One Last Sweep

By: | June 2, 2025

This winter and late spring, when we all had mono and a variety of flus and colds and for a while thought Pete might have cancer, we spent a lot of time on the couch watching Pete’s favorite comfort shows. I was scared and trying not to be dramatic about it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that the life we’d built and were enjoying so much wasn’t going to last forever. It was one of those times when the reality I can usually ignore was sitting right next to me in the theater, loudly snapping its gum and looking at its phone.

Still life with Hedwig lovey and toilet paper

While we waited for biopsies to come back, I drew. I told myself I was going to keep drawing — one sketch a day! forever! — but once we knew Pete didn’t have cancer and recovered from mono life suddenly accelerated to full speed again. For one thing, Will started moving — not just crawling but hurtling along the ground the way a komodo dragon does, his short, muscular limbs propelling his wiggling torso forward in a motion that, when lizards do it, scientists apparently call terrestrial swimming. 

Now-rare moment of Will in repose

I stopped drawing — or sitting for more than a few minutes at a time — and started chasing. Then we decided to move our entire household (see Helen’s post about her recent move, asking if life is, after all, just hard.)

Moving was a necessary but somewhat sudden decision and it felt like the rest I’d been looking forward to for months had been snatched away. Pete and I had lived in our old house for seven years, the longest either of us have stayed anywhere in our adult lives.

We moved in when we were still dating. We moved out with several household’s worth of hand-me-down baby clothes and supplies and an eleven-month-old baby. 

So. much. stuff.

It took us two months to get the move done, because we had to take turns watching Will or do it in sprints when we had childcare. Since Will puts everything he can find in his mouth, moving into the new house entailed triple-cleaning every surface — at one point, I was crawling on my hands and knees, using my fingertips to comb through the carpet pile. It was worth the effort: In addition to dozens of tiny orthodontic rubber bands, I found a barbed salmon fish hook.

Last Friday, I went over to do a final sweep of the old house and, as my final domestic act, wipe down the fridge. It was a bit emotional, as these things are. I thought about the years Pete and I spent there together — getting to know each other, getting engaged, followed immediately by the Covid lockdowns, getting a cat, me getting pregnant, having Will. 

It was a great house for us, even if the floors were so warped that none of the furniture sat quite level. I’ve met the new tenant — he seems to get this funky little house’s potential. But it was strange to give the keys away, and with them, all the layers of life we laid down there. How long before all the traces of Calliope’s fur are finally gone, I wonder? I’d wager years, even though we cleaned thoroughly. 

Now we’re trying to “babyproof” the new house — a joke, first of all, and a challenge with stairs — and begin the next round of shaping the space we live in to fit our lives. We have a bathtub, finally, and a dishwasher. Now we just have to keep Will from climbing inside the dishwasher — the last time I looked away for a half a second, he’d managed to steal a steak knife.

Goodbye, old house.

I think one of the reasons it was hard to leave the last house is that we survived there — through the Covid-19 lockdowns, wildfires, job changes, all the ups and downs of building a life together. Even though we were sick and exhausted a lot of the time, that house was where we rested and healed. Now I have to trust another house to take care of us the way that one did. Or maybe just trust that no matter where we go, we’ll be able to take care of ourselves. 

How I Became A Bird Spy

By: | May 30, 2025

Don’t read too much into this, but I have become an obsessive bird spy. I blame LaWONian Ben Goldfarb. He wrote a post about his birdcam (and the board game Wingspan, which I still intend to try), and it made me think that a birdcam would be a great Mother’s Day gift. I consulted with Ben and selected one for Mom.

Mom liked the gift well enough (she would never tell me otherwise), but it has attracted mostly rodents and she can’t keep it up all of the year lest she attract the bears in her neighborhood among the foothills of Sandia Peak. Still, it got me so excited about the device that Mom gifted me one in return. 

I’ve always loved birds, but now I can watch them close up. It’s like hanging out on the branch with them. For the first months after I installed the camera (it’s a bird feeder with a camera that connects to the internet so I can watch the live feed on my phone), I had only juncos and scrub jays. Both are lovely birds, but they’re very common and they hang around our front porch and other places where I frequently get a good look at them, so it  didn’t feel that special.

At the same time, I found myself watching these familiar birds and getting to know them better in the process — the cute sounds they make, the way they interact with their friends and other birds. Before long, I had fallen in love with their endearing little gestures, the way they hold the various seeds in their beaks and hop around on the feeder. 

I loved my juncos and scrub jays, but I was a little baffled at why they seemed to be the only birds coming to the feeder. I have always loved mountain bluebirds, and when they arrived this spring I saw them everywhere but the birdcam. I also noticed that the Stellar’s Jays also didn’t frequent the birdcam feeder. 

I started to think that I was running a restaurant that only admitted scrub jays and juncos, and then the black-headed grosbeaks arrived. They are colorful and cute and look sort of funny stuffing their beaks with food. 

Other pretty birds are coming too. My favorite is the pair of Lazuli Buntings that have been frequenting the birdcam. The male is a gorgeous blue, while the female is more like a middle-aged woman, beautiful if you truly look at her, but invisible if you’re not paying attention. 

I guess the moral of this story is that the closer attention you pay to your surroundings, the more delights you might discover. 

Like Helen, I consider the The Merlin Bird ID app the best feature on my phone, and I’ve been learning to better identify birds by their songs. Spying on my neighborhood birds on the birdcam is not just about looking at them, but also learning the noises they make and their patterns of behavior. They’ve taught me to slow down a little bit and do more observing. It’s really just a way of practicing paying attention.

Snapshot: The best thing on my phone

By: | May 28, 2025
Screenshot of app with sound waveform and "Swainson's thrush"

What’s the best thing on my phone? The Merlin Bird ID app. It listens and tells you (with reasonable accuracy) what birds are around you. Recently I heard someone singing who I didn’t immediately recognize, but I thought sounded fluty and musical, like a thrush. Merlin agreed: Swainson’s thrush, a new bird for me.

In the olden days, my family had LPs of bird songs. If you listened to it, you’d hear the man’s voice saying the name of the bird, the bird singing, then the name of the next bird, its song, and so forth. I am sure there are people that can learn this way, but I am not one of them.

Merlin has turned bird sounds into flashcards. I listen to the sound, I make a guess, I ask my phone, and it tells me if I was right or not. It’s just like learning vocabulary in a foreign language.

So that’s how I know that a Swainson’s thrush sang on my urban block for four days in a row this week. Even though it mostly sings from the leafy treetops where it’s very hard to see. But since I knew it was there, I did go out with my binoculars one morning and peer into the tree until it decided to hop down to a bare lower branch. I hope my neighbors didn’t think that was weird. I hope they’d be happy to know about the musical bird in their backyard.

What’s the best thing on your phone?

Image: Screenshot from Merlin app, featuring a performance by my local Swainson’s thrush

Inhale. Exhale. Hopefully, Repeat.

By: | May 26, 2025

I was sipping my second cup of coffee the other morning when I got this call: “Hi Jenny, this is Dr. Menon’s office. You need to go to the ER immediately. You have a pulmonary embolism.”

Pulmonary embolism? Isn’t that the thing where the old guy down the street gets shepherded away in an ambulance on a Wednesday afternoon? “Old Mr. Wiggins was such a kind man, and a terrific gardener,” the neighbors say, “but he was 90, after all, so an embolism isn’t exactly a surprise.”

For me, though, a PE just didn’t make sense. I’m in my mid- (to late-) 50s—okay, not young, but not “PE old.” I’m petite and eat healthy food, I don’t drink or smoke, I’m active, I’m young at heart. I sit like a kid, criss-cross applesauce. I walk everywhere, I stay limber. I limit myself to binging 3 episodes of something at a time (I might even do a little yoga while watching). I wear compression socks on long flights. So, what’s all this? How did I end up in the ER where, scarily enough, during triage I beat out most of the other people waiting there and was whisked to a room for tests?

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Under an Old Growth Sky

By: | May 23, 2025


This coming Monday is the new moon, which means by tonight we are in the soup. There’s nothing to block the stars but clouds…and us.

Every month has its dark nadir and we’re pretty much there, stars as bright and numerous as they’ll ever be. That’s the thing about a full night sky, it’s as dark and rich now as it would have been 10,00 years ago, if you’re in the right place.

A big moon all bright and milky is one kind of night sky. No moon at all, we see our galaxy from the inside out.

A book of mine came out this week, called “The Wild Dark,” which is about finding dark skies during the most well-lit time in Earth’s history. What I’m looking for I refer to as “old growth dark.” You know the stuff, and it’s disappearing.

A global study among 51,351 citizen scientists using star charts around the world shows a dramatic decline in how much of the night sky we’ve lost between 2011 and 2022. If 200 stars could be seen when the study began, 100 were still visible when it finished. You get the point. It’s going downhill fast. The outcome is not only what this does to our minds and perception, but to our bodies. Cancers and a host of other maladies attend our new era of brilliance, our circadian rhythms derailed, throwing off a litany of physical functions from metabolism to sleep. We are tangibly fucking ourselves up with all this light

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Feel the Burn

By: | May 21, 2025

When I need to get out of my head, I go to Ellwood. This stretch of bluffs along the coast in western Goleta has trails through open grasslands and small paths that wind down to a wide beach, where you can find driftwood forts and views out to the Channel Islands. At its north end, a eucalyptus grove is home to winter roosts of monarchs. I have happy memories of wandering through the trees with a group of preschoolers in rainboots. When the sun broke through the clouds, dozens of the monarchs and their orange wings descended from the branches and hovered just out of reach. The grove felt, for a moment, touched by magic.

This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to remember that right here, in 1942, shells from a Japanese submarine were the only thing flying overhead. After the attack, the Japanese Imperial Navy reported that they had “left Santa Barbara in flames.” This was wishful thinking: The damage, at least to the land, was minimal. The target, the Ellwood Oil Field, lost a derrick and a pump house. One of the shells crashed into a nearby pier.

Postcard of a painting of a Japanese submarine shelling the California Coast by Junichi Mikuriya, Wikimedia Commons

But for those who lived on the coast and had just been listening to President Roosevelt’s fireside chat when the shelling started, the fear sparked by the attack was much more devastating.

One concern: Los Padres National Forest, just over the ridge. Many firefighters, along with the equipment they used, had been pulled away from this and other forests to fight in World War II. How could the Forest Service get everyday people more willing to stop the fires they no longer had the ability to fight?

The Ellwood bombardment was the sparkle in the eye from which Smokey Bear was born. Wearing a ranger hat and jeans, he’s urged generations of forest users to take responsibility for preventing fires from posters and advertising spots during Saturday morning cartoons, as a giant balloon during Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

But after decades of fire suppression—and increasingly devastating fires—some wonder if Smokey’s message could use an update.

Wait for it . . .

One of these people is Emily Schlickman, a landscape architecture and environmental design professor at UC Davis. Every time she drove out of the mountains and back to the Central Valley, she saw a billboard with Smokey, still protecting the dense stands of forests that cover much of the Sierra Nevada.

Then, on a field visit to Illilouette Creek Basin in Yosemite, Schlickman saw something different. Instead of thick, protected forest or large stands of standing dead wood, the valley teemed with a patchy mix of meadows, grassland, and forests—the result of decades of allowing fire to burn through this area. “People say it’s like a glimpse into the past, like what a lot of the Sierra Nevada forests should look like today,” she says. She remembers turning to a colleague and saying, “What if Smokey had a buddy?”

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Garwin Died

By: | May 16, 2025

Richard L. Garwin died this week on Tuesday, May 13, 2025. He was born April 19, 1928, you can do the math. He lived a long time but I still don’t see how he did everything he did. I interviewed him a lot over the years, and stayed in touch even after his health stopped him from doing the things I interviewed him about. I wrote this post April 11, 2014, after a documentary about him had just come out, and I run the post again, updated, because it says what I have to say about him.

Garwin: the Movie opens with an old, steady, precise hand on a computer keyboard, scrolling through now-declassified documents.  Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower make announcements, and newspapers flash headlines about our splendid new hydrogen bomb.  Then the blossom of a mushroom cloud unfolds; and John F. Kennedy talks about Russian missiles in Cuba; and the same old hand places a pill case near the keyboard, then dumps out his pills. Lyndon Johnson explains the complex problems of Vietnam and soldiers shoot their way through a jungle, and the old hand is tieing up a necktie.  Walter Cronkite reports Three-Mile Island, and the old hand pulls on a suit jacket and slings a heavy backpack over his shoulder.  The oil wells of Kuwait explode into a fiery smoking darkness, which becomes the smoking darkness of the Twin Towers, which slides into the tsunami slipping in slow motion over the drowning towns of Japan; and the old hand picks up an umbrella, and a heavily-burdened, slightly baggy old guy in a nice suit and tie stumps out onto the sidewalk, gets in a cab, and goes to DC.  The film title slowly spells out the name, Garwin.  The old guy gets out of the cab, slowly, creakily — he’s 86, after all — and walks past a group of anti-nuke demonstrators, stops and looks at them for a second, then walks on.  He’s seen them before.  He walks into the Executive Office Building.  You know, he says, the president and his national security advisor, aside from their positions, “are really just ordinary people.  And they need to make decisions and they don’t have time to learn.  So the only thing that really works is education.”

§

Richard L. Garwin, a physicist and inventor, has been educating politicians on the scientific realities, whether they want him to or not, in every administration since Eisenhower’s.  He educates them on the physics of nuclear weapons, missile defense, jungle warfare, burning oil wells, terrorist attacks, and of nuclear plant meltdowns. The people who made the movie about him, Richard Breyer and Anand Kamalakar, originally pitched a film on the history of science in America, using Garwin like Zelig or Forrest Gump, they said, because at important moments in history, he always showed up.  “But when we got to know him and hung out with him,” Kamalakar said, “it evolved into this other film about a person who built this horrible thing and worked his whole life to dance around it.”

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