Hi, Livejournal land! I am still alive.  I am spending the summer going slowly insane from temporary unemployment.  I have the same job I've been at for the past three years to go back to in the fall, so this is not disastrous, but I didn't manage to get hired for a summer job.  I'm not good at this much unstructured time, especially when living ( Read more... )

I went on a nice 4-mile hike today up a nearby peak called Cerro Alto.  It was steep enough to remind me that I'm not actually in particularly good shape, and I wouldn't try it on a day any hotter than today (the computer says the high in the nearest town was 67˚F, but I suspect it was a few degrees warmer than that on this inland hike).  The views ( Read more... )

Political news is really fucking depressing this week.  First Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator, thus almost certainly killing all possibility of getting through even the inadequate, neutered version of health care reform it looked like we would get.  I suspect all the MA people reading this blog did your part and are probably even more ( Read more... )

Long time no post! Sorry, folks. I don't feel like a comprehensive update, but here's a little bit about my last few days ( Read more... )

Today is the International Day of Climate Action!  I went to my town's demonstration in support of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million or below,  the target that many scientists now believe is the maximum atmospheric CO2 that won't lead to catastrophic climate change. We had beautiful weather for it, some very nice local ( Read more... )

( lengthy ramble about national parks (the idea and the new documentary), environmentalism, spirituality, a bit about the frontier, and more )

I randomly felt like seeing what's going on at Swarthmore these days, so I looked at the daily gazette.  This article gave me a serious WTF?!! response.  EDIT:  I just noticed that this story is from back in February.  I have not the slightest clue how I came across this while randomly poking around the Daily Gazette site not attempting to go ( Read more... )

It is perhaps a sign that biology makes you weird that when I saw the first photo in today's Cake Wrecks post of "creepy crawly cakes," my first thought was "AWESOME!"  They have a naked mole rat cake!  I want to meet the people who ordered it and the decorator and take them all out for dinner.  I want to know what occasion calls for a naked mole ( Read more... )

Hello, world!  Despite the lack of activity on this journal for the past few months, I am still alive.  Feel free to rejoice.

I spent two months of my summer in the British isles, mostly England and Wales with a dash of the republic of Ireland thrown in.  I had a fantastic trip!  I kept a public travel blog occasionally while over there.  If you ( Read more... )

I began a trial run of packing today, instead of waiting until the night before departure like I usually do when I'm going somewhere.  Interestingly, I still followed my usual pattern of getting started, then getting distracted for a long time so I didn't really get down to business until 10 pm.  Apparently I am incapable of packing in sunlight.  ( Read more... )