I’ve just finished a story about gas and galaxies. You’re bored already, aren’t you. After I’d sent the editor a query about it, he took months to respond and then wanted several rewrites of the query; I think he was bored too. If gas and galaxies are so boring, why did I want so much to write about them, what was so interesting? Unfortunately I don’t usually figure that out until after I’ve written the story. But now the story is finished so I know what I think is interesting and unfortunately again, it didn’t make it into the story. Continue reading
A week with the winter coming, a week with some excellent words.
Guest Colin Norman started the week with his final post in his thorough, smart, and elegant series, Affair of the Heart. He’s been through the medical system and come out the other side, more or less intact, certainly better than when he went in. Now, to pay for it.
A brave, modest, lovely plant with a dubious name, stinking hellebore, blooms in the cold by making its own heat in its nectaries. Roberta’s a little chilly herself and heads off to the nearest nectary.
Michelle re-reads A Wrinkle in Time, then re-reads it a few more times to her kid. “It’s a dark and stormy night,” snuggle in and listen. Michelle likes what the book has to say: wander off-planet to your heart’s content, come back home. Or as L’Engle said, “Tesser well.”
“Go home and put on some proper winter clothes you dumbasses,” Cassie doesn’t yell through her car window. The dumbasses are young and so have more brown fat than Cassie, who’s cold, cold, cold. She could do something about that, if she wanted.
Watch a milkweed pod on your walk to work, every day for two months, and you see it go dehiscent. You also see some unlikely bugs and a fuzzy little epiphany. I’m going to start walking to work with Helen.
About halfway between my apartment and my office is a community garden.
In a corner of that community garden is a milkweed plant.
I first noticed it in early September, because of the brightly-colored animals crawling all over it. These, I learned from the internet (thanks, internet), are milkweed bugs. They eat milkweed seeds by poking their pokey proboscises into the milkweed pod.
The next time I walked by, the milkweed bugs had been replaced by ladybugs. Continue reading
On my way to the dry cleaners, I passed a gaggle of highschoolers on their way home from class. The high was 16 degrees yesterday, and the wind made it feel like single digits. But most of these students were dressed for a crisp fall day. One kid, some Justin Bieberesque boy on a bike, sported a sweatshirt instead of a jacket. The sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, leaving his forearms exposed. On his hands he wore lime green fingerless gloves. The girl next to him had a light coat that she had failed to button. Gusts of polar wind whipped it to and fro.
“Hell no!” I thought. “Go home and put on some proper winter clothes you dumbasses.” If it hadn’t been so cold I might have rolled down my window and yelled it.
I was stupid once too. In North Dakota, where I grew up, winters were brutal. Yet, as a teen I used to drive half an hour to school in a Dodge with a broken heater. And because it was the era of what my father calls “mall bangs,” I never wore a hat, even on those -20 days when the wind would freeze your nose hairs and steal the air from your lungs. On the coldest days, I might put my lightly gloved hands over my naked ears. Teenagers are idiots. But they also seem to be immune to the cold. Continue reading
It was a dark and stormy night.
In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.
The house shook.
Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.
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The opening lines of the children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time are never all that far from my mind. As a kid, I loved the book so much that given the chance, I would have crawled inside it and stayed. And this time of year—especially at night, when the wind is blowing and branches are scratching across the windows—I often think of Madeleine L’Engle’s archly purple curtain-raiser and its creepy, cozy promise.
Snuggle in, it says, and listen. Continue reading
Winter is settling in: the air is nippy, branches are bare, and wearing open-toed shoes is now out of the question. During a recent visit to a horticulture centre, though, I was impressed to see that many flowers in their gardens still bloomed. Cheery red blossoms, gold-centered asters, and frilly magenta petals popped against a bleak backdrop of dead stems and grey skies.
As someone who has trouble keeping plants alive under the best of conditions, I’m intrigued by flowers that thrive even in frigid weather. The white blooms of the Christmas rose, for instance, emerge in December. A related plant, less attractively named the stinking hellebore, has pale green, purple-tinged flowers that also grow during the winter.
It turns out that the stinking hellebore relies on a curious mechanism to warm itself up. Inside the plant’s nectaries — the compartments that hold nectar — live thousands of yeast. These microorganisms busily break down the sugar in the nectar, producing heat. Continue reading
I spent about seven hours in the operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital being worked on by a highly skilled surgical team, followed by a day in intensive care and five days in regular care. I also had a battery of pre-op and post-op tests and consultations to investigate the aortic aneurysm that put me on the operating table. When I asked friends to guess how much all that cost, not one estimated less than $100,000. I probably will never know who came the closest.
I know exactly how much Johns Hopkins and some two dozen surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists, cardiologists, and assorted other specialists billed Medicare, the government-sponsored program that provides most of my health coverage: just under $64,000. And I know how much Medicare paid. But those sums aren’t the actual costs of the care I received. Nor do they reflect how much an uninsured patient or a private insurance company would have been billed, though it almost certainly would have been much more than $64,000. Welcome to the bizarre and confusing world of American medical price setting, in which health care providers strive at least to balance their overall costs and payments–and in most cases make a profit–and in which charges vary according to who’s paying. Continue reading
More imaging, more problems: Colin Norman’s medical troubles began with his heart. But in this week’s post, an MRI of Colin’s heart shows that his pancreas is wearing a cyst ominously called an intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm. These cysts may be an early sign of pancreatic cancer, but using them to screen for the disease . . . well, that’s tricky.
Why does Christie love elk hunting? Maybe because you do it in the dark. “Something magic happens in the woods when the sun goes down. Without sight as a guide, the other senses become more vivid, in the way that I imagine a blind person must become more attuned to sound or touch.”
Lava smothers everything in its path, but eventually life returns. Craig goes to Hawaii to see succession for himself. “The force of the living seemed more cunning and unstoppable than any devastation, ready to explode onto whatever it touched.”
Countries can’t seem to come to any agreements on climate change. But maybe megacities could lead the charge, says Jess. “City governments are used to down-and-dirty infrastructure tasks and practical decision-making – the kind of pragmatic thinking we need to follow through on carbon commitments.”
And if you’re looking for action on climate change, don’t look to Congress, says Richard. Politicians aren’t scientists. They’re not farmers or teachers either. “Don’t expect any votes on agriculture or education,” said one House member, speaking on background.” They aren’t experts on . . . well, anything.
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Image: La Veda Pass at night by David Kingham via Flickr.