Photo Op

I have already had tons of fun experiences by just showing up to events and then telling everyone I meet that I´m new and want to make friends. A few weeks ago, someone I had met once emailed me and asked if he could take my picture. Larry is a talented amateur photographer who specializes in portraits and was intrigued by my vintage wardrobe. 

I´m no model, as evidenced by my inability to pout, but it turned out to be an absolute blast. His friend was there to help me dress, and she also suggested poses and made faces at me to inspire me to new facial expressions. If you come visit me you will think I have a huge ego because of all the photos of me now hanging on my wall. But aren´t they fun?

Making smoking glamorous again. (Just kidding, that is a rolled up piece of paper because we couldn´t find anyone to bum a cigarette off of.)

Someone got me an empty decorative box!

Yes, I pay a huge amount of money to ship authentic reproduction 1940s jeans from the UK. 

We all have our foibles.

I do not believe your pseudoscientific claims are supported by the data.

All photo credits: Larry Hyler

Cycling

Transporting a holiday wreath I scored at a volunteer gig

Gainesville is turning out to be a pretty good place to ride a bike. When I packed up my life in my car, I brought two hobbies with me - sewing and bicycling. Sewing is my creative activity, and bicycling is both exercise and transportation. I am able to bike a lot here. The city has made a major effort to have lots of bicycle lanes, and any city with a university has students on bikes and mopeds. Don't get me wrong, this is not Amsterdam. But I can pedal almost anywhere in about thirty minutes and can usually find a not very busy road to get me there. I've even found a bicycling group that takes a weekly ride. They are a perfect fit, because all the other members are 25 years older than me so they actually go a speed that I can keep up with.

A surprise lake along the one excellent recreational path.

Many things are changing in my life (and will be changing even more when I switch countries), so it´s nice that there are some things that still feel the same.

Another Fête!

My friend E had the brilliant idea that I should host one last holiday party in DC, and she would make this possible by offering her cleaned and decorated house as the location. I loved this, especially because the pandemic has prevented my annual party for the last two years. I invited a dozen and a half of my friends, flew up to DC, grocery shopped and cooked for two days, and then everyone fêted.

Well, almost everyone fêted. Because COVID did what it does best, and my friend E got sick. So we all ended up at her beautiful house, hosted by her husband and daughter, while sick E and her son stayed at a hotel so we could use her house. E has earned her angel wings, and someday I will have to throw another party just for her to make it up to her.

Everyone looking their best. The couple who wore their wedding outfits won the best dressed category, in my opinion.

Looking fancy and vintage.

Discussing fancy things. The one child in attendance was excited about dressing up and eating fancy food but was dismayed that talking about fancy things turned out to be talking about regular boring adult things in fancy clothes.

Step One: Meeting People

I have three goals in my life right now: clean out the condo I´m living in, apply for my Spanish visa, and make friends. The first two deserve a separate post, so I´ll save them for another time. I am not naturally talented at making friends, unlike my nephew and my best friend. But I am a keen observer of social patterns and a project manager to the Nth degree. So I´m pretty good at making friends by following rules (that are research-based!). 

I figure that the first step to making friends is meeting people. My rules for this part are: (1) go to 2-3 group per week, (2) stay to talk to people afterwards, (3) accept as many invitations as I can, and (4) issue my own invitations. It has been challenging to find groups, as Gainesville is 1/20th the size of DC. But in my two weeks here, I have managed to start a weekly volunteer gig, attend several group meetings, and get invited to (and attend) two dinners at people´s houses. In DC I could find groups by searching Meetup.com and the Internet for my interests. Here it is working much better to just tell people I am looking to make friends, ask what activities they know about, and then get added to personal email lists. 

I know it will take time to actually make friends, because that comes from sharing experiences and knowing people well enough to reveal feelings and thoughts beyond the superficial. But simultaneously I know that the only way to make this happen is to show up and keep trying. I´m also working hard to maintain my connections to older friends in DC and other places, so that I don´t feel too alone during this transition. So far, I have met lots of interesting and welcoming people.  I am amazed at how nice people can be and also at how much energy I can spend on socialization when I am not using it for work purposes. Retirement has many benefits. 

The Sunshine State

So, I packed up everything I own, put it in my car, and drove away. I was surprised that it all fit, with room to look out the back window, no less. It was a trip filled with mixed emotions. I am feeling buoyant from owning so little and enormously sad at leaving all my good friends. 

Two days and 1300 km later, I arrived just in time for the late-season hurricane Nicole. I hurried to buy groceries and get everything safely removed from the car, but the hurricane ended up changing course so it wasn´t a big deal. We ended up with about 24 hours of rain, but none of the super-damaging winds. I´d complain about the lack of drama, but I appreciate having reliable electricity too much to complain.

I am living in Gainesville, a small city in north central Florida, mostly known because it houses the University of Florida. This is the smallest city I have lived in since my 20s and there´s already a bit of culture shock. Everywhere I need to go always seems to be a 15-minute drive from where I currently am. There aren´t all the kinds of shop I´m used to having available, and it´s looking difficult to find groups and meetups where I can meet new people to make friends in such a small city. It´s also definitely the south, but I am pulling on my experience from Savannah to remember that it is okay to greet people when you see them in the halls of the condo and to talk to strangers for no apparent reason. 

Just for fun, the last time I did something like this I was aged twenty-four, and I drove my 1988 Pontiac Grand Am to Albuquerque to work in my uncle´s restaurant. My cat Sundae is next to me in the homemade cat carrier, an awesome brainwave of my father´s, which meant I also had a useful laundry basket when I arrived. I lived on $7k per year and lived in a semi-scary apartment filled with cockroaches. Gainesville is looking much better in comparison.

An Empty House

I have said goodbye to the bats that swoop around my back yard each night. I have sold or donated almost everything I own (except for that cursed antique but broken 1930´s couch). And on Tuesday I got confirmation that the house sale had gone through. It ended up being harder to sell my house than expected, which was a combination of the state of the market and the state of my not-very-up-to-date house. I finish cleaning and packing today, and then I´ll have the rest of the weekend to hang out with friends and say goodbye.

I still remember how I felt when we drove away from DC in 2010, en route to my new postdoc job, passing the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. I expect I will feel the same way when I drive (again) through the city on my way to Florida (again). I will really miss this city, with its combination of amazing and free museums, gobs of cultural events, and a significant international population. I find the climate here just about perfect, which would shock the people who think of it as a hot and humid swamp, because it has four distinct seasons and none of them are too long. 

This city is also full of friends. Friends who accompanied me through graduate school and who helped me survive Andrew´s death. And newer friends who weathered COVID with me and helped me enjoy the start of my retirement. Making friends does not come naturally to me, but having moved so much in my life means that I go at friend-making with a well-developed plan and research-based methods. So I cam confident I will make new friends, but also that that will take months.

In the meantime, I will focus on the many details of closing down a house, establishing a life in Florida, and starting the visa application process. I see many more to-do lists in the coming months, but they are all pretty exciting to-do lists.

Trail Reflections

After three more days of cycling, I am back home. This was one of the best trips I took this year, tied only with Stoic Camp. I´ve been spending some time thinking about why it was so great, especially compared to some of my other vacations. (I´m looking at you, Galapagos!).

First off, nothing I worried about actually happened, but I was mostly prepared in case problems happened. The bikes didn´t break down. When it was cold and rainy, our gear kept us warm. R and I didn´t want to kill each other after spending eight days continually in each other´s presence. (Well, I can only speak for myself. R did not express such a desire out loud, and that´s really all you can ask of someone.)

I had forgotten that small towns can have a hotel but then just a pizza restaurant and a gas station as dinner options. The food was not as enjoyable as I hoped, but the rare good options were therefore really appreciated.

And although it pales in comparison to marathons or obstacle races that some of my friends do, this was the most physically demanding thing I have ever prepared for and completed. I enjoyed all the practice rides with a purpose throughout the summer, and then it felt even better when I could complete it without struggling much. I definitely prefer trips that ask something of me, rather than just providing leisure.

I also really enjoyed having a companion on the trip. I take a lot of solo trips because I am determined not to my current life circumstances prevent me from doing what I want to do. But it is delightful to have someone to talk to on mile 27 or to laugh when the town has six pizza restaurants but no place that will sell you a vegetable. 

Random trivia at the Pennsylvania- Maryland border: Mason and Dixon were British surveyors and not representatives of some deadly north-south feud. Additional trivia: if you travel with me, I will make you stop at every informational plaque. I have never met an informational plaque I didn´t like.

We are physicists. Of course we found the only Foucault pendulum on the trail. 

The hardest day was 31 miles at a small but continuous incline. I was determined not to use the battery on my bike, which was mainly a matter of pride. R was probably dismayed at the thought of cycling at 4 mph for the entire day, though, so he ended up carrying half of my luggage that day. We encountered the steam engine on a downhill day, so I was managing all my luggage in this photo.

Sleet, nuts, and beautiful views

We just finished day four of the cycling trip and it is still awesome. 25 miles per day is definitely doable, even at my piddly 6 mile per hour speed. The path follows an old train track, which parallels the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers. We have been slowly but surely climbing in elevation, and sometime soon we'll start descending. The river plus fall color makes for spectacular views.

We had nice weather for a while, but today it turned quite cold and rainy. It was a pleasant surprise to find that our rain gear worked well, even when we encountered sleet. Tomorrow it is supposed to rain more or less continuously, but it just so happens to be the planned rest day. So rather than a hike, I'm thinking that staying in with a cup of tea and a book is a far better choice.

Food had been a bit of a challenge on this trip. The towns are very small and sometimes only have options like a sandwich shop that is open on alternate Thursdays or an all pork restaurant. On top of that, my gut has been iffy and some days pizza or cheese sandwiches feel like more than I can handle. Here R showcases our trusty companions on the trip, peanuts and almonds. They have gotten me through many lunch-less afternoons.

Accomodations are a mix of inns, BNBs, and Airbnbs. I apparently did very little research and forgot all details after I paid the deposits, so every night is a surprise. Last night we stayed in a converted one car garage that faced a busy street (earplugs thoughtfully provided for all guests) run by a hotelier who actively disliked us (not all the guests, just us). Tonight is a lovely half of a tiny duplex facing the river that is blissfully silent. It's a surprise every day.

The GAP

I had scheduled a vacation for this week, which is turning out to be a welcome respite from selling furniture and wondering if the house will sell. (In fact, the first buyer has fallen though but we are trying again with a second buyer.)

Earlier this year I decided to try a cycling trip. This took some planning, because I wanted to avoid the hot summer months and because the route I planned had limited hotel capacity. I am cycling the Great Allegheny Passage (aka the GAP) a 150-mile trail that stretches from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Cumberland, Maryland. Many people do this in the or four days, camping along the way. I am not very fast and cannot carry a lot of weight, so I planned a seven day trip, with stays in inns and BNBs. 

My parents were kind enough to visit me right before the bike trip, so they could drive me and the bike to the starting point. At the last minute, my cycling friend R decided to join me.

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The fall colors are really beautiful right now and the weather was great for the first two days. However, they are predicting a cold spell for the next few days, so I will be glad I brought my thermals.

It has been delightful so far, as long as you consider minor inconveniences as part of the adventure. The first AirBnB was at the end of a three mile climb on a road with too much traffic. And then I ordered delivery so spicy I couldn't eat it, and we were far from other options. But all in all, it's been a way more enjoyable than my Galapagos vacation, so I'm content.

Traveling light

The house is under contract! If you haven´t sold a house before, that´s what you say when you and a buyer have agreed on a price and a date to hand over the house. You can´t say that you have sold it yet, because the bank could decide not to give the buyer all the money or the inspection could show a lot or problems that the buyer doesn´t want to deal with.

Nonetheless, the means that I can move on from my daily showing routine: every morning I´d make the house immaculate, including removing everything from the kitchen counters, and wiping down all the sinks, turning on all the lights. Then I´d leave for however long people were looking at the house. Sometimes that would be one or two half-hour periods in the day, and sometime it was for eight hour as a stretch. I had almost fifty showings, plus an open house, which is about three times as many as my realtor expected. I spent a lot of time sitting in the car at a park, taking walks, or drinking coffee, waiting for time to pass. 

Now it´s time for me to shed possessions as fast as I reasonably can. I have seen so many people downsize and almost every time they are overwhelmed and frantic by the end. Almost all of us underestimate how many belongings we have. My goal is to throw as little in the trash as possible, which involves a combination of selling, donating, and sharing with willing friends. Hopefully, in three weeks, I will have a single carload left, which will come with me to my next destination - Florida. For various boring reasons, it makes sense to live there a while, and then apply for my visa from there. The adventure continues!

Farewell Tour, Part 2

Wednesday was the last time I´ll get to participate in the local Unitarian church´s Vespers service. I have been part of the group leading the repetitive phrase singing that is the bulk of the Taizé-style service. The style and non-Christian focus were a perfect fit for me. I´m not sure I´ll be able to find anything like it again, and I´ll miss it.

The next day, I had a goodbye coffee with one of my graduate school advisors, who is now retired. We talked about all of his new interests and my future plans and then I said goodbye, perhaps for the last time. After all, I don´t have any more reason to connect with my previous professional community, and if I visit DC in the future, I´ll probably spend my limited time with my closest friends only. 

Yesterday I went for the first time, and the last, to the Maryland Renaissance Faire. I am a minor groupie for my friend´s madrigal singing group, but I had never seen them in what was clearly their natural habitat. It was delightful to listen to hours of Renaissance music and see so many people happily immersed in their chosen community. I thought a bit about how long it will take me to learn Spanish well enough to enjoy days like this in the future. 

This week the house goes on the market. I moved up my previous timeline, because I suddenly have the impetus to make things happen. The photographers and the realtor did amazing things with staging (aka ¨cute¨ things carefully strewn about) and filters, so I hope it will sell pretty easily. You can see all the magic they did here.

It is starting to feel quite real, and it is definitely bittersweet. I am giving up not just my house, but almost all of my possessions and putting a large distance between me and most of my friends. I expect it will pay off in the long run, but right now I just keep saying goodbye.

Destination Homerville

Many of my friends are also friends with my parents. This works out well for me because when we all get together, they can entertain each other and my introverted self can go read a book :)

This year, I planned a road trip with two friends to meet my parents and hang out in rural Ohio, and soon after my best friend and her family planned a different road trip that included my parents and invited me to meet them there. So I saw a lot of Homerville, Ohio (population 2,023) in August.

The draw for my friends, besides my parents´ excellent company, is the chance to hang out in the country, far from the noise of traffic or people. We ate grilled, lazed around on the porches, and played with my father´s many toys.

J takes my mother´s four-wheeler for a spin through the woods.

My best friend M is one of two adults I know who is actually shorter than me. It makes it easier for us to hug each other.

Trip 2: L, CA, and I. One of the goals of this trip was to help L experience some proper country living in rural America. She moved to DC from England not long before the pandemic began and hasn´t had a lot of opportunities to experience Amish vegetable auctions, sweet corn picked that morning, or the aroma of freshly spread manure. CA is a well-traveled American, so she showed us some of her favorite spots along our route.

My father took L and CA on rides in his vintage Triumph car. Alas, top hats are only picture props, since they don´t work well in convertibles. After the visit, L is talking a lot more about buying her own vintage American car and taking it back to the UK with her. 

The other Washington

Somehow I have completely fallen off the blog bandwagon, and have taken three or four trips they never made it in to the blog. 

In July I recovered from COVID just in time to visit my favorite grumpy pet, Wesley the cat. He had recently moved from the San Francisco area to the state of Washington, just outside Portland.

Wesley spent a year with me while his family traveled the world. He remembered me and occasionally deigned to let me pet him during my stay. Wesley is now very old, but has managed to maintain his misanthropic personality.

Conveniently, my brother and his family share a house with Wesley, so I was able to spend time with them as well. One of the highlights was a trip to a nickel arcade. I have no experience with arcade games because they were expensive when I was a kid. But my brother treated each of us to 50 nickels worth, and it was a blast. My nibling trounced me at  Guitar Hero, and my nephew left me in the dust during at motorcycle and car racing. (For the record, my IRL skills include riding a motorcycle and playing acoustic guitar.)

The penny arcade was part of our Portland tour sponsored by the letter "P": Powell's books, the "pentapenny" arcade, and Pip's Donuts.

These donuts were expensive and we had to wait in line for them a half hour. Definitely worth it.

My brother and I had a disagreement about the best brand of mint chocolate chip ice cream. We settled this as everyone does, with scientific blind taste tests. We procured seven brands, and each person tested them twice over two nights. Conclusion? Standards to evaluate mint chocolate chip ice cream vary by person. We largely agreed on the worst ones, but couldn't agree on the absolute top choice. The best value, though, is expensive local brands that sell in half gallons, rather than expensive pints or cheap half gallons.

Up next on the blog: not one, but two trips to Homerville, Ohio!

Recuperation

A typical tray outside my quarantine room

My final road trip stop was a weekend with my friend D and his partner T in Chicago. D and I are old foodie friends, so we ate many delicious meals- Georgian, Polish, and Italian. We make great food partners because I´m willing to do all the cooking and he´s willing to bankroll the ingredients (and make the cocktails). The Italian meal was inspired by a cooking show episode he saw about Amalfi lemons, including a lemon pound cake and lemon pesto.

Unfortunately, at the end of the weekend, I started feeling ill. I managed to drive partway to a hotel that afternoon, and by the time I made it to my parents´ house the following day, I was testing positive for Covid. So I´ve spent the last week in my parents´ guest room. It has all turned out pretty well, in that I seem to have avoided infecting them, and my mom is the best caregiver ever. She makes delicious lunch trays and even includes extras like a cloth napkin or a little chocolate. I felt so lucky to bask in that love while I slept all week. I´m recovering, and I think I should be well enough to drive home tomorrow so I can discover exactly how overgrown my garden has become.

Farewell Tour

Camping, instead of hotelíng, at a conference

One of the things I wanted to do this summer is visit friends and relatives who I will likely not see once I leave the US. My road trip through the Midwest has been part of that. In Champaign-Urbana (Illinois), I attended a family wedding and caught up with cousins and aunts. I ate ice cream with my friend E, a tradition we have maintained since graduate school, and I spent time with his lovely partner J and their menagerie of guinea pigs, a rabbit, and a cat. I ate pizza and played Little Chicago with my friends in Kankakee, where I grew up.

I also got to say goodbye to physics. For the past fifteen years, I have attended an annual conference of physics educators. I gave my first professional talks there, as a terrified young graduate student. I met professors who encouraged me and argued with me about my research and who were probably the anonymous reviewers of my published papers. I watched the students in my cohort graduate and do postdocs and become professors who now bring their own students. As my career progressed, I became the person looking for work to promote or fund, who spoke on behalf of my organization.  This conference was so important to me that I planned my wedding around it. 

Because it is a relatively small community, I consider many of them friends, not just colleagues. The conference was located in Grand Rapids, Michigan this summer, just five hours from where I had been staying earlier in the week, so I took the opportunity to say goodbye. I didn´t attend a single talk or workshop, I just sat in the hallways and lobbies and waited for people I knew to walk by. Because of the pandemic, attendance was light, but I still got to have long conversations with many people, including my doctoral and postdoctoral advisors, people who really shaped me professionally, and who are good friends. It felt amazing to see all the important work that will continue without me, and to say goodbye, in person, to the community that made me the physicist and professional that I am.

Kankakee, my once upon a time hometown

I lived for many of my growing up years in Kankakee, Illinois, a town stuck in the cornfields about an hour south of Chicago. When my parents got together with friends, they played a dice game they called Little Chicago. The origin story of this game is practically mythical, and you won´t find it on the internet. As a kid, all I knew was that it involved five dice and seemed to take hours. Children were never invited to play, nor were we ever interested in such a boring pasttime, which was clearly just an excuse to talk.

I am in visiting my parents´ friends, who are now also my friends, for a few days as part of a Midwest road trip. Last night I got to play Little Chicago with the grownups for the first time, and I won. Now I feel I must retire from the game, because my 100% winning rate can only go down. I can, however, now see the point of a relatively straightforward game that gives you lots of time to chat.

Its always fun to visit a town that you last knew as a child. Kankakee is very, very midwestern and American, full of wide streets, strip malls, and lovely neighborhoods full of old trees. Of course the buildings are smaller than I remember, but the downtown is also emptier. Is that my faulty memory, or the passage of time (and big box stores) chasing out the smaller stores? I´m not sure. In any case, Kankakee has always been able to boast about its mention on Arlo Guthrie´s song, The City of New Orleans, and I am pleased to report that they can also boast about their soda. I went to a locally owned root beer stand and had an excellent float for an absurdly low price (unlike my experience in Philadelphia). 

Tomorrow I leave for camping in near Grand Rapids and then it´s on to Chicago. Stay tuned for even more pictures of flat places.

The Magic of Rural Pennsylvania

My annual physicist camping trip this year was short a few physicists and mostly lacking the camping. We lost 1.5 families to ill timed COVID illness, and we decided to rest a shared house rather than stay in tents and cabins. Because we avoided state parks with strict reservation rules, we could plan our Pennsylvania trip for the warn month of June instead of the usual freezing early May weekend. The family farmhouse was lovely, surrounded by hay fields and gently bellowing cows.

As always, our trip included singing around the campfire, hikes, and communal dinners. A new experience for me was a bike ride through a tunnel on a decommissioned highway. The picture below doesn´t really do the tunnel justice. It was a gaping maw of darkness stretching 1.3 miles (2km). We pedaled for more than 15 minutes in the dark, by the light of a very dim phone flashlight before we made it out the other side. There were many jokes made about the literal light at the end of the tunnel. I was really impressed that the two kids in our bike group were pedaled fearlessly so long, even as I fought the feeling that a giant hole in the (poorly maintained) concrete would suddenly appear and swallow us.

I wish I could write a poem about the light of the fireflies. I have never seen such displays, which lasted hours and were dense with lights. We all agreed it was amazing, although I may have been laughed at when I suggested it was like a Disney World fireworks display.

I don´t know if the timing will work out for me to attend next year, but I certainly hope to come back to the US for more of these annual trips at some point. This decade-long tradition, with graduate school friends, and now their children, is one that I would like to continue sharing.

The Not So Secret Garden

Tonight I sat behind my house in the twilight and sipped a drink while I watched the fireflies blinking and the bat swooping. This is one of my favorite ways to spend a summer evening. If I were a poet, I´d write a sonnet about my garden, which is pretty much the best part of my house. And when I say garden, I mean that in both the American sense (flowers and vegetables) but also the English sense (green space surrounding the house).

I wanted to sell my house in the fall specifically so that I could enjoy the garden for another season. I am even trying to space out my trips so that I can weed and plant and water in between being gone each month. It took me almost a week after my Galapagos trip to get everything back under control after being away for nine days.

Already, I am harvesting zucchini and peas and lots of flowers. And I keep encouraging the little tomatoes to grow, grow, grow.  Since I am not  freezing anything for later, I have also had lots to share, and fresh grown produce makes a lot of people happy, it turns out. 

I know I won´t have any place to grow anything at all in Madrid, at least at the beginning. But if I find I really need to be able to play around in the dirt, I comfort myself that I can move. It may take some time to decide where I want to settle down.

Animals, Up Close: The Galapagos

The big trip for June, and really for all of 2022, was the Galapagos. My parents and I took a tour, really a small cruise, this past week. This destination must be on everyone's bucket list, because whenever I mentioned it, people would get far more excited than when I framed it as a trip to Ecuador. 

I could summarize the trip in a few words: amazing animals, continuous lack of sleep, and then massive illness. So probably not a trip I'll be recommending for others, although I don't regret going.

What's this? It's a blue footed boobie. All the birds, sea lions, and iguanas were completely unfazed by humans. Because there are no mammal predators on the islands, they pretty much ignore people. Birds build nests in the middle of the path, and it's your job to make sure you don't step on then or their eggs. That's also why your small group is always carefully shepherded by a park ranger every minute of the day.

A demonstration of how close you can get.

My father, happy before the dreadful illness began. (That's called foreshadowing.)

Albatrosses, the largest birds on the islands. They court by closing y beaks together, like fencers.

Marine iguanas exist only on the Galapagos. They lie in great heaps that look like there has been a momentous reptile battle.

I refused to buy special trekking clothes so I wore my vintage clothes.

Halfway through the trip we realized there was something going around the ship. Over half of the passengers and crew got sick with what was probably a Norovirus. It was pretty unpleasant, and my mother ended up going to the hospital to get fluids. (Both my parents are on the road to recovery, thank you for asking.) I have not gotten sick yet, but I won't really feel safe until I've been home for a few days.

Separate from illness, it just wasn't really clear to us why so many people dream of this trip. It was cool to see animals up close, but to do so you travel in small, uncomfortable boats for a week or two. I have also realized that I value travel more when I accomplish something- learning about Stoicism and practicing my Spanish recently felt really good. For this cruise, you just spend a great deal of money for people to shepherd you around and show you where to point your cameras. 

So, if this is your dream, don't let me stop you. But I'm really looking forward to being back in my own bed in a couple of days, and I don't see any guided tours or cruises in my near future.

Hablo español, un poco

I'm in Quito, Ecuador! It's my first time outside the country since 2020 and it's delightful. I scheduled my first day for just walking around and soaking up the scenery. Which primarily seems to be baroque churches, quite frankly. I didn't include any photos with this post, but if you can just imagine every wall, ceiling, and column covered with gold gilt intricate carving, you'll be reliving my day.

The best thing happened at the Quito Astronomical Observatory. It's pretty old as these things go in the New World (founded 1873) and still seems to be quite active in public engagement in the community.

When I walked up to pay the entrance fee, one of the attendants heard my accented Spanish and told me he had a proposal. I was momentarily apprehensive, as proposals to single clueless women tourists have the potential to be a problem. But he wanted to offer me free entrance in return for proofreading their short brochure about the observatory for English speaking visitors. I mean, I'm a physicist and a former writing tutor, I was not going to say no. I got the chance to be useful and then geeked out on nineteenth century sextants and meteorological equipment for a few hours.

This evening my brain hurts from talking, reading, and thinking in Spanish so much. Several people have complimented my Spanish, but I think they says more about the kindness of Ecuadorians than my skills. I mean, sure, if you are willing to talk to me slowly and stick to the present tense, I can usually follow and respond. But throw in a jest or am unexpected conversational direction and I'm lost. So I am simultaneously encouraged and discouraged with my language skills today. But I know I'll get it eventually.

Stoic Camp

The Stoic philosophers were so named because the founder, Zeno of Citium, taught his students on a porch, or stoa. And I had an awesome time learning about Stoicism on a porch (and in a lodge and on hikes) last week in Wyoming. I've been interested in Stoicism for a year or two, but that has been limited to reading a few books and participating in a one week online event called Stoic Week. I also read a few blogs, and one of them posted an advertisement for Stoic Camp earlier this year. This seemed like exactly the kind of thing retirement was supposed to provide time for, so I signed up.

Each morning and afternoon we read and discussed the writing of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius in groups, and in the evenings we had guest lecturers who helped connect Stoicism to other schools of western philosophy. Shared cabin lodging and meals were provided by the camp, and every day with good weather, we had time to hike. But mainly, I got to learn about a really interesting topic with people who were really passionate about it.

Before I went, I predicted that I'd either love or hate Stoicism by the end. And I'm definitely leaning in the love direction. It's a philosophy that resonates with me, but of course the real test will be putting it into practice over the coming months and years. 

Near the end of the week, we all got up before 5am and hiked up a ridge to watch the sun rise and ponder.

The last day, the weather turned. The roads were closed and I wasn't sure I'd be able to get back to the airport in time for my flight. But thanks to a lift from fellow campers in an unreliable pickup and a lot of good fortune, I made it. If I needed to, I could have stayed an extra day or two. I continue to be grateful that I have the funds to pay for unexpected situations like surprise hotels or speeding tickets or dental bills. I will never forget the year in Albuquerque in my twenties when things like that weren't possible, and which now provides a foil for my current life. 

If you want to learn more about Stoicism, you can read more at Stoicism Today, some of the podcasts from Philosophy as a Way of Life (co-hosted by the leader of the camp), or just read the Wikipedia page.

And so it begins!

As a reminder, I've been doing some consulting for my old company. They hired my replacement, and the last two weeks I worked daily, onboarding her. In fact, I really like her and am a bit sorry I won't actually get to work with her. But not enough to keep working, of course.

So my contract has ended, and that means I am officially, absolutely not working any more. That very afternoon, I deleted my work email and Slack from all devices (Yay!) and aimed myself in new directions. I've got two trips planned for May, assuming I manage to continue avoiding COVID.

Yesterday I arrived in Denver. I got to play tourist for the weekend, then I'm off to Wyoming. I'm always surprised by how expensive, dry and White it is. There's a very progressive/hippy/alternative vibe that it is much harder to find in DC. 

I went to the city botanical gardens. They did a very good job with plants from arid places. My friend M said I looked like I was on safari in this picture. Good thing the photo didn't show my saddle shoes; that would have ruined the vibe.

Every Japanese garden I have every visited had been lovely.

There were also many cottonwood trees, but I couldn't manage a good picture of them with the seeds blowing on the wind. Cottonwoods release seeds in the spring attached to white, cottony fluff. We had a few on our property when I was growing up, and my parents grew up in a county named for them (shout out to Cottonwood County!).  My father said he remembered small drifts of the cotton fluff at the right time of the year.

And not in the garden, but downtown, I saw this pioneer monument. Its depiction of maternal protection and gun violence really struck me.

And so my really, truly, not working life begins. I have one or two trips planned every month until I leave DC, so stay tuned for lots more.