I tried, really I did.

A while back I brought my first plant into my home.  A kentia palm.  When that died, about a year ago, I went back to OSH and bought another palm, this time a majesty palm.  That has died as well.

The first died from underwatering; the second got mold from overwatering (I was told to drench the soil, not dump the occasional leftover glass of water in it), so I stopped watering it to kill the mold.

This time, before returning it to OSH, I did some research on "plants you can't kill."  What did we do before google?  I immediately found the magic list.  I was in particular looking for something that I didn't have to water at all, since I'm really good at that.

I cross-referenced that list with the list of plants that are poisonous to cats (which crosses off philodendron pretty quickly, but that's OK because they are vines and need to be put somewhere other than the floor) and came up with Snake Plant and its, well, relation, Mother-in-Law's Tongue. Both of these ominous-sounding plants are from the genus Sanseviera, which makes me wonder if Sansa Stark is a namesake.

They are considered air purifiers and are even used for treating sick building syndrome.  Kind of like turkey vultures: ominously-named creatures that have a peaceful purpose.

[That turkey vulture link goes to another post of mine from a year ago that I only just discovered I'd never published.  A lost manuscript.  I backdated it, so it looks like I published it a while ago, but anyone investigating its provenance would see is that it's dated exactly a year ago from this moment.]

Snake plants are on the poisonous-to-cats list, but further googling shows people with cats saying (1) they are only mildly toxic, and (2) no one has ever seen a cat try to eat one.  One person reported that her cat destroyed her snake plant, but the cat was not harmed.

Off to OSH.  The woman in customer service looked at my plant and told me all the reasons it died.  Whhnnnahh wnah whnnaaaahh.  (That's the Charlie Brown "adults talking" sound.)  When I mentioned snake plant, looking for approval, she suggested I get a philodendron.  Then I told her I was thinking cactus or maybe something plastic.

I went looking for snake plants and found three puny ones.  I found other plants that you can't kill: lots of dracaenae, but they were more poisonous; bromeliads, but they would have given me nightmares (the online photos don't do the creepiness justice). Also, the "plants you can't kill" site says they require copious water.

I may need to buy a snake plant from a place that really sells plants.  Right, a nursery.  Well, it had better not die.

The slow life?

I came home, ran the water in the sink for a few minutes (literally: minutes) to get it to be hot.  Went to the living room, hit the TV power, and while it was powering up I turned on my lamp, which has a CFL bulb and so takes a while to light fully.

Waiting for the water, the TV, the lamp.  No instant gratification here.

Liveblog from flight to Hong Kong

[It took me a while to figure out how to post this -- my first encounter with Google China -- all the links were in Chinese.]

My biggest fear: the weight of my suitcase. It weighed 48.4 pounds. Whew!

On a packed plane to Hong Kong, the seat next to my window seat (which is at some sort of structural point, so there is no actual window) is empty. The guy in the aisle seat, Gary (my made up name for him, although I would think his name is Ryan), and I look at each other and decide we’re the luckiest people on the plane.

If there had been someone sitting next to me, and me with no window, just a blank wall, I would have gone insane with claustrophobia.

As we’re served our food, United shows an hourlong Discovery Planet special. It’s on lions. And, over and over, it shows lions killing and eating a variety of animals. Oh, and then they show some sort of ceremonial bleeding of a cow. Really appetizing. Plus I feel for the mother of the four-year-old girl in the first row, right under the movie screen.

I am so grateful to M&M for sharing their Bose noise-canceling headphones with me. I took them off at one point – how deafeningly loud planes are. Cordless, I can even wear them walking around the plane. Why don’t people just wear these all the time? We can converse with them on, so why not cancel out everything else? Why don’t airplanes just use the technology to fly more quietly?

Further playing with my airplane toys, I just dropped an Airborne into my latest cup of water. Wow, that stuff looks nuclear.


10:30 AM HKT
After I looked out of my half-window and saw the spectacular mountains of an Aleutian island, the second movie, “Ghost Town,” with Ricky Gervais (loved it, cried) played. Then I check my watch and am shocked at how much longer this plane ride is. The in-flight map comes on, and I see that we are over the Bering Strait, barely past the “Great State of Alaska,” still flying over the Aleutians, and WE ARE NOT EVEN HALFWAY THERE?? I have eaten pretty much all of my snacks – all I have left is a Special K bar and half of a really destroyed peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I can’t find my the two packs of gum I packed. These fabulous headphones are weighing heavily on me. Normally I pack too heavily for the plane and end up with too many snacks when I land. This time, I did not bring enough variety of food and entertainment.

If there had been someone in the middle seat, I would have had to jump out of the plane.

I’ve been Freecell-sober for almost 10 years, but now being able to play solitaire for 10 hours straight seems like it would be a functional skill. However, I seem to have deleted all games of all sorts from this damn laptop!

OK, in my widgets I have a tile game. This will last me about 30 seconds. Where is my Tetris????

12:10 PM HKT
Cried through another movie, “Nights in Rodanthe.” Good thing I had Kleenex within reach: just as I thought I had my eyes under control, my nose started dripping. With Bill’s death this week, I can’t handle all this dying in movies. Next up is “The Duchess.” Hopefully it’s just about manipulative people and there is no poignant dying. Meanwhile, there are more than six hours left to the flight. What are they going to do about entertainment? We only have one more movie on tap. Then four hours of TV? Hopefully no more lion shows.

I’m so bored!

I want another cup of water so I can make another Airborne radioactive drink.

Water that makes you forget?

I bought some Trader Joe's "brand" "vitamin" "water," "Dragonfruit" "flavor" (is there anything about this that is authentic?) because I was in TJs and I was thirsty and they don't sell anything normal to drink. It's the first time I've tasted any kind of "vitamin" "water." How on earth did this stuff become popular?

The evolution on its "flavor" on your tongue goes from worse to bad. My first reaction was to spit it out, and then it developed a horrible aftertaste, like the taste of metal and sweat. It's kind of like Gatorade with a metallic additive and without personality. I wanted desperately to get the "flavor" off of my tongue. Then, a few seconds later, I conveniently forgot how awful it tasted and felt so thirsty that I craved and took another swig. Phthhh, pththhh. After four rounds of this, I wondered what kind of odd control this drink had over me. Is there something in it that makes me so thirsty and amnesiac that it makes me want more?

Phoenix Mars redux

Back in college, I took planetary geology from Peter Schultz. Peter is a crater man. We spent something like the first three weeks (two or three days per week) talking about impact craters. He was also a researcher at JPL/Ames, and he told us all about all the things he would shoot through the Ames Gun into a special bowl of whatever at whatever angle at whatever speed. Like: shooting an egg into sand at a ninety-degree angle verses a forty-five degree angle and examining the splatter. At that stage of my life, empirical research meant nothing to me: I was a historian who looked at people and political theory to see how ideas connected, almost like the study of intellectual gossip, and I didn't yet look at tangible objects and wonder how they got that way. And certainly the nuances of crater splatter were boring to me. I wanted to study the volcanos on Io (and did). I was interested in Mars and the possibility of water and weather. I wanted to learn more about the present before asking how it got that way.

Now it all seems so obvious, and perhaps I needed three weeks of crater study to get it: planets are made of things mashed together, and craters are the evidence of that. Duh. Just as when you look at light that comes from very distant objects, which takes many millions of light years to get here, you are actually looking back in time, unpeeling impact craters is also a way to look back in time.

Peter also taught me to turn the picture upside down if a crater in a photo looked like a bump to me.

Much as I found all that crater stuff somewhat irrelevant, the time was exactly right to be studying it, and to be studying it with Peter, and I'd like to believe I knew that. In 1980, Alvarez and Alvarez published the theory that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a meteor impact. So impact crater theory was really hot stuff in the scheme of things. And this theory was very much in play. I thought it was a good one (having been raised on the theory of Nuclear Winter) and decided for myself that the meteor was what created Hudson Bay. What a privilege, a unique life experience, to study a theory before it became widely accepted. (The search since 1990 has been for the crater or crater patterns which caused the K-T Event. Hudson Bay is not in consideration.)

How many people remember an exam question from 25 years ago? I think the only one I remember was on Peter's final exam. He asked us how we would determine if Mars has or had water on it. I'm sure there were people in the class who wanted to use mass spectrometry or something to determine this from a distance, but my solution was to send a probe to one of the poles and reach out an arm or something and poke it. I suggested there might not be surface water, but there might be evidence of water below the surface.

So the Phoenix Mars project is particularly exciting to me.

A day at Tomales Bay

Today my favorite place in California is Tomales Bay.

A classmate has a long term rental of a great house there and invited a bunch of us to a day at the beach. Potluck. With a vague idea of when to show up, knowing this was potluck but not sure how many hours we'd be there, with a forecast of cold, overcast, and rainy, we left in a caravan, grumpy.

Instead, the day was sunny and warm. Duck Cove turned out to involve seven hours of hanging out, throwing rocks into the water, boating, hot tub, and lots of eating. J brought sangria, which we slurped and munched; I brought enough snacks to ruin our appetites for real food, which included tri tip, grilled asparagus and other vegetables, sausages, and hamburgers.

The boating was kicked off by seven children and three adults piling into our host's tiny Boston Whaler to go across the bay for oysters. As they returned, we on the shore thought they looked like refugees, absolutely packed into the boat.  Either that or the scene from "The Sound of Music" when the von Trapps kids joyfully swamp their boat as they greet their father.

Fresh oysters on the grill -- even the kids were eating them.

I have a thing about water.  Whenever I am near it, I must go in.  J and I were reminiscing about a trip we took up the coast years ago with a crowd of classmates.  We stopped at a rocky beach, the kind with huge eruptions of surf as the waves hit the rocks.  I got closer and closer, loving the smell and the spray.  Dragged J with me, and one of the waves totally soaked us.  (I really believe someone has a picture of this moment.  We must dig it up.)  I was wearing jeans and learned that getting wet in jeans is no fun; since that day, I bring a change of clothes if I think I will be anywhere near water.

Until today.  Today I sat by the picnic tables and hung out and had random sangria-filled conversations and took pictures, working up the nerve to ask our host if I could be next in the sea kayak.  I know how to canoe, but I'd never sea kayaked.  I'm a convert!  It's a hull of plastic like you'd buy at Toys R Us, and you just fly with little effort.  Much easier than a canoe.  I anticipated being so lame at kayaking that I said I'd just toodle around near the shore, but once I figured out how spectacularly simple it is to kayak I was off and running.  Not even noticing that I was dripping water all over myself as I paddled out into the bay.  It was like flying, like dancing.  Others of our party were out there in a pedal kayak, and I hung out with them on the water, sprinting off, moving in all directions, letting myself drift in the sun.

By the time I got out, which involved grounding the kayak on the shore and then kind of falling out into the water (not the most graceful landing), I was definitely soggy.  And in jeans.

Nothing drinking more sangria, sitting in a hot tub overlooking the bay (as the fog rolled in), and eating oysters off the grill (throwing the shells off the cliff), and having more great conversation can't fix.  Today we ate 100 oysters.