

I was up early today, not because A. was up early to go to a conference, just because. Now, at 8 am, I'm wide awake with that groggy, not-enough-sleep feeling. My coffee is cool and needs to be refreshed, and although the sun has just risen, I have no desire to go outside and take pictures. That's what lack of sleep will do. The cold wouldn't bother me, normally. Lazy day Saturdays do mean lazy.

Now for a tangent: I have always been an anxious person. I remember, specifically from my youth, when I first learned about AIDS. I remember being paranoid I was going to catch it. A child's ignorance can drive fear to a rather irrational level, and I was never comfortable enough to voice my fears. Now, at a point in my life where I am significantly less ignorant, I have less irrational fears. It seems to be a strange paradox that with understanding of how dangerous the world truly is, a person has less fear of it. To know truly what a nuclear bomb can do, or how a disease can ravage a body. As a scientist, I know some of the inner working of these objects, these afflictions, and yet, I fear them less.

Rationality is what overcomes fear, or at least keeps it at bay. That's how I start my Saturday, drinking coffee, thinking about fear. Coffee does help though, at least with the groggy feeling. Apple spice for a cold fall day.