On Saturday I went to the visitor’s center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, showed my driver’s license, and got a yellow paper badge to hang around my neck. The occasion: the friends and family day for MMS, the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission. MMS isn’t one of NASA’s better-known missions. When I googled […]
Last year I started drawing again after about a 16-year break. I say “again” like I ever really drew in the first place—really, I took a few classes, produced a few things that bore some resemblance to the thing they’d been based on, and quit. Then, one day toward the tail of last winter, I […]
It was a long winter in North America. The kind of winter where you think, well, that must have been the last snow storm, and then it snows three more times. It seemed like this might be the year when, Narnia-style, winter never ends. Here in Washington, we gauge spring by the cherry trees. The […]
On Monday, I asked: Do Penguins Need Sweaters? Answer: Not really. But my friends Joanna, Kate, and I thought penguin sweaters were perfect for the Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest. Our entry: Sweaters for Peepguins After the bunny peeps read on Peepbook that peepguins in the Southern Hemisphere needed sweaters, they met up at their […]
I’m a lover of science and a devoted knitter. Science-related projects that appear on the internet and have to do with yarn find their way into my inbox. That means I am aware of the project in Glasgow to knit microbes for elementary schools. I am in love with that shawl that depicts the night […]
Right now at the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, here in Washington, D.C, is an art show about climate change in the Arctic. Three local artists worked together on the show, called Voyage of Discovery. I know, art about climate change in the Arctic. It sounds depressing at best and […]
The other day on a flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., I ordered a ginger ale. The flight attendant asked if I’d like the whole can—the plane had been in line for more than an hour waiting for a slot to take off, so I suppose she was feeling generous—and I accepted. More ginger ale, […]
My desk is a disaster. Let’s see…there’s a pile of notebooks. An extension cord. A Christmas card from Switzerland and a postcard from Oklahoma. Index cards with poems by Wordsworth and Blake. A folder with the notes for a paper I wrote in 11th grade. And the only reason there’s no stack of unread and […]