Woman at Work

Death Valley for the Holidays

2012-01-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

Death Valley is not aptly named for a holiday destination, but it makes a good one even so. Home to great winter weather, both the lowest elevation in North America (Badwater Basin at 282 feet below sea level) and the highest in the continental U.S. (Mt. Whitney at 14,505 feet above sea level), rocks of all colors and textures, mountains, craters, sand dunes, vast salt flats and nights ablaze with stars, Death Valley also has the advantage of being only three hours by car from Las Vegas. What more could you ask of a natural marvel?

I took quantities of photos; here are a few of my favorites.

Artist's Palette

Ubehebe Crater

Salt flats

A plant eking out an existence

General gloriousness

Lake Tahoe

2011-08-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

I wonder if it's possible to appreciate beauty in a vacuum, without reference to other things one has seen or read or heard. I imagine that it is, in large part because of scenery like that around Lake Tahoe. It seems to me that the splendors of Lake Tahoe would be perceived as gorgeous by everyone, no matter his or her frame of reference, experience or aesthetic preferences.

Huge (192 square miles), deep (at 1,645 feet deep, the second deepest lake in North America), high (surface elev. 6,229 feet), with cobalt blue water of extraordinary clarity (it's said that a white dinner plate at a depth of 75 feet would be clearly visible; I don't know if that's true since we didn't toss one in to find out, but glacial lakes are always astonishingly pure) and surrounded by snow-capped mountains, Lake Tahoe is quite an eyeful. Glacially carved Alpine scenery is my favorite: its pristine magnitude is all at once majestic, serene, spectacular, evocative, and profound. There is no better example than Alaska, and the Lake Tahoe area is reminiscent of our 49th state, although on a far smaller scale (and with a lot more sunshine).

In fact, our first impressions of Lake Tahoe were somewhat spoiled by our memories of Alaska. It was rather like seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time: the small, dark painting tucked away in a corner of the Louvre was underwhelming until we got ourselves intellectually revved up over it and examined it more carefully. Similarly, Lake Tahoe struck us primarily as not-Alaska until we adjusted our brains and used our eyes to take in what it was, rather than what it wasn't.

Don't miss the moon in this last picture. (Click on the pic to make it bigger.) These photos are all from the area around Emerald Bay. For some reason, I didn't take pictures of the craggy mountains surrounding the lake this time; if you'd like to see some of those in a different glacially created setting, click here.

An Unexpected Passion

2011-08-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

No, that's not the title of a bad romance novel (although, plainly, it could be). Instead, it's meant to reflect the surprise I feel at having developed a little passion for hiking. When I first realized hiking was just walking with a fancy name, I was disappointed. But then I tried it to impress my daughter and discovered it could be delightful. Basically, it's walking amid great scenery with the addition of cool gear. What's not to like?

This year, I've gone from someone who disliked walking from the house to the garage to someone who can hike for up to six miles before I get tired and start visualizing Diet Cokes and comfy sofas. I figure that's really the same as being able to walk indefinitely on level ground at reasonable altitudes inasmuch as nearly all my hikes have been hilly and at high-ish altitudes - from the 2500 feet above sea level where I live to as high as 9500 feet. (Yes, that high-altitude hike was really hard; my lungs felt like they were gathering themselves up in preparation for exploding right out of my chest.) The two June hikes I enjoyed at just above sea level in Chicago were the easiest I've done - and I didn't even have SmartWool socks or hiking poles at the time.

There are only two things I don't like about these treks. One is loose-rock terrain that requires one to emulate a mountain goat, a difficult feat I don't handle well, probably because I am bipedal. The other is heat. It's way too hot in Las Vegas right now to hike at any time other than just before sunrise.

It's a testament to the sincerity of my new passion that I actually get up at 5:40 every other morning to walk a 1.25 mile loop around my hilly neighborhood. I hate getting up early even more than I used to hate walking; my preferred schedule is to go to sleep well after midnight and to get up around 10:00. I started this ridiculous (and in my opinion heroic) crack-of-dawn walking because it's impractical to head up to the mountains every day and I didn't want to be out of shape once it cools down and we have nine months of fabulous weather during which to hike the myriad trails around here any time we feel like it. I've continued it, though, because I find I crave it. I've felt this way about swimming for years, but it's astonishing to me that I now feel similarly about repeatedly putting one foot in front of the other.

As it turns out, the lower temps at higher altitudes are disappointingly still not low enough to make hiking a non-sweaty enterprise. We were on the Mount Charleston trails and at Capitol Reef and Bryce Canyon National Parks in July, and we just got home from a week in Lake Tahoe. All were spectacular in terms of scenery, and Lake Tahoe provided the additional pleasures of staying at a super-deluxe resort, but for me at least, the brilliant sun in the thin air at 6000-9500 feet made even 65-degree air feel overly warm.

The only place it felt cool enough to hike enthusiastically was Wheeler Peak (elev. 13,065 feet) in Grand Basin National Park, which we drove up to on the way home from Lake Tahoe. The parking area at 10,000 feet was beautifully cool, and the splotches of snow on the peak itself also contributed nicely to the overall sense of chill. But it was hard enough up there to breathe and walk from spot to spot to take pictures, and my hiking companion had a little stress fracture in his foot by then, so we lazed and gazed instead of exerting ourselves.

I've written about the beauty and geologic glory of Capitol Reef and Bryce Canyon in other posts, but here are a few new photos from there:

CAPITOL REEF

BRYCE CANYON
(More on Lake Tahoe and Great Basin, including photos, in subsequent posts.)

Ode to a Friend

2011-05-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

I'm mourning today. I learned this morning of the sudden death over the weekend of my friend Molly. Molly and I never actually met. But the memories of her that flood my thoughts today, and the sorrow I feel, make it plain to me that she was indeed a true friend.

We met on Twitter, early in my career there. It's easy to dismiss social media as frivolous and shallow. I have often done so myself with respect to the great majority of the tweets I read. But it turns out that a genuine connection made via Twitter is as real and wholehearted as one made anywhere else. A connection is a connection is a connection, I guess.

Molly and I started with each other's tweets, moved on to include each other's work, and emailed occasionally as well. We shared a lot of interests: books, photography, the foibles of US, UK and Italian politics, feminism, the scenery and history of the Western United States. Her comments, unfailingly kind and supportive, are sprinkled throughout my travel posts and photos.

We knew the bare outlines of each other's lives - husbands, kids, backgrounds - but only as they came up in conversation. And what a conversation it was. Molly was old enough and sharp enough to have no qualms about voicing her strong opinions on a wide variety of subjects; conversing with her was alternately hilarious, touching, profound and validating, and it was always fun. For three years, we exchanged ideas, opinions, befuddlement, poignancy and even a recipe or two over Twitter, sometimes daily for weeks on end, other times sporadically. Nothing made me happier than to open Tweetdeck and see she was "in the room."

Molly was a writer, as am I, so perhaps it's not surprising that we formed a true connection via written words. It's interesting to recollect that we never actually spoke because I know her voice well. Her turns of phrase, the smatterings of Italian and French interspersed in our tweets, the personality that was so evident in her intelligent, articulate writing all accumulated into a voice I could hear. I can hear it as I write these words. And although Molly herself is no longer here, I think I will hear it for a long, long time to come.

Super Sunday

2011-02-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

In a great break from tradition, yesterday's Super Bowl game was not boring. Yes, I was rooting for the Packers (and, once the game started, wishing I'd decided to bet the season's winnings on them instead of sitting this last game out, gambling-wise). But it wasn't only that. The game was not the plodding, conservative, try-not-to-lose-instead-of-play-to-win non-spectacle of most past outings. The Steelers and the Packers actually played. Except for a quarter-length stretch starting in the middle of the third quarter, when I did...let's say, multi-task...a bit, the game held my riveted attention. As it should have, given that it's the last football I'll get to see until I'm literally starving for it - ravenous enough to watch even the lame pre-season games in August. I'm already wistful.

I thought I might be projecting my bias as I watched the teams file through the tunnels to enter the field - the Pittsburgh players flat, unsmiling, sedate, possibly nervous; Green Bay hopping around, giddy, all but bursting with excitement - but it was obvious even then how the game would play out. Is there anything in football more graceful, magnificent or eye-popping than the passes Aaron Rodgers throws when he has time in the pocket? Anything more certain than Ben Roethlisberger's chances of throwing a perfect strike as he thuds to the ground in a thicket of defensive tacklers and then, soon after, standing tall and tossing an inept, brain-dead pick?

The melodic mangling of "America the Beautiful" and the verbal mangling of "The Star-Spangled Banner" struck me as right in line with the apparent belief of younger generations that meticulousness and accuracy are obsolete traditions of the past. The flyover above a closed stadium roof perfectly encapsulated the blithe, wasteful, out-of-touch-ness of Jerry Jones and his ilk. John Madden texting while sitting at a football game next to a former President of the United States was priceless. Whimsical and iconic, it was a beautiful blend of old and young, traditional and modern, the past and the present. (I adore John Madden.)

And throughout the game, I kept wondering what another football icon might be thinking and feeling. A persistent image of Brett Favre sitting in his Barcalounger, nursing his sore muscles, broken bones and equally banged-up spirit while he watched TV, flitted through my head. Was he thrilled for the Packers, for so long his team? Bummed about his own whimper of a final (I presume) season? Texting with John Madden? Or was he, like me, relishing the game and already sad that there will be no more NFL football until August?

A Hike Through Zion

2011-01-10T17:42:00.000-08:00

I am not a fan of the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mode of transport. Except when I'm sightseeing in European cities or making my way through vast casinos to the double-deck pitch blackjack tables, walking provokes in me all the mental and physical sensations commonly associated with the word "trudging." So it should come as no surprise that I am not a hiker.

But last week we visited Utah with our daughter, and she suggested a hike through Zion National Park. The hike in question, she noted, was mostly paved, relatively flat and only (only!) 3.5 miles round-trip. I didn't want to disappoint her or cause her to think I'm a wimp, so I agreed. Do kids have any idea how much their parents do to avoid falling short in their eyes? I'm guessing not; I surely never sensed my parents were making any such efforts.

Anyway, hike we did, and it was wonderful. Zion is the middle rung of the so-called Grand Staircase that starts in Bryce Canyon and ends in the Grand Canyon. The whole thing was, and continues to be, created by the rain that falls on the 11,000-foot-high Colorado Plateau and then rushes downhill, slicing through and carving layers of rock. This rushing and carving creates glorious scenery, which you get to see from an entirely different perspective when you're walking instead of driving. Frequent forays from the car to see a slightly hidden sight up a little closer or to get the best angle for a photograph aren't the same, I've learned, as experiencing the whole thing on foot.

Zion is spectacular, possibly even more so in winter than in summer. Snow highlights crags and striations in towering cliffs. It contrasts gorgeously with red rocks and creates a charming visual oxymoron with green cacti. There's more visible flora and fauna than in the summer, too, and the cold, cold water in the streams and rivers sparkles with extra extravagance. It could be the ongoing adrenaline rush talking - I'm still thrilled and impressed with myself for having actually hiked - but the park may well be at its pinnacle of beauty when seen on a crisp 40-degree day from a trail that winds through its snow-painted cliffs under the blazing sun.

Shaking Hands with the Future

2010-12-17T11:55:00.000-08:00

Well, I've done it. I've joined the digital revolution. Sort of. I still shudder at the thought of actually reading a book on an electronic device, but I've made my own novel A Merger of Equals available on Kindle. Now, I'm fervently hoping that all the people who assured me this was a good idea, a necessary step, absolutely essential, will get busy proving they were right. Let the e-buying begin.

Little in life makes me happier than cuddling up with a book. It's a sensory pleasure as well as an intellectual one. The heft of a book in my hands gladdens and reassures me. The font and spacing of the text interest me (or, in the occasional case, make me wonder what lunatic thought extreme ugliness or illegibility was the way to go). Equally delicious are the choices of cover art and colors, of matte or shiny finish for the jacket or cover paper, the formatting of the front matter - copyright page, acknowledgments, dedication - and the tantalizing brevity of the About the Author paragraph, which is inevitably pristine and enigmatic in what it says and, even more, in what it doesn't.

And then the story unfolds, a sinuous mental flow of ideas, characters and events evoked by a black-ink parade of words marching across and down each porous cream-colored page. The way letters look etched into paper. That experience of flipping a page because you can't wait to see what the next words will be, then going back because the words at the bottom of the previous page are calling irresistibly. The story's the thing, to be sure, but, for me at least, the delivery package is so intrinsic a part of the enjoyment, so integral to the full experience.

I've sampled a friend's Kindle. (The very friend, in fact, who previewed my book to make sure the conversion process hadn't gone horribly awry - a million thanks to you, Jeanine!) It's a super-cool device, and a superb alternative to hauling a suitcase full of books when you travel. Maybe it even offers tactile and visual pleasures comparable to those of paper-and-ink books. But I seriously doubt I'll ever find out.

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Clearing the Path

2010-11-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

Apparently, I'm not going to get around to writing the post I have in my head about the Rio Grande Rift and the geology of New Mexico any time soon. Honestly, the opening paragraph and a snappy conclusion have been mentally written since late August, but neither the middle itself nor the motivation to create it has been forthcoming. Worse, other potential posts seem to be log-jammed behind this unwritten obstacle.

This may or may not help, but I've decided to post photos from the Rift and the beautiful northern New Mexico landscapes around it before even more time passes. With any luck, the desire to put some delectable text with the photos and to commit to paper the three or four other posts knocking around upstairs will soon follow.

♫ "A-standin' on the corner in Winslow, Arizona..."*

2010-08-09T18:34:00.000-07:00

I didn't really grasp the concept of elevation until I moved to the West. I understood intellectually that higher elevations meant cooler temperatures and different topography, flora and fauna, but knowing something like that intellectually and experiencing several different elevations in the course of one afternoon are two very distinct ways to comprehend.

Our travels today took us from 2500 feet above sea level to over 7200 feet, then down to around 5,000 feet. The temperature swung from 104 to 72 to 86. Desert scrub and sandy, barren mountains gave way to tall pines and green-carpeted slopes, which in turn transformed into the dusty greens and gently rolling contours of the high-desert railroad towns along Route 66. The air stopped sucking the moisture out of everything not already bone-dry and started hydrating skin and tightening curls. (I imagine the wildlife also differed significantly from elevation to elevation, but I'm not particularly interested in fauna, and we saw neither snake nor mountain lion nor buffalo.)

Unless I've forgotten or something's changed in the last five-and-a-half years, one cannot travel by car from Chicago in any direction and encounter in the course of a single afternoon meaningfully higher elevations. (Lower elevations need not be mentioned; Chicago is barely above sea level.) So my Midwestern-born-and-bred understanding of elevation was based on book knowledge and the intelligence gleaned from travels by plane. Taking a plane to a destination that's novel, whether by reason of elevation or other attribute, is not the same as experiencing entirely different environments within 30 miles of one another.

I've been wondering all afternoon what else I might know intellectually, but not truly get because I haven't actually experienced it. I bet elevation isn't the only such thing.

*I really did write this post in Winslow, Arizona. Though I wasn't standing on that corner (or any other) at the time, how could I resist using the title everyone (or at least everyone alive in the 1970s) associates with this sleepy little town full of railroad- and Route 66-related history? Here are a few photos from Winslow:

Rift

2010-08-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

I'm getting ready for our trip to explore the Rio Grande Rift. Like the Rift, our route will bisect New Mexico, from north of Santa Fe all the way down to Las Cruces. There will be geologic glories galore, including calderas (volcanic craters), lava frozen in place by millions of years of time, mountains (ditto), and the sparkling water of the Rio Grande itself. This trip will also feature the sophisticated man-made glories of Santa Fe, which will be our home base for a variety of mostly geology-related side trips before we head south.

I'll post a travelogue with photos while we travel, but the rift I want to write about today is the one caused by Arizona's immigration law. For the first time in over fifty years of traveling within the United States, I feel obliged to take my passport.

I am not a fan of "shoot first, ask questions later" type laws. I'd just as soon not visit Arizona or patronize any of its businesses until its state legislature decides to recommit to the principles of democracy. But the only sensible way to drive from Las Vegas to Santa Fe is via Arizona's roads, so out come the documents proving we're U.S. citizens.

It's very strange to think we might need our passports to travel to an adjoining state. I'll be surprised - and horrified - if we actually do need them. But who knows what some over-zealous officer in some middle-of-nowhere Arizona town might conclude based on my curly brown hair and my and my husband's tanned, olive skin? I don't relish the idea of spending part of our vacation being detained, interrogated, confined to a jail cell or deported.

I'm a law-abiding sort, and I do not support illegal immigration. I also do not support racism, racial profiling, intolerance or fear-based legislation that fails to take into account or respect inalienable Constitutional rights. Appearing to be "foreign" or, for that matter, actually being from somewhere other than the United States is not an appropriate basis for being suspect under the law.

The U.S. as we know it has benefited from the contributions of immigrants ever since the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth Rock. Immigration and immigrants aren't the problem - illegal immigration is. Immigration reform is certainly necessary, but ill-thought-out, misguided, and fundamentally un-American responses like Arizona's have no hope of effecting it.

Deserts, Mojave and Palm

2010-05-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

We decided to spend a couple days visiting the Mojave Desert before it gets too hot. Actually, most years it's already too hot by mid-May, but this year we're enjoying an unusually cool spring/beginning of summer around these parts. The drive through the Mojave National Preserve was wonderful: spectacular desert scenery via a bumpy two-lane road, full of roller-coaster rises and dips. The road would be annoying if there were traffic, but we saw maybe a dozen other cars the whole time.

I'll get to the scenery and some photos, but we stayed overnight and spent a delightful day in Palm Desert before we headed home, and I have to exclaim over how incredibly friendly the people were. They were super-friendly, Midwestern-level friendly. We felt like much-loved regulars as we enjoyed fish tacos, queso fundido and entertaining conversation at the bar at Armando's on Friday night. It was like being at a great dinner party. Not only do we feel like we now have friends in Palm Desert, we also have a bouquet of California-related vacation suggestions for future trips. We had similarly convivial experiences with everyone we encountered on Saturday. What's this about? Southern California has in the past struck us as much more...well, let's say standoffish.

The journey from Las Vegas to Palm Desert through the Mojave Preserve swings back and forth between elevations barely 600 feet above sea level to nearly 5000 feet up. At the low point are the salt flats near Amboy, CA, and they are about as cool as scenery gets. Check this out:

Looks like snow, doesn't it? But no, it's salt. Here's another flat, this one less liquid:

And here are some snaps of the crazy rock mountains*, scrub and Joshua trees in the Mojave Preserve:

*I've written about these crazy formations before, in the second paragraph here and the ninth paragraph here. They are outlandish; it's hard to believe they're a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Honest Scrap Blogger Award

2010-04-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

Rather to my dismay, Jamie Harding (a normally delightful person whose blog, The Life and Times of a Househusband, I love and who is a complete kick on Twitter) "honored" me with the above-titled award.

I don't usually react to honors with dismay, but this one comes with a suspiciously meme-like obligation. Here are the rules:

1. The Honest Scrap Blogger Award must be shared.
2. The recipient has to tell 10 true things about him/herself that no one else knows.
3. The recipient has to pass on the award to 10 more bloggers.
4. Those 10 bloggers should link back to the blog that awarded them.

I don't plan to follow these rules. What a rebel, huh?

I'm not one for chain letters; in fact, I can be counted on to break the chain, no matter the entreaty, the cause or the direness of the promised consequences. (Hmm, I wonder if this bit of explanatory narrative could count as one of my 10 things. So it will if it turns out I can't think of 10 others.) But, hey, I can be a good sport about Rules 1 and 2. We'll see about 3 and 4.

My 10 things (some of these aren't quite known by nobody; it's hard to come up with those when you've been married for over 30 years to someone you met in high school):

1. When we were children, my youngest sister ate French fries slowly. She always had some left by the time my other sister and I finished ours. We would ask her for a few, and she would command us to bark like dogs: Bark! Bark for French fries! Yep, we did. Woof.

2. I have never owned or come into contact with a toaster that worked properly.

3. No, I did not get married in high school. Or in college. I'm just older than you think.

4. If I had to choose one favorite song, just one, it would be "Roll Me Away" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band (as recorded for "The Distance" album way back when). If naming it meant listening only to it and nothing else, then I would choose the first movement of Schubert's Ninth instead because I'd hate having to get sick of "Roll Me Away" and I appear to have an infinite capacity for listening to the best first movement ever. (Just ask my husband or kids.)

5. I routinely slather my feet with Bag Balm, a lanolin salve meant for cows' udders, before I put on socks.

6. After knee surgery in 1989, I spent an entire week on the couch, determined to conquer Super Mario Brothers 1, 2 and 3. By the end of the week, my knee was fine, I could rescue the princess in every game, and I was very popular among my kids' friends.

7. I have been in every state in the U.S. except South Carolina and South Dakota. I don't have a problem with states named South something; this is just an odd coincidence. Oh, and by "been in," I don't mean drove through or changed planes in; I mean actually visited long enough to have to take a shower in.

8. I try to understand it and, failing that, to be tolerant of it (at which I also fail dismally), but I can't shake my sense that Facebook is the dumbest f*%#in' thing on earth.

9. I played Ado Annie in a high school production of Oklahoma! Lots of bizarre things inherent in that experience, but the ones I recall/care to disclose are the thrill of being cast, the surprising raciness of the old-time musical's lyrics, and the appalling smell of the costume (eau de years and years and years of sweating teenagers).

And ta da! Number 10 is that I always break chain letters. Now you know who deserves the blame for the promised riches that never arrive.

A Cheesy Clip Show

2010-03-06T09:26:00.000-08:00

I got the nicest note from one of my Twitter friends a couple days ago. She noticed I hadn't blogged in a while and wanted to know if I was OK. She also said she missed me. This started me thinking about how oddly wonderful Internet friends can be.

The term "Internet friends" has more dubious connotations than anything else, at least for me - can't help remembering the end of Old School, when Juliette Lewis' character invites Will Ferrell's character to a party: "yeah, you know, just some Internet friends."

But I've found some of the most charming, intelligent and delightful people on the Internet. And it's weird: we've never met, we've never spoken voice-to-voice or face-to-face, but I have the sense we know each other. Turns out a lot can be communicated in the accumulation over time of 140-character snippets.

Anyway, I feel remiss about blogging, but I've been in a writing frenzy for several weeks. I'm working feverishly on my new novel; my characters have co-opted all the space in my brain. I have no unexpressed thoughts that aren't going into the book. Every now and then, I get a nubbin of a side idea, but both these and my will to explore them are too weak to flower into a blog post. They're barely enough to sprout a tweet.

So how about a clip show instead? (Cue the Simpsons singing about how lame it is "when a long-running series does a cheesy clip show.") Still, I'm always a little sorry old posts get buried in the past. Even if the ones linked below aren't new to you, I hope you'll enjoy the encore.

What it's like to write obsessively

Where blogging fits into life

Where blogging doesn't fit into life - or the value of privacy

A little tidbit about the new book

Glaciers

Why I dislike and try not to use the noun "bitch"

The dangerous silliness of political correctness

A spreadsheet approach to sex and parenting

Ode to a lost friend

Corporate Cranberries

2010-01-07T12:59:00.000-08:00

In what must have been a fit of inspired creativity, the holiday decorators at the Palazzo came up with utter brilliance. The bedecked papier-mâché bears were good, the snaky branch, flower, ornament and light thing was super-cool (if a little reminiscent of one of Lord Voldemort's scarier incarnations), but the ornamental pool filled to the brim with cranberries was pure genius.

(Click on the picture to get a better idea of the full force of a profusion of cranberries.)

I can just imagine the corporate meeting at which this design was pitched. Purchasing: We're going to need a cranberry guy. Number-Crunchers: How do you measure ROI on a gazillion cranberries? Idea People (all but the one who came up with the idea): I wish, wish, wish I'd thought of that! And the Suits: Top this, Steve Wynn!

Actually, in the context of the Strip's fanciest over-the-top hotel/casino/shopping/dining/entertainment extravaganzas, the whole concept of business meetings in conference rooms is hilarious. In what other corporate setting could cranberry-related agenda items nestle comfortably and sensibly right alongside occupancy rates, profit margins, Impressionist art exhibits, and the latest in uniform concepts for leggy cocktail waitresses?

A Rave Review & a Holiday Offer

2009-12-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

It suddenly occurred to me that I might have a blog reader or two who doesn't also visit my website or follow/friend/whatever me on some social media platform. In case there are indeed any of you out there, here's a heads-up about a couple current events.

A Merger of Equals just received a rave review in SUE Magazine, which is an aptly (and hilariously) titled e-publication for women in litigation. The reviewer gave my book five gavels, the magazine's highest rating, and the review is delightful. Click here to read excerpts or to download a PDF of the complete review.

To celebrate both the review and the season, I'm offering free shipping and special prices on A Merger of Equals through December 18. If you've thought of buying copies for yourself or to give as gifts, now's the time to do it. The more copies you buy, the better the savings. Click here for the particulars.

Thanks to all my readers - books, website, social media platforms, and blog. Writing is a huge pleasure for me; knowing you're out there reading is the richest of icing on the cake.

A Little Help?

2009-11-10T10:59:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the bookshelf review I undertook for this post, I'm now rereading Mary Renault's The King Must Die. It's the story of the mythical hero Theseus, King of Athens. One of Theseus' early adventures (before he gets to Crete and deals with the Minotaur, the book's centerpiece) takes place in Eleusis, a kingdom ruled by women. The women are like despotic rulers throughout time: contemptuous and dismissive of those not like them. In Eleusis, men are considered childish, weak-minded, and utterly unfit for the worlds of business, government, religion and everything else the society deems important.

Women rule in Eleusis because the society is an antiquated one, still wedded to cultural dictates developed in response to the ancient notion that women and the gods create life. Although the Eleusians in Theseus' time know the role earthly men play in conception, Eleusian culture has not evolved to take that into account and elevate men above second-class status. Everyone seems OK with this except, of course, our hero.

As events spin out, Theseus ultimately finds himself in position to modernize (it's killing me, but I'm not going to put that word in quotation marks) Eleusis. The following passage made my hair stand on end:

Later that day, I appointed my chief men, from those who had been resolute in defying the women. Some of these would have had me put down women from every office in the land. Though I tended myself to extremes as young men do, yet I did not like this; it would bring them all together to work women's magic in the dark. One or two, who had pleased my eye, I should have been glad to see about me. Only I had not forgotten Medea, who had fooled a man as wise as my father was. And there were the old grandmothers, who had run a household for fifty years, and had more sense than many a warrior with his mind only on his standing; but besides their magic, they had too many kindred and would have managed the men. So I thought again about what I had seen in Eleusis of women's rule, and chose from those sour ones who took their pleasure in putting the others down. And these did more than the men to keep their sisters from rising up again. A few years later, the women of Eleusis came begging me to appoint men in their stead. Thus I was able to make a favor of it.

I recognize that Mary Renault wrote those words in the 20th century, but they haunt me anyway. There were written records in the times the book depicts; I presume she relied on them for political and cultural realities just as she did to paint the book's remarkable depiction of the time's religious rites and its architectural, scenic and other physical realities.

Obviously, the passage says a great deal about the nature of power and how and why institutions as well as individuals promote on the bases of sexism, opportunism, tokenism, protectionism and atavistic fear, rather than solely on the basis of merit. But does it also illustrate something fundamental in the nature of women? Or does the passage simply confirm that in times of oppression and discrimination, when power is scarce for one gender or the other, some of those with power will do anything to hang onto it?

Most career women have at some point in their careers run across a successful woman who's reached an elevated position and acts as if she believes there's some honor and glory in remaining alone there. Instead of trying to help other women succeed, she revels in her exclusive status. This sort of queen-bee behavior does as much to mask opportunity and hold women back as do sexist men or the pressures of the status quo. It horrifies me to think it might have been going on since ancient times.

Either way, I'm feeling galvanized. I'm determined to do something right this minute to help another woman succeed. I hope you will, too.

Valley of Fire

2009-10-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

We've had visitors here for the last few days and on Saturday, a perfect day for being outside in the desert sun without roasting (as are most October days), our guests decided they wanted to see some Vegas glories of the natural versus man-made variety. Not being either shoppers or out-of-towners who are obliged to clog up the Strip on weekends in order to see it at all, we were delighted (and a bit relieved) by this choice. Our definition of hospitality includes letting guests decide on plans, then chauffeuring them, keeping them company, and otherwise doing what we can to make sure they have a wonderful time. This policy occasionally leads us down dubious paths activity-wise, but not this time.

Valley of Fire, Nevada's oldest state park, is within an hour of Las Vegas. Its name comes from its eye-popping red sandstone formations. These fantastical shapes and sinuous layers were created 150 million years ago by enormous shifting sand dunes, then sculpted by both the uplifting and faulting of the entire region (which occurred in pulses from about 80 million years ago until about 35 million years ago) and by erosion, geology's most dogged player. The park also features layers of limestone, shale and other gorgeous and geologically fascinating rocks, chipmunks as bold as game-show hosts, lizards, jackrabbits, coyote, birds, and the usual array of desert plants.

It's amazing how distinct and colorful these plants now appear to us. When we first moved here, our eyes accustomed to the splashy colors of Midwestern foliage, all the desert flora looked similarly scrubby and more or less beige. Familiarity has transformed subtle beauty into vivid beauty, as splashy in its own way as the rich rainbow of humid climate colors or the gaudiness of the Strip. Here as elsewhere, I guess, perspective is everything.

Sunday Night Outrage

2009-10-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

Most on-air football commentary is bubble-headed. Lowering the volume so you don't really have to listen to it usually suffices; in extreme cases, there's always the mute button.

The Sunday night announcing team (formerly the Monday night team, but times change) was about as good as it gets. This isn't saying much. In fact, it isn't saying anything other than that the commentary did not customarily have to be reduced to gentle white noise or muted altogether. Al Michaels, while utterly dorky, knows the game pretty well and has some ability to watch the proceedings as opposed to blathering inarticulately about unrelated matters (a distressing habit shared by too many of his colleagues). John Madden was enthusiastic and, if occasionally incoherent, also incredibly knowledgeable and never mean-spirited. Cris Collinsworth, who has taken Madden's place, has been bland so far, but he may settle in and be as good as he was in his previous broadcasting gig.

Tonight, however, both Al and Cris achieved new lows. In a blast of vulgarity, Cris crowed, carefully enunciating each word, "The Pittsburgh Steelers are kicking their stinkin' butts!" Nice. Really elegant commentary.

Worse - far worse, if you ask me - was Al's casual, gratuitous and highly offensive sexism. As he went into raptures like a teenager with a crush over Mike Tomlin (the Steelers' coach, for you readers who aren't football fanatics), Al gushed that the day before the opener against Tennessee, Tomlin had spent four hours attending his kids' teacher conferences. "Of course," Al enthused, "it's easy to tell the wife to go do that. But [Tomlin] was there."

My husband and I turned to each other, aghast. "Tell the wife to go do that??" The wife?? Leaving aside the dismissive nomenclature, let's count the offensive implications of Al's statement: (1) wives are subordinates who exist to be ordered about; (2) attending school conferences is women's work; (3) fathers who choose to attend their own children's conferences are doing something exceptional, noteworthy; (4) there's no way Mrs. Tomlin might have a career that would preclude her being dispatched to handle this child-related matter; and (5) it's perfectly OK to express sexist sentiments such as these to the Sunday night football audience because, of course, we're all guys and all guys are sexist pigs, right?

I think Al owes the actual Sunday night football audience an apology. I think NBC does, too. This kind of throwaway sexism is outrageous. Its time has long been past. Even dorky football guys in their 60s should know it no longer flies, whatever their personal opinions may be. It's indisputably harmful - to the women, the men and the children it presumptively shackles in stupid, confining, restrictive, gender-limited boxes. For shame!

For Your Reading Pleasure

2009-09-10T17:21:00.000-07:00

Inspired by an invigorating literary conversation on Twitter with my friends @Amalari and @Angpang, I decided to compile a list of my favorite books in the categories of fiction and biography, the two categories I love best.

The list below is not even close to complete nor did I go about compiling it in any scientific way. I merely went to most of my bookcases and wrote down the titles of books that have swept me away - from my own work, my own world, and my own sense of time and responsibilities. These are the books that made me glad I was an adult and could stay up all night reading without parental interference or the need for a flashlight under the covers. In a few cases, they're books I did read with said flashlight when I was young enough to be told to get to sleep by said parents.

Because of the "swept away" criterion, I have not included books I think are very, very good, but which fall more in the eat-your-vegetables category of reading than in the tear-through-a-box-of-Belgian-chocolates category. (Don't get me wrong. I love vegetables. That's just a different list.) Mrs. Dalloway, for example, is a fine book, but for sheer delight and irresistible forward motion, it cannot compare to Michael Cunningham's extraordinary The Hours. (If you've only seen the dumbed-down movie in which the central plot complexity is given away in a very early frame, you've missed quite a treat. The book requires you to be smart as it magnetically pulls you in and along; the movie requires only that you be awake.)

Just so you know, it's killing me a little not to include mysteries, which I adore. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Sara Paretsky, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, Dick Francis, Elizabeth George, Elizabeth Peters, Deborah Crombie, Patricia Cornwell, Anne Perry, Sue Grafton, Nevada Barr - and many others whose names I'm sure will come to me the instant I hit "Publish Post" - have afforded me hours adding up to years of pleasure, puzzlement and revelation. But that's also a list for another day.

Finally, I didn't have time to go to all my bookcases this afternoon. Even if I had, there would still be omissions. I loan and give books to people all the time, so my collection doesn't begin to include all the books I once owned, let alone the ones I've borrowed from other people, loved, and returned.

For all these reasons, the list below is only the beginning. I doubt I'll ever manage to compile a truly complete list of my favorites, but I promise to get closer in subsequent posts. Will you add your favorites by commenting on this post, either with the names of your additions or with a link to your own list on your own blog?

Biographies (I think the first four are superb, the others very good):

Savage Beauty, by Nancy Milford (about Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Henry James, by Leon Edel

John Adams, by David McCullough

Emerson: The Mind on Fire, by Robert Richardson (about Ralph Waldo)

Frida, by Hayden Herrera (about Frida Kahlo)

The Lonely Empress, by Joan Haslip (about Elisabeth of Austria)

Eleanor of Acquitaine, by Alison Weir

Fiction (in no particular order, because I follow no shelving system. I rely on my memory when I'm looking for a book; the occasional frustration caused by memory lapses is more than outweighed by the adventure of running into something unexpected or forgotten):

Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

Robert Girardi, Madeleine's Ghost

Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American

Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Time in its Flight

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

John Updike, Rabbit, Run

Gregory Maguire, Wicked

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Seville Communion

George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

Yann Martel, The Life of Pi

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (short stories, which normally irritate me slightly, but these are a marvel)

Alice McDermott, Charming Billy

Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons (all her books are highly readable; these are my favorites)

John Irving, A Prayer for Own Meany, The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp (ditto the Anne Tyler comment)

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Kent Haruf, Plainsong

William Faulkner, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying (my all-time favorite writer; these are the best of the best, but all his books are glorious)

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Pat Conroy, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, The Water is Wide, The Lords of Discipline

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

Anthony Trollope, The Barsetshire Novels

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (in my opinion, THE Great American Novel)

Mary Renault, The King Must Die

Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina

Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

Julia Glass, Three Junes

Michael Malone, Handling Sin

Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast

J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (the sine qua non of short stories)

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

John Fowles, The Magus

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, Jo's Boys

Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Jane Mendelsohn, I Was Amelia Earhart

On the Road Again - Post 12

2009-08-06T23:16:00.000-07:00

Today was a driving day, but around here even getting from one place to another offers a scenic masterpiece. Here are pictures from the road between Evanston, Wyoming, and Torrey, Utah:

The mountain in the picture below is Mt. Timpanogos, so named after a pair of doomed lovers. According to a nearby sign, Ucanogos was the lovely daughter of the chief of a tribe of Indians living on the shores of Utah Lake. She was in love with a young brave called Timpanak. Her father nevertheless held a contest to determine whom she would marry. Jealous of Timpanak, the other braves killed him and threw his body down the mountain. Ucanogos climbed the mountain and died atop it, grieving. The mountain then took on the outline of her body, and it has been called Timpanagos (a combination of the lovers' names) ever since.

On the Road Again - Post 11: Gold Rushes & Ghost Towns

2009-08-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

Gold strikes and the towns that spring up around them evidently follow a rather sorry pattern most of the time. Gold is discovered, usually in a "meet-cute" story worthy of a romantic comedy. Thousands or tens of thousands of people flock to the area and a boom town is born. Lawlessness, vigilantism and high hopes abound; non-gold-claim-related infrastructure is entirely absent. Then the gold runs out, and so does the town's raison d'être. The once prosperous boom town becomes a ghost town, nothing more than a name on a map and, sometimes, a few rickety buildings.

Bannack was the town that boomed in response to the first of Montana's three major gold strikes. It was the first territorial capital when the Montana Territory was carved out of the Idaho Territory in 1864, but it held that honor very briefly and was a ghost town by mid-1865.

Why? Bannack's easily accessible gold was exhausted and word of a new strike had spread. A group of prospectors on their way to the Yellowstone River encountered an unfriendly bunch of Crow tribesmen and had to beat a hasty retreat. Legend has it that on the retreat, one Bill Fairweather made a joke about finding something that would fund the purchase of some tobacco, stuck his pick in the ground near Alder Creek, and came up with something that funded a very large amount of tobacco and a whole lot more.

Fairweather and his buddies couldn't keep their find a secret, and Virginia City sprang to life a mile or so south of the gold field. Within a few weeks, it boasted 10,000 residents (many of them refugees from Bannack and most of them arguing about individual gold claims) and it was in short order named the new territorial capital. Like Bannack and most of the rest of Montana, Virginia City was ruled by a Vigilance committee that operated on both sides of the law. Also like Bannack, within a year or so it too was a ghost town, its population having lit out for Helena in response to the Last Chance Gulch strike.

Bannack is now a state park, preserved but unrestored. Virginia City was reborn as a tourist destination in the 1950s, thanks to the efforts of a couple who bought the town in the 40s and funded its restoration. While it is no longer home to 10,000 as it was in 1865, Virginia City is far from deserted. Some 130 people and, according to local lore, more mean-tempered and obstreperous ghosts than in any other city in Montana call it home.

Click on the picture below to get some fun info about Bob Gohn's grandfather. Bob is the owner of Bob's Place (above) where we bought surprisingly sophisticated sandwiches for lunch. With their pesto, fresh tomatoes, delectable cold cuts and superb focaccia, the sandwiches were anything but authentic Old West, but we weren't complaining.

On the Road Again - Post 10: Glaciers

2009-08-04T14:11:00.000-07:00

Borders, like time, have always seemed a little silly to me. They're merely constructs, real only because we agree to consider them so. At the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, established in 1932, Canada and the United States decided to agree otherwise for one segment of the line on the map dividing them. Marked only by a couple of white markers, one on the ground, one high atop a ridge, and a swath cut in the forest at the 49th Parallel, that segment is the longest undefended border in the world.

The peace and trust signified by the decision to ignore the border seem utterly at home in serene Upper Waterton Lake (pictured above) and the rest of this magnificent park. There's a super-abundance of beauty here: craggy peaks; gentle slopes; sheer drops; deep chasms carpeted in green and taupe; thick forests; glittering waterfalls; vast pristine lakes hundreds of feet deep, most of them astonishingly clear, others tinted turquoise by suspended glacial silt; even the engineering marvel that is the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

I've written about these beauties before and barely scratched the surface. It's tempting to go over that territory again or to mention cool facts I left out the first time, such as Triple Divide Peak. The Continental Divide winds its way through the Northern Rockies; at Triple Divide Peak, not two, but three watersheds intersect. Depending on exactly where it falls on the Peak, a raindrop will ultimately end up in the Hudson Bay, the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico. An area only as big as the span of a hand determines which direction the drop will travel.

Instead, though, I'm going to write about glaciers, my absolute favorite geological phenomenon and the reason Waterton-Glacier looks the way it does. Its topography is a textbook illustration of the effects of glaciation - if the textbook were the educational equivalent of an illuminated manuscript.

Glaciers cover about five million square miles of Earth's surface, four million over Antarctica, 750,000 over Greenland and the other quarter-million scattered around the rest of the world. Glacial ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on the planet, and is second only to the oceans as the largest reservoir of total water. As such, glaciers are crucial to both world water resources and variations in sea level.

And they are fast disappearing. In Glacier NP, for example, there were 150 at the end of the cooling trend known as the Little Ice Age (1550-1850). By the middle of the 20th century, there were 50; in 2005, there were 27. If global warming continues at current levels, all the glaciers in the park will be gone by 2030.

That will be very sad, not only for aesthetic, fresh water or sea level reasons, but also because glaciers are an extraordinary phenomenon and the sculptors of some of the most striking landscapes on Earth. Glacial ice comes in second to streams as an agent of erosion, but what a glorious second.

Glaciers are the beautiful ice-blue result of climates cold enough to permit snow and ice to survive year-round. When over time the amount of snow that falls is greater than the amount that melts, a remarkable transformation takes place. Delicate snowflakes are converted by a process called sublimation into vapor that instantly recrystallizes into a granular ice called firn or névé. The sand-sized crystals then bump into each other and melt at their points of contact. The resulting water flows into the spaces between the grains and instantly refreezes, creating a mass of glacial ice.

Once the mass reaches a thickness of 150 feet, the weight of the top ice causes the bottom ice to become plastic and flow. Remember, in geology "plastic" means neither a liquid nor a solid. The rocks in the asthenosphere portion of the mantle are likewise plastic and for the same reason: the weight of the overlying rocks in the lithosphere. Plastic flow occurs because the ice (or, in the case of the asthenosphere, the rock) is composed of layers of molecules stacked on top of one another with relatively weak bonds between the layers. When the stress caused by the weight of a higher layer exceeds the strength of the bonds between the layers, the top layer moves faster than the layer below. Voilà! Plasticity.

I understand plastic flow and I can explain it, but it seems magical to me anyway and it's one of the big reasons I love glaciers. Another is the way they operate. As glaciers advance (which means grow in size), they erode the rock under them spectacularly. They're very workmanlike about this, despite the dramatic results. Glaciers physically remove chunks from the underlying bedrock and pull them up into the ice. (This process, called quarrying or plucking, is accomplished by the very same eons-long freeze-thaw process that carved Bryce Canyon's eye-popping rock formations.) The rocks so taken up in the ice abrade the bedrock over which the glacier moves, effectively turning the flowing ice into a colossal piece of sandpaper that scours, polishes and stripes the surface below.

Glaciers come in two varieties: the stodgy-seeming continental (like Antarctica and Greenland) and the flamboyant alpine (like the rest). What they do is identical: form, advance, retreat, and erode the landscape. How they do it and what it looks like when they're done are very different.

Continental glaciers form only in polar regions and they sit on huge horizontal surfaces. Constantly falling snow causes the ice to collapse under its own weight, which moves the whole mass. The movement is very slow, only 15 feet or so per year. When they eventually retreat, continental glaciers leave landscapes that look like Canada east of the Rockies or the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. This topography may seem boring, but it is, in fact, the result of ultra-dramatic glacial activity. Advancing continental glaciers actually increase the relief of the bedrock over which they move. But when they retreat (think "melt"), they deposit gigantic loads of glacial till (the stuff they've quarried along the way over eons). The till piles up and piles up, and eventually it reaches and buries the high-relief peaks, turning the landscape into flat or very gently rolling plains dotted with depressions where water collects into lakes.

Alpine glaciers are the showboats, much flashier in terms of how they move and the landscape they leave behind. They form in the headwaters of V-shaped mountain stream valleys. First, the growing mass of ice digs a bowl into the mountainside called a cirque. Eventually, the ice overflows its cirque and goes careening down the mountain (well, geologically speaking - the rate of movement is typically a foot or so a day). The glacier spills into the stream valley below and transforms the existing V-shape into the tranquil, soothing U-shape characteristic of glacially created valleys.

Alpine glaciers indulge in a bunch of other acrobatics as well. They can form in adjacent valleys on two sides of a mountain and eventually sculpt knife-sharp ridges (aretes). They can tunnel through ridges and create high mountain passes (cols). They can get together and gang up on all sides of a mountain peak to create a horn (think of the Matterhorn or the Grand Tetons).

The forces of gravity that caused alpine glaciers to spill down mountainsides in the first place are still at work when these glaciers retreat. They deposit their quarried loads in moraines below and sometimes astride the cirques, filling up valleys (remember Jackson Hole?), but leaving the highest ground craggy, the cirque basins filled with glacier remnants or cold clearwater lakes (called tarns), and the slopes down which they flowed polished, striped and spectacular. The sculpting effected by alpine glaciers is superimposed on topography already carved by streams, and the combination is what we have to thank for scenery as incredible as the Northern Rockies and the Alps.

Although they, too, are in retreat, the Mendenhall Glacier in the Juneau icefield and especially the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska's Yakutat Bay retain miens of power. It is possible to look at them and see as well as comprehend the gargantuan work they've done and still do.

By contrast, the glaciers in Waterton-Glacier NP are small, outwardly inert, sad even. They seem to be clinging by their metaphorical fingernails to their cirque basins and mountainsides as if for dear life. If you know nothing about how glaciers work, you might find them pathetic. Armed with knowledge, however, you have to be impressed. With their dazzling handiwork spread out around and below them, Glacier's glaciers are like proud great-grandparents at the head of the table - aware that their work is done and content in the realization that they did a superlative job.

We saw a veritable wildlife jamboree on this visit: a black bear; a perfectly posed ring of bighorn sheep; a more independent, but equally picturesque, lone bighorn; a deer wandering through the Logan Pass parking lot looking for all the world like a prospective car buyer checking out the inventory; three mountain goats, including the baby pictured below; a stag that sauntered up to a hedge, sat, stretched his elegant neck, posed thusly for 15 minutes, then rose and sauntered off, his shift apparently over; and another black bear.

On the Road Again - Post 9: Boom Town

2009-08-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

I'm not really a fan of those historical tours you can take in almost every city and town. For one thing, they're typically conducted in modes of transportation either so cute it makes your teeth ache (e.g., locomotives like the kiddie trains at amusement parks, double-decker buses, trolley cars, and so forth, all of them inevitably red) or so uncomfortable you soon believe it would be altogether better simply to throw yourself through the window (e.g., noisy diesel buses with cramped, high-backed seats molded to allow only one totally disagreeable sitting position).

For another thing, these tours are always conducted/driven by an enthusiastic, big-personality jokester, the kind of person who asks where everyone is from and instructs the crowd to give Bill the ticket guy a round of applause because he's the one who washed the windows so everyone would have a nice clear view - this on an open-air vehicle that has no windows. Ha-ha. Being an extrovert and a public speaker myself, I feel bad if I leave these people hanging, so I end up playing along and feeling instead both imposed upon and like a chump. It's exhausting, really.

But my husband loves the tours and, with rare exceptions, he's been right about their value, despite the drawbacks. They're a great way to get the lay of the land and a sense of the local scenery and history. The tour in Helena, MT, was not an exception. It took place in a tricked-out locomotive that pulled three open-air cars (the whole thing cherry-red, of course), and it was conducted by an exceptionally chipper woman named Liz who looked about 25, but told us she was the mother of three daughters, two of them teenagers, and the wife of a man who often "feels he's swimming in an estrogen ocean." She also mentioned her father, her brothers and that she's planning a run next year for the Montana state senate.

Liz managed to tell us a great deal about Helena, too, as she trundled her super-cute tour vehicle around town. I owe her - and the Helena Chamber of Commerce website, which disagrees with her on a few matters - a debt of gratitude for the tidbits I've woven into the tale below.

The last of the three huge gold strikes in Montana's history was discovered by four prospectors known for unclear reasons as the Four Georgians. Apparently, only one of them was from Georgia, but all of them had decided to go home empty-handed if they didn't strike gold in the gulch along the Last Chance Creek. The gold they found there in 1864 began one of the largest gold rushes in the West.

The town site of Helena was first surveyed in 1865, but most of the streets - then and now - meandered as had the miners, following the curves of Last Chance Creek and circumventing miners' claims. Even then, naming things Last Chance one thing or another must have been irresistible. It certainly is today. My favorite was the (I suspect inadvertently) sinister Last Chance Splash Swimming Pool & Water Park.

By 1888, fifty millionaires lived in Helena, more per capita than in any other city on earth. As millionaires are wont to do, these flush late 19th century versions built grand mansions, cathedrals and public buildings, and stooped as low as necessary to make sure that their Helena, which had become the capital of the Montana Territory in 1875, was also designated the state capital when Montana joined the Union in 1889. Arms were twisted, votes were purchased, and it's said that more votes were cast for Helena as the new state's capital than there were residents in the Territory.

The public buildings include two standouts. The Greek Renaissance-style State Capitol, surmounted by a copper dome (left unpolished and, as a result, richly patinated thanks to oxidation) was, according to Liz, upon its completion in 1902 the first state capitol in the U.S. to have electric lights. Helena also boasts, really rather randomly, the St. Helena Cathedral, which was modeled after the famous cathedral in Cologne, Germany, and the Votive Church of Vienna. The first funeral to be held in the Cathedral, not too long after its completion, was that of the man who commissioned and paid for it, a heartbroken long-time widower who raised a daughter on his own only to see her "make some bad choices" and die of pneumonia (in the G-rated version anyway) at 19. Both the Capitol dome and the 230-foot spires of the Cathedral pop into your line of sight from all sorts of vantage points throughout Helena's hilly, easy-to-get-around 14 square miles, and they are as picturesque as they are unexpected.

Among the mansions gold built are the original Governor's Mansion, a lovely Queen Anne on a beautiful lot. It housed 10 Montana governors until the new residence (quite hideous by comparison) was built in the 1950s. Oddly enough, neither the original nor the current Governor's Mansion is in the Mansion District, but that District is nevertheless rife with a large variety of other architecturally swanky homes, many featuring turrets, portes-cochères, wraparound porches, carriage houses, children's playhouses, lead-lined bathrooms, and other manifestations of the whims of their well-heeled owners.

During our two weeks in Helena, we lived in a "little mansion" complete with gorgeous woodwork, stained glass windows, fireplaces we never got to use, internet access, modern kitchen and bathrooms (thankfully), and a bewildering multiplicity of irons and cordless telephones. We discovered extraordinarily fresh vegetables, one first-rate and two very good restaurants, superb Gorgonzola salad dressing, and the best donuts we have had since we were children. Our days were punctuated by trips to the Y to swim (me), to Mt. Helena to hike (not me), and to all sorts of locations to eat and explore. The temperatures were warmer than we'd hoped, but we did get to see one humdinger of a thunderstorm and the sun shone until nearly 10 pm every evening.

The Capitol and the Cathedral:

The original Governor's Mansion and a selection of homes in the Mansion District, all photographed too late in the afternoon on an extremely sunny day (sorry):

Sprinkled around the Mansion District are ornate hitching posts, which serve as further reminders of both the area's Old West origins and the crazy things on which people will spend money. Click on the picture below to see the full magnitude of one resplendent hitching post as well as the original late 19th century brick sidewalk behind it.

The "Guardian of the Gulch," another Helena icon, is a fire watch tower built in 1886. It's the most recent of a series of observation buildings and lookout stands to have stood on Tower Hill overlooking the Downtown District. For some inscrutable reason, it was made of wood even though all of its predecessors...you guessed it...burned down.

Wildlife is everywhere in Montana, including in Helena. We encountered these deer nibbling on lawn foliage a few blocks from the original Governor's Mansion.

On the Road Again - Post 8: Time & the River

2009-07-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

Before the formation of the Rocky Mountains, the area that is now Montana was a gigantic inland sea, its bedrock at least 2.5 billion years old and its seabed thickly blanketed by seashells (a.k.a. the calcium carbonate that hardens into limestone). Three hundred million years ago, the Precambrian rocks of the Ancestral Rockies pushed their way up through that seabed. For the next hundred million years or so, these Ancestral Rockies eroded; the debris resulting from their erosion eventually solidified into new layers of sedimentary rock.

Fifty to 70 million years ago, the current Rockies began their rise, thanks to a colossal collision. When the Canadian Shield and Pacific tectonic plates smacked into each other, the lithosphere buckled and crunched, and molten rock from the mantle underneath pushed upward through the layers of sedimentary rock left behind by the Ancestral Rockies. (Click here if you missed Post 5 and would like definitions of these terms.)

The dinosaurs then wandering about would have felt all this buckling and pushing as earthquakes. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's not, but the dinosaurs became extinct just as the granite from the mantle finally burst through the overlaying sandstone about 55-60 million years ago.

The evidence of this geology is everywhere in modern Montana, by area the fourth largest of the United States, by population the fourth smallest. Fewer than a million people live in this whole enormous state, so there's plenty of undisturbed room to take in both the spectacular vistas and the extraordinary sky. (I've written about the Montana sky before; "Big Sky Country" is a richly deserved nickname.)

On July 19, 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition found itself on a remarkable stretch of the Missouri River about 20 miles north of what is now the city of Helena. Limestone cliffs (which Meriwether Lewis incorrectly thought were granite because it was raining and the wet stone looked black) rose up 1200 feet on both sides of the river. At each bend in the waterway, the looming stone walls looked as if they would block passage altogether, but then the river would curve and each time the walls opened like gates. Observing this, Lewis wrote in his journal, "I shall call this place Gates of the Mountains."

Lewis also wrote, "The river appears to have forced its way through this immense body of solid rock." This imagery, while apt, was again based on a mistake. (Lewis was no geologist.) In fact, the river predates the uplift of the cliffs around it. The Hilger Fault has been raising the northern end of the Big Belt Mountains and lowering the Helena valley for million of years. This forced (and continues to force) the Missouri to erode downward into the hard rock and carve the canyon that cuts across the mountains.

In the 204 years and 10 days since Lewis and Clark originally beheld it, the view has remained essentially unchanged. Limestone cliffs 1200 feet tall still manifest the extraordinary pressures of their formation in sensuous twists and curves and the effects of weathering in jutting ridges, domes and outcroppings. Areas of ancient Precambrian rock still alternate with the limestone. Cave openings abound. Ospreys, eagles, and falcons dot the sky. Bighorn sheep, mountain goats, otters, deer, squirrels and all manner of other wild animals roam the cliffs and flats. Pines grow thickly and reach for the sun.

And the silty waters of the Missouri continue to flow, powerfully placid.

The pictographs in the cave pictured below were painted by Native Americans long before Lewis and Clark showed up here in 1805. The youngest of the pictographs dates to 400 years ago, the oldest to 1400 years ago.

Among the fascinating rock formations in this Missouri River passage are three famous "faces." Can you find the Canyon Monster in the first photo below, the Stony Elephant (eyes and trunk) in the second, and the Eye of the Rhino (profile) in the third? (Click on the pictures if you want to make them larger.)

Cave openings and a bald eagle in flight.

On the Road Again - Post 7: Precious Metals

2009-07-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

The settlement of Southwest Montana is a story of mining - the excitement, the rush, the plundering, and the decline of chasing after gold and copper.

The first official U.S. visit to the territory was Lewis and Clark's 1805 expedition. In 1806, John Colter, a member of the expedition, struck out on his own, determined to make a fortune as a trapper and trader. When he returned to St. Louis four years later, he was a very rich man. Having likely been the first non-Native American to see what is now Yellowstone Park, he was also raving about boiling springs and smoke billowing from the ground. The people in St. Louis thought he was insane, but they were evidently willing to overlook insanity in the face of wealth. Companies (including John Jacob Astor's) and hundreds of freelancers lit out for the wilderness. These trappers brought back more than half a million beaver pelts annually for 30 years. By the 1840s, beavers were all but extinct in the Rockies and the Montana Territory was reliably to be found on the white man's maps.

For the next 20 years or so, people pretty much went through Montana on their way further west. But everything changed when prospectors struck gold in 1862, 1863 and 1864.

The last strike was at Last Chance Gulch in what is now Helena. This was a rich strike: in today's dollars, $3.6 billion in gold was mined from 1864-1884. To this day, the main drag of Helena's cute downtown is called Last Chance Gulch. (How great an address is 1200 Last Chance Gulch? North of downtown, it's the YMCA where I go to swim while we're here.)

Mines, railroads, ranches and lawlessness flourished in the Montana Territory from 1862 until nearly the turn of the century. But a brutal winter in 1887 dealt a harsh blow to ranchers and began the decline of the Old West. The U.S. Congress ended silver subsidies in 1893, which ruined the market and caused the collapse of silver mines throughout the Rockies. The same thing happened to the gold market in 1933.

The story of copper mining continued into the 1970s, but it, too, ends badly - a rise and fall nowhere better illustrated than in Anaconda.

We visited Anaconda, a city of 10,000 people about 50 miles northwest of Butte, on one of our side trips from Helena. In the 1880s, the Butte area became the world's largest copper producer. Over 19 billion pounds of ore were unearthed by hard-rock miners over the following decades; the copper was then extracted by smelters and shipped all over the world.

Anaconda was founded in 1883 when legendary "copper king" Marcus Daly built a copper smelter and reduction works there as part of his ongoing battle for domination of the Butte-area copper industry. From 1892-1903, the Anaconda Copper Company was the largest copper mine in the world; over its lifetime, it produced $300 billion worth of the metal. In 1899, the company was merged into Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, in a brazen sleight-of-financial-hand deal that made a few people exceedingly rich and led, among other things, to the eventual enactment of U.S. antitrust laws.

Anaconda Copper was shut down in 1980, a casualty of the decrease in worldwide demand for copper, decline in ore grades, and rising mining costs. (The takeover in 1971 by Socialist President Allende of Anaconda's huge Chuquicamata mine in Chile didn't help much either.)

All that remains of the operation now is the Anaconda Smelter Stack, one of the tallest freestanding brick structures in the world. At 585 feet, the stack is taller than the Washington Monument; it now looms sadly over the landscape from its position atop a hill next to what appears to be a slag heap. I'm not sure exactly what to make of the fact that this giant phallic symbol is the sole remnant of years of fabulous wealth, back-breaking work, financial chicanery, environmental devastation, and worldwide domination.

Befitting its wealth and status, Anaconda was once an opulent city. By 1898, it boasted mansions (small by East Coast and Midwestern standards, but grand indeed in the Old West), fancy churches, and other grandiose buildings, including the Hearst Free Library (George Hearst, William Randolph's father, was one of Daly's investors) and the Washoe Theater (978 seats, Art Deco, and rated by the Smithsonian as one of the most beautiful interiors in the United States). Like the Anaconda Smelter Stack, this all looks sad today, run-down and/or abandoned as it is.

On Highway 1, the road to and from Anaconda, you pass the towns of Wisdom and Opportunity. I wonder if the same person named both and, if so, whether he meant the two names to be taken optimistically (the southbound Wisdom, then Opportunity) or pessimistically (the northbound Wisdom after Opportunity).

On the Road Again - Post 6

2009-07-18T22:23:00.000-07:00

Today was a leisurely driving day. It turns out that the only sensible way to get from Grand Teton National Park to Helena, MT (our home away from home for the next little while) is to go through Yellowstone. Perhaps not the best plan for a Saturday, we thought as we approached the Park's South Entrance. Definitely not the best plan, we worried, when the ranger at the gate declined our National Park Pass, telling us in that wholesome, cheery, enthusiastic ranger way that it was a "free weekend."

But our worries were unfounded. We've been to Yellowstone before (and didn't love it), so this time we elected to forgo the usual sights in favor of staying on US 89 and getting through the Park as quickly as possible. Probably because it bypasses the most popular tourist spots, this generally northwesterly route was uncongested even on a free weekend. It twists and turns, mostly at a nice 45mph clip, past some magnificent scenery and wildlife, including the preternaturally serene buffalo in the picture above. (Among the things that did not appear to be troubling this "so ugly he's actually sort of beautiful" creature was his extreme need for lotion and hair conditioner.)

Don't miss the fumaroles in the picture just below. (Click on the picture to see a larger version.) These steam spouts billow out of the ground more or less constantly all over Yellowstone. Like their flashier cousins the geysers, fumaroles are an unexpected and bewitching thrill to the eye; to the mind, they somewhat sinisterly confirm that boiling away not very far underground is the same magmatic heat that powered the violent volcanic eruptions that created, shaped and reshaped Yellowstone's topography.

Most of Yellowstone is a high volcanic plateau. But the northern portion of the Park and the chunk of south-central Montana you find yourself in immediately after you leave the Park through the North Entrance are more geologically complex.

Landslides, more erodible shales and sandstones, and glacial till deposits of a whole host of rock types make for a very different landscape in this area of the northern range. The soils here have a high clay content. Water binds tightly to clay, which results in very little water being available to sustain plants. In case that alone wasn't enough to discourage plant growth, these soils are also poorly aerated, they resist root growth, and they have high levels of sodium and salts. For all these reasons, the landscape stops looking lushly green and looks instead like this:

Sparkling streams, creeks and the impressive Yellowstone River, complete with rafters, kayakers, waders and swimmers, contrast implausibly but gorgeously with this rugged landscape.

We stop for gas in tiny Gardiner, MT, and enjoy both the cowboy boots on the residents, male and female, and the wonderfully named Hellroaring Street we pass on the way out of town. By the time we get to Livingston, it's midafternoon and we're hungry. Relying once again on Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood book, we head for the Sport Restaurant on Main Street. But for all the trucks and SUVs, the street looks to be straight out of a Western.

After hamburgers topped with a veritable salad of incredibly fresh and delicious lettuce, tomatoes and mushrooms (where on earth could they be from, we wonder), a pile of crisp garlicky fries, and an enjoyable chat with our waiter (David, originally from St. Louis), we hop back in the car, realize that it would really be far more appropriate to unhitch horses and hop on them instead, and head for Helena.

On the Road Again - Post 5

2009-07-17T21:14:00.000-07:00

The Grand Tetons are the youngest of the Rocky Mountains and they are considered the most photogenic. Happily, this is not further evidence of our youth-obsessed culture. It is instead because there are no foothills to obstruct the view of the craggy, snow-dotted peaks as they soar 13,000 feet above sea level and 7000 feet above the Jackson Hole valley. And while the ravishing Tetons are mere babes at 10-13 million years old (as compared to the Rockies at 50 million years old), the rocks of which these youthful beauties are made are among the oldest on earth.

The tale of why there are no foothills leading up to the Grand Tetons and how 2.5-billion-year-old Precambrian rocks ended up rising above the Wyoming plain a mere 13 million years ago is a great illustration of the impacts of three of geology's money players: tectonic plates, glaciers, and erosion. Even if you aren't agog about geology the way I am, stick with me on this. It's a great story.

The earth is comprised of layers around a solid center core. The inner core is estimated to be about 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The rock gets progressively cooler and more solid toward the outside. The stuff between the core and the earth's crust is called the mantle, and it comprises the bulk of the planet. The mantle is rock, but it is neither solid nor liquid. It constantly moves and flows, but super-slowly, like gooey taffy or warm plastic. The thin layer of hard rock that consists of the crust and the upper mantle is called the lithosphere. We're still talking pretty hot rock where the mantle meets the lithosphere: over 700 degrees F.

Thanks to the spinning of the planet, the flowing of the mantle under the lithosphere, and differential temperatures all over the earth, the lithosphere is and has always been under a lot of pressure. It responded by breaking up into big puzzle pieces called tectonic plates. Driven by the heat of the circulating, semi-molten mantle underneath, these plates move around, nudging, grating, grinding and occasionally crashing against one another. Sometimes they even ride up on or slide underneath each other. For example, the Pacific Plate has been crowding the North American Plate for eons; these plates meet along the coast of California at the San Andreas fault. You know what happens there.

Between 120 million and 55 million years ago, a plate called the Farallon collided with the North American Plate. The Farallon got pushed under our plate, down into the mantle, and it stuck. This is what allowed the Rockies to be formed so far inland. When the sub-plate fell down into the mantle, a lot of liquid hot magma (as Dr. Evil would say) welled up and caused severe volcanic activity. This created more mountains and it also left a lot of residual heat in the lithosphere.

The heat caused the North American Plate to stretch, spread back out and crack. Since the land was being stretched from east to west, the cracks formed north to south. Cracks are faults and they angle deep into the earth's crust. The Teton fault was thus formed, about 13 million years ago. As the land continued to stretch, the fault pulled apart. One side (Jackson Hole) slid down along the fault, and the other side (the glorious mountain range) rose up. The side that dropped down displaced some of the underlying mantle, which further pushed up the rising side.

The differential is huge - the mountains rise about one foot for every four feet the valley drops. The current differential is about 27,000 feet from mountain top to valley floor. (Stay tuned for why the numbers don't quite seem to work.) And these forces are all still at work: whenever the two chunks of crust move along the fault, there is an earthquake. The Tetons are the product of 13 million years of earthquakes, the last huge one about 4800 years ago.

There are no foothills leading up to the Grand Teton range because the valley sank. The Precambrian rocks of which the young mountains are made were meandering along, minding their own business, in the mantle under the lithosphere until they got displaced by that sinking valley. These ancient rocks are gneiss and granite, metamorphic and igneous rocks (respectively) that are very hard once they cool. They erode at a much slower rate than the sedimentary rocks like shale, limestone, sandstone and siltstone that used to comprise the whole region and still comprise the bulk of Jackson Hole. The softer sedimentary rocks that originally rose up from the earth along the fault line, pushed up by the sinking valley and the harder metamorphic rocks, have eroded completely away but for the ever-shrinking top hat of sandstone Mt. Moran wears to this day.

Where did they go? This post has gotten too long, so I'll give short shrift to my favorite geologic phenomenon of all: glaciers. During the big Ice Age, which began 2 million years ago, thick ice covered the entire region (along with most of the rest of the northern parts of the world). Smaller ice ages followed, the most recent between 50,000-14,000 years ago. The Grand Tetons were buried several times under thousands of feet of ice for tens of thousands of years. Whenever the earth warmed up, the glaciers receded; their movement created the topography we see today.

Glaciers are the big kahuna of sculpting erosion. They bulldoze, carve, scour, polish and striate everything in their path. They also carry along - and then, when they melt, dump - unimaginable tons of eroded material. This is why the Jackson Hole we see is only 7000 or so feet (and not the full differential) lower than the tips of the Tetons: glacial debris filled up the other 20,000 feet.

I'm dying to go into more detail about glaciation, but I fear I might have exhausted even the patience and interest of those who've stuck with me this far. So I'll stop here and leave you with pictures.

The following picture isn't very good, but I offer it to show you the enormous scale of the place. I took the shot with 18x magnification and still the herd of enormous elk in the middle looks like nothing more than a thin, slightly bumpy brown line. The elk were in a standoff with a bear hoping to separate a tasty baby from its mother.

On the Road Again - Post 4

2009-07-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

Soon after we leave Montpelier, we're in Wyoming. The road quickly climbs 1300 feet and now there are brown mountains behind the green hills, some of them sporting patches of snow gleaming improbably in the summer sun.

Just as quickly, the elevation decreases back to 6200 feet and the rolling hills open out into vast pastures. The mountains ringing the pastures in every direction are still thickly carpeted in green, but the slopes of the eastern range are wearing their evergreens in north-facing Mohawks. They look like so many teenagers rebelling against their fully forested elders to the north, south and west.

Horses chew lazily on the grass in the pastures. Cows lounge in clumps under the warm sun. As everywhere, the cattle have arranged themselves as if they're attending a conference: most in the main meeting, some in breakout groups, a few engaged, apparently, in some form of independent study. Little towns (Smoot, Afton, Etna) appear and disappear without fanfare and not very often. Businesses have names like "Clip & Curl Corral" and "Bull Moose Saloon;" buildings are few and either weathered or falling down altogether. Notwithstanding these indicia of human activity, we see more bales of hay and grass than people, and the breadth, grandeur and verdancy of the vistas bespeak nothing more than undisturbed tranquility.

At Alpine, we join the Snake River (in the picture above). From Alpine to Jackson, the road follows the river as it curves, bends, widens, narrows and generally makes plain how this valley got carved. It is the job of rivers to carve the land, always with the goal of returning to sea level. The Snake still has quite a job ahead of it; its river bed is around 5500 feet above sea level.

After the town of Alpine, the topography to the west becomes less rolling and more, well, alpine. Nothing craggy or barren yet - we're still far below the timberline - but the angles are steeper than the placid angle of repose and the foliage marching up the slopes mostly hugs the ground. The tall evergreens are now in smaller squadrons, and they appear to be clinging to the mountainsides.

Jackson looks like all yuppie ski resorts. The main streets are pretty much interchangeable with those of Estes Park or Park City, Vail or Beaver Creek. Cute shops, wood-timbered Old West facades, congested streets, restaurants with big city pretensions, the obligatory microbrewery, and more people crammed into a few square yards than we've seen in hundreds of miles.

We get through it as quickly as possible, which isn't very quickly, and then the Grand Tetons, which have been hovering on the horizon to the northwest, are suddenly before us. On one side, we still have the rolling green-clad mountains that have accompanied us since northern Utah:

On the other side, we have this:

And here's the view from the balcony of the cottage that will be our home for the next couple days:

I think the Grand Tetons are going to make it possible for me to forgive Wyoming for Yellowstone.

On the Road Again - Post 3

2009-07-15T19:20:00.000-07:00

Today featured a leisurely drive from southern Utah to Montpelier, Idaho, and a world-class BLT.

I feel silly waxing rhapsodic about a sandwich within 24 hours after extolling the geologic splendor of Bryce Canyon, but there you have it.

The Roadfood people note in their rave review of Hire's Big H in Salt Lake City that the BLT is "an unassuming masterpiece." "Deceptively simple" would be a better descriptor than "unassuming," but the sandwich is indeed a masterpiece.

To clarify - and for the benefit of any chefs who decide to embark on the assembly of a truly great bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich - here are the essential elements:

--First and foremost, the bacon must be cooked to order and only slightly cooled. None of that bendy, glutinous, after-the-fact garbage; the BLT can only reach perfection when the bacon is freshly cooked, crisp and still warm.

--The tomatoes must be ripe, red, cold and sliced about the width of a pinkie finger.

--The lettuce may be leafed (my preference) or torn into bite-sized pieces, but it must be fresh, crisp and cold.

--The mayonnaise must be the real deal - smooth, creamy and white. Nothing ecru or goopy or filled with chemicals. There must be enough for a teardrop or two to squeeze out while you eat, but not so much that the sandwich sobs.

--Finally, and nearly as important as the bacon, is the bread. Nothing multigrain or sourdough or crusty or fancy in any way. The bread must be white bread, but not, I hasten to add, some soft doughy tasteless abomination. It should be white bread like someone's grandmother from the old country makes - substantial and full of natural flavor - and it should be toasted to a lovely nut brown on both sides. Oh, and there should be only 2 slices of it, both slightly thicker than the tomato slices. This is not some starchy monstrosity we're building; it's an exquisite assembly that someone will still be marveling over hours, possibly days, later.

I think I can tear myself away from blissful contemplation of the BLT long enough to describe the beauties of the drive north. Salt Lake City is always a bit of a production to get out of, what with the traffic and the road construction, but we left before serious rush hour began, so it didn't take us too long to find ourselves in the gorgeous green serenity of northern Utah and southeastern Idaho.

This topography is one of rolling hills, except here the hills rise 2500 feet or more from the roadway, which is itself around 6000 feet above sea level. The air is fresh, pure and semi-arid (no humidity and no frizzing of curly hair). The temperature is in the 70s. The mountains are the gentle, angle-of-repose slopes carved by receding glaciers; with their rounded fissures and cracks, they always look to me like the gigantic paws of colossal animals at rest.

The whole landscape, in fact, looks like the purview of titans. The scale is vast. No crowding escarpments here. The mountains hang back, like quietly self-confident hosts who know they need not assert themselves to be noticed.

These mountains are densely blanketed in green, from scrub to shrubs to small rounded trees to sentinel-straight ranks of evergreens. It's amazing how many shades of green there are. A few white or yellow wildflowers and some purple shrubs also stud the carpeted slopes, but the overall effect is of a thousand shades of green, from sage to lime to loden and everything in between.

Just before Utah gives over to Idaho, the road opens onto the breathtaking vista of Bear Lake. Its vast acres of cobalt blue water fringed by dark-green-cloaked mountains are impossible to capture photographically (at least by me), but it leaves a mental imprint that cannot be forgotten.

About 30 miles later, we're in Montpelier. There's nothing much there, but after last year's Death March to Bataan drive from Salt Lake City to Yellowstone, we decided to take it easy on this trip. Our destination is the Grand Tetons (missed last year due to said Death March), but tomorrow is soon enough to get there.

I'm a snob where big city hotels are concerned, but on the road I require nothing more in a place to stay than cleanliness, blackout shades, air conditioning, and the delivery by both the bed and the shower of firm pressure. The Clover Creek Inn offers all this, plus the added luxuries of friendly staff, high-speed internet access, a profusion of pillows, and towels a step above typical motel fare. We reconnect briefly with the outside world, then sleep like babies.

One last thing: It seems important to mention that we ate no potatoes in Idaho, a mistake we intend to rectify the next time through.

On the Road Again - Post 2

2009-07-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I love Utah's National Parks is that they are literally groundswells of geology in action. I have no interest in flora and very little interest in fauna, but I have a passion for geology. I love its all-but-infinite time horizons, its grandiosely broad perspective, its eloquence and its ubiquity.

The geologic story of Bryce Canyon - and of Utah's other National Parks - is primarily a story of water. Rock formations result from erosion, and erosion, even in the desert, is water's handiwork. The day-to-day freeze-thaw cycle of dew, rain, ice and snow sculpts rock by working its expansion-contraction magic over geologic time.

About 60 million years ago, the basin that covered most of southern Utah began to fill with fresh water. For millions of years, rivers and streams from surrounding mountains filled the lake in the basin with silts, clays and sands. Calcium carbonate glued these sediments together and formed the limestone from which Bryce Canyon was carved.

About 16 million years ago, southern Utah began to rise as large faults in the earth's crust pushed up a series of plateaus. The Paunsaugunt Plateau rose from sea level to approximately 8000 feet. The Aquarius Plateau, just to the east, rose 2000 feet higher still. Water erosion began to wear away the limestone even as the plateaus were still rising. Eventually, the softer stone washed away, leaving the spires, arches, walls and, finally, the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon.

Hoodoos are the pinnacles left behind when ridges, walls and arches wear away and collapse. They go last because they're protected by a layer of harder caprock called dolomite. This erodes too, but at a much slower rate. The differential erosion rates are what cause the crazy shapes. Dolomite can't protect the hoodoos forever, though; they, too, eventually collapse.

One of the coolest things about rock formations like Bruce Canyon is their ephemerality. They seem, and indeed are, permanent when viewed in human terms. But in geologic terms, they are provisional, fleeting, as mortal as we are. Geology has all the time in the world and, given all that time, the same forces that created Bryce Canyon will reduce it to rubble and then replace it with something equally spectacular - again and again and again.

With that said, I'll let profound beauty speak for itself:

On the Road Again - Post 1

2009-07-13T21:33:00.001-07:00

The desert in summer has a beauty, but it is a subtle beauty. Part of its appeal is its essential featurelessness. But for the occasional sprinklings of Joshua trees and other close-to-the-ground dun-colored scrub, the desert is nothing but sand, the many-colored but utterly barren mountain ridges that ring the horizon in every direction, sky of a singularly deep blue, and the hot, clear, brilliant sun. The vistas are huge and panoramic; they don't merely dwarf their constituent parts, they swallow them up. Las Vegas, which admittedly has fantastical elements that would make it unlikely in any setting, seems altogether chimerical within two minutes after it disappears from the rearview mirror.

Between Las Vegas and the northeast Nevada-Arizona border (pat yourself on the back if you knew that a corner of Arizona pokes up between Nevada and Utah), there is almost nothing but limitless desert. But for the road, it's probably looked the same for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years. Well, the road and Mesquite, Nevada, a tacky, hopeful Las Vegas wanna-be. In the summer as it shimmers in the heat, Mesquite seems particularly well named - it looks to be possible to grill a steak on virtually every rooftop, roadway and other sun-scorched surface.

The little spit of Arizona changes everything. Suddenly, the road winds and climbs and the mountains close in. The sun is just as intense, the mountains just as orange and craggy, but the perspective is now primarily vertical rather than horizontal. It is a fitting introduction to Utah, one of the most extravagantly beautiful places on earth.

The diversity of Utah's topography is astonishing; it offers everything from arid desert to dense alpine forests to verdant pastures thousands of feet in the air to fantasy lands of iron-rich sandstone and pearly limestone. Its five national parks - more, I believe, than in any other state - span a tiny band right at the top of the quality spectrum, from the eye-popping splendor of Zion and Arches to the out-of-this-world glory of Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and Canyonlands.

Interstate 15, which starts in Los Angeles and goes north, by way of Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, all the way to the Canadian border, was well placed. It occupies the only ugly and boring cylinder of space in Utah. We leave it behind at the first opportunity and wend our way to Bryce Canyon via one of the many scenic byways available to people not in a hurry.

Within the next hundred miles, we gain nearly 8000 feet of elevation and lose just over 40 degrees of temperature. Not too far after the summit at 9910 feet above sea level, Lake Navajo, in the picture above, perches placidly in the rich, dry 71-degree air.

Within 50 miles of Lake Navajo, we encounter the hoodoo-topped red rocks in the pictures below. This topographical diversity is all part of the Dixie National Forest, so named not out of geographical confusion, but because Mormons in the late 1800s sent some of their number to this part of southern Utah to grow cotton.

Our home for the night is Bryce Canyon Lodge, a historical landmark inside the park that was built by the Union Pacific Railroad early in the 20th century. We wander, somewhat breathlessly inasmuch as we are now at a lung-draining 8500 feet, surrounded by 6-million year old rock formations. The pink cliffs of the Wasatch formation date back to the Cenozoic Era, the time when mammals first appeared on earth.

More on all that tomorrow. For tonight, content after a dinner of salad and grilled red trout, we walk to the lip of the canyon and watch the sun set behind the alternating soft siltstone and hard limestone layers that millions of years of rain, ice and snow have eroded into fantastical pinnacles, walls, and arches. It is strange to think that sunsets were already old-hat billions of years before these ancient rocks existed.

Youth

2009-07-07T15:16:00.000-07:00

I am at the coffee shop, having been driven out of my normally quiet home by the clatter and bustle of the cleaning people. In four high-backed upholstered chairs that don't match and have, in any event, seen much better days, sit four teenagers. They have the chairs pulled close around a tiny table - one of those short side tables that serve as central tables in coffee shops.

The little table above which the teenagers' chairs loom is crammed with food and drink, and the teenagers are gobbling. This is surprising. I doubt the three boys and one girl combined weigh 400 pounds. They are, all of them, freakishly skinny, drug addict skinny.

Their clothes and haircuts seem to have been chosen for maximum ugliness. Underwear is visible on all - the boys are sporting colorful tight briefs (the kind little children wear) with either jeans or slimy nylon basketball shorts slung on their palm-width hips, defying gravity; a ramshackle bra, which she does not need, pokes out of the girl's skimpy sundress, itself a plaid the colors of jaundice and fresh bruises. Two of the teenagers are dirty blond, two are dirty brunette; all of their hair is pasted greasily to their skulls and none of it appears to have been cut with any sort of plan or symmetry in mind. One of the blond boys wears a red woolen stocking cap. (This is Las Vegas and it is currently 104 degrees Fahrenheit).

The teenagers' skin keeps the drug addict imagery alive: they have no glow, no tan, no ruddiness, not even the slick shine of acne. They are gray. But for their oddly loud clothing, they could be characters in a black and white movie shot by a bad cinematographer.

How do I see all this? They cannot sit still as they gobble. First one, then another, then the first, then yet another pops up, wanders around the shop, texts, makes a quick call, sits back down. Perhaps all this fidgeting is why their food creates no bulk. Standing, the boys look like long-waisted optical illusions. Their legs are skin-wrapped sticks, seemingly nowhere near sturdy enough to support even emaciated bodies. One of the boys slings his arm around the girl. She smiles, but does not look up at him. Both the line of her jaw and the knobs where her arms meet her shoulders look sharp enough to cut glass.

It is impossible to think of any of them writing a term paper, running for public office, raising children, curing cancer, working in an office building (or, for that matter, in the Peace Corps) or in any other way assuming the mantle of adulthood.

There is no denying it: I am old. What a relief. I am giddy with the realization that my own transition from awkward awful adolescence to adulthood is so far in the past as to be all but beyond recollection.

A Howl at the Moon

2009-06-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

How I wish it were possible to meet other people's behavior in kind without having to think of oneself as equally churlish. It irritates me to feel obliged to take the high road, even though I know it's the right thing to do, and the only realistic option, when others are ignorant, unresponsive, unreliable, rude, ungenerous, thoughtless or so wedded to their own agendas that the mere hint of a differing viewpoint pushes them to dizzying heights of defensive anger and uncivilized restatement or to awkward depths of sulky withdrawal.

I would give a lot never again to have to deal with people who, as William James put it, think they are thinking when all they are really doing is rearranging their prejudices. I'm tired of "you scratch my back; I'll refuse to acknowledge you even have a back" behavior. I'm weary beyond belief of people unwilling or unable to keep their promises, people who don't follow up, people who ask and take but don't listen or give, and people who don't mean what they say (or maybe they do, but it doesn't matter because what they say has no apparent influence over what they do).

When did breathtaking inconsiderateness become something basically decent people allowed themselves to indulge in with nary a blush or pang? Get back in touch with me after a decade to request a personal reference, but via a note that makes it plain that you didn't even bother to look at my profile on the LinkedIn/Plaxo/Biznik/Facebook/Twitter route you took to find me and so have no idea that I no longer live in Chicago or that I've written books or have a website. Request that I send you something, then fail to thank me for it or even acknowledge that you received it. Call me when you need something; live the rest of your life in blithe indifference to my existence. Ask me to be your friend, your fan, your follower, to vote for you in some contest, to comment on your blog, to read your book, to attend some event, all with no attempt or intent (or, as far as I can tell, even any awareness that it might be possible) to do the same for me. Yammer on about how relationships are important, engaging is important, generosity is important, then treat everyone else as if they are nothing but numbers who can boost you in some way.

I'd love to be able to make the decision to become a "me first, me only" jackass and still live with myself. The high road is often a lonely, windswept, howling place. I've learned from experience, though, that taking it exacts a lesser cost from me than does grubbing in the crowded mud of ill-mannered, uncharitable, self-absorbed ugliness. But oh how I sometimes wish it were otherwise!

Now Appearing on a Blog Near You

2009-06-12T16:55:00.000-07:00

I've written another guest post, this one for M-BRANE SF, the creation of Christopher Fletcher. In addition to being a blogger, Christopher is a chef, a magazine publisher, and a fiction writer currently living "in self-imposed exile in OKC." My thanks to him for the opportunity and to GUD Magazine for introducing us on Twitter.

My guest post - "For Writers: A Story & Three Tactics" - is about my evolution as a writer of fiction, my writing process, and a few of the ways I polish my work. Please click through to read it. While you're on the M-BRANE SF site, be sure to take a look around; you'll find a lot of interesting material.

Lawyers & Their Careers

2009-06-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

No one who knows or has worked with me would call me an apologist for large law firms. I have written, in some places scathingly, about the many, many things these firms could do better relative to their workforce, to their clients and to running themselves like sensible, for-profit businesses.

(If you're interested in reading any of my constructive criticisms, check out The Productive Culture Blueprint or browse the Careers and Feminism posts here.)

But when I met Ron Fox on Twitter and surprised him by saying that I thought large law firms, despite their many shortcomings, were still the best places for new law grads to learn the craft of being lawyers, I found myself limning the positives of what Ron calls "BigLaw" to explain what I meant.

Our ensuing email conversation was quite spirited, and Ron suggested we break it down into separate posts for publication on his Lawyer Satisfaction Blog.

Here they are:

Post #1 BIGLAW FOR NEW GRADS: FRIEND OR FOE?

Post #2 HOW DO LAW STUDENTS MAKE CAREER DECISIONS?

Post #3 ARE LAW SCHOOLS MERELY FUNNELS FOR BIGLAW?

Post #4 WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

A Word is a Word is a Word. Or Not

2009-05-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

Apparently, "balance" is now a dirty word. As in "Balance is a myth."

At first, I was inclined to dismiss this as so much sound and fury signifying nothing, but I can't seem to let go of it. The dirtying of the word seems to me to contribute to the repulsive notion that women are something other than full-fledged human beings with the ability and the right to manage their own lives - not to mention to focus on what actually matters.

I was informed this morning that in the context of work-life balance the word has come to mean 50/50, as in "I must spend the exact same amount of time and expend the exact same effort on my family as on my career in order to be balanced."

Obviously, this is ridiculous. A balanced life is just like a balanced story, a balanced diet, a balanced argument. The point of the word is that the thing in question works, it's pleasing, it has the right relative placement of the important and the less important. It does the trick. The 50/50 concept must be read into the word; it is not there as a matter of definition. Moreover, why 50/50? People have more than two things to balance; they have friends, lovers, hobbies, pets, causes and all manner of other activities in addition to career and family.

If the word has come to have this 50/50 connotation, the reason ties directly to the work-life balance conundrum faced by women. Whether adopted by women ourselves with the result that we feel bad about our own balance choices or batted at us at all times by a society intent on insinuating that it is not possible to have both a good career and a good family simultaneously, the whole "balance is a myth" phenomenon is misogynistic and limiting.

Does anyone hear the phrase "balance is a myth" and think first:

--Maybe I better reconsider taking a sabbatical to work on a political campaign?

--How am I ever going to incorporate care of my elderly parents into my life?

--Will it be possible to combine my career goals with being a dad?

I doubt it. I think most people hear the phrase and think either "Good grief! How am I ever going to make this career/being a mom thing work?" or "Women don't have what it takes to do both." The likely impact of this is concern bordering on despair for women contemplating taking on both, and narrowing of opportunities for women in work environments that demand dedication and commitment from their workers.

Neither impact helps women construct and lead full lives. The bottom line is that the dirtying of the word "balance" has a disproportionately negative impact on women and is inherently sexist.

Maybe I should just relax. One of the tried-and-true tactics for re-selling a tried-and-true concept is to make it seem fresh instead of old-hat. If we call balance a dirty word, we can spin a new one that, with any luck, will strike people as perky, appealing, and innovative. A bit sleazy perhaps, but OK. I can live with it.

Also, unintended meanings have been attaching themselves to words, like so many barnacles clinging to the hull of a boat, from time immemorial. The word "choice" comes immediately to mind. So does "working mother," which carries far more meaning than the usual adjective/noun combo. (It continues to annoy me no end that "working mother" is a loaded phrase and "working father" is not a phrase at all.) New nuances and meanings are how language evolves, and the evolution is not necessarily political. Evolution is OK with me, too.

But here's my problem. First of all, this wordplay is silly, in the same way the 60s talk about changing the word "history" to "herstory" was silly. Easily scorned silliness like this doesn't help the cause, both because it lends itself to being mocked and because it distracts our eyes from the ball. The word isn't what's in need of redefinition. Whether you call it balance or something else, the point is that each person has the right and the responsibility to define and then construct for herself a life that works.

Second, the world we live in does not need any help marginalizing women. It does not need any help insinuating that there's somehow a right way to be a woman and that all other choices fall short. Examples abound, be they discussions - in 2009! - of gender as a potentially negative issue when filling a Supreme Court seat, or the pregnancy of a 66-year-old woman (who is almost without exception referred to as a "career woman" instead of, more appropriately, as an example of selfishness and medical freakery), or a list of great 20th century books that manages to include only 7 books written by women (and to include among the exclusions, if you will, not only Edith Wharton and Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker, but also the Great American Novel, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird). (Don't like these examples, which, by the way, are all from just this morning? Here are plenty more.)

Even if the intent of throwing a nice word like "balance" under the bus is to empower women, the very separation of women from men in this regard suggests we are somehow not in the same position as men with respect to making our own choices, setting our own priorities, and doing what each of us, in her own wisdom and circumstances, deems the right things to do with her life. Backhanded sexism is still sexism.

Frontiers, Crossed and Crossing

2009-05-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

My Twitter and Facebook friend Raul Ramos y Sanchez is the author of AMERICA LIBRE, a novel coming out this summer that is already an International Latino Book Award winner and one of USA Today's 2009 Summer Reads. Raul is thoughtful (in both senses of the word), and his passion for exploring issues of ethnicity in American life, culture and politics mirrors mine for exploring issues of gender. He is always posting provocative questions along these lines, and we have enjoyed stimulating conversations on Twitter, on Facebook, and here on my blog.

(In fact, Raul is the reason I now brave Facebook once or twice a week. The nicest thing I can say about Facebook is that I don't get it. The interface makes little sense to me, I have better ways to stay in touch with people I already know, and all those sophomoric quizzes and applications may well, it seems to me, put the final nails in the coffin of Western civilization (and, for all I know, Eastern civilization too). But Raul's thoughtful conversational prompts are great, and I can't stand the idea of missing one, so into Facebook's shallow, silty waters I now wade. I should also acknowledge, before I close the parentheses on this paragraph, that I recognize I'm standing in a glass house throwing stones when I diss Facebook. Twitter can certainly be sophomoric too, but I've found it much easier to tailor my own experience there. To each his or her own.)

Anyhoo, Raul asked today whether President Obama will name a Hispanic to the Supreme Court and whether achieving ethnic balance on the Court should even be a factor. I answered that it should indeed be a factor given our current circumstances, which are that there are eminently qualified Hispanic (and female) candidates for Justice Souter's seat. It is not necessary to relax standards to appoint a replacement who is not a white man. Given that, and in light of US demographics, I think achieving ethnic and gender balance on the Court is a completely appropriate goal.

In answering Raul's question, I lifted some ideas and paraphrased some sentences from A MERGER OF EQUALS. I concluded long ago, somewhat shakily, that quoting myself without attribution is not plagiarism. I feel...I don't know, derivative, I guess...whenever I do it, but I do it all the time anyway, secure in the knowledge that no one but I has read, let alone committed to memory, virtually every sentence I've ever written.

Today, however, my character Charlie keeps interrupting the writing I've been trying to do (on another book altogether) with a strong message to the effect that I didn't do justice to the point I lifted from him. So here it is (redacted to delete spoilers, for those of you who haven't yet read the book):

That created the first vacancy on the Executive Committee since the coup, and I felt strongly that we should fill it with a woman.

At the time of the coup, I had regretted that our slate didn’t include any women. But there were none of sufficient seniority at the Firm and we’d decided we had enough to manage without adding the effort of identifying and recruiting someone from outside, then selling her to the rest of the Firm. One step at a time, we’d told ourselves.

There was something about [recent events] that made me feel our “one step at a time” approach, however practical, had been essentially a rationalization. Women seemed to me to be able to handle just about anything, and it started to strike me as shabby that we hadn’t yet managed to handle getting even one into the Firm’s management.

The Firm still had no women positioned for appointment to the EC, although we had made good progress in the last year. I had no doubt that in another year or two several women would be good candidates for the EC.

We considered naming one of them to fill the EC vacancy even if it was premature. A couple were probably strong enough to make their voices heard even without a more established power base. But we weren’t looking to put a woman on the EC just so we could say we had one. The goal was to realize the actual benefits, financial and otherwise, of inclusivity and diversity – and to demonstrate that it wasn’t necessary to relax standards in order to include women.

Putting a token woman on the Committee satisfied neither of these goals. We needed someone with proven leadership skills and either a client base or some other equally credible value to bring to the Firm. All the EC members had strong client relationships; most were (or had once been) group heads and also chaired important Firm committees or held other administrative leadership positions. Naming a woman without these qualifications to the EC would undercut both the purpose behind our stated diversity goals and her ability to feel and act like a full-fledged member.

Because we’d have to look outside to fill the immediate vacancy with a woman, there was a fair amount of discussion at the EC about waiting for the next opening or seeking a woman for the open spot but filling it with the best candidate we found, irrespective of gender. As far as I was concerned, this was just so much bullshit designed to put off diversifying the Committee. I argued hotly that there was no reason we couldn’t find a qualified woman unless we failed to look seriously for one and that we shouldn’t settle for filling the vacancy with another man.

As I said to Raul, I applaud President Obama for taking into account the goal of achieving ethnic and gender balance and developing his Supreme Court candidate list accordingly. As Charlie reminded me, there is no reason we can't find a qualified and diverse candidate unless we fail to look seriously for one.

Hysteria

2009-05-05T15:06:00.000-07:00

I don't understand the impulse toward hysteria. There's also nothing much to like about the phenomenon. Starting with the word itself, which derives from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus, "hysteria" was originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women. With those misogynistic roots, one would think the term had nowhere to go but up.

But no. Instead, hysteria became a social phenomenon, nowhere more evident than in this recent ridiculous mania over swine flu. As I understand it, statistically speaking your chances of contracting and dying from swine flu are significantly less than your chances of choking to death on a ballpoint pen (which 100 people do every year). They are a tiny fraction of your chances of dying in a car accident (43,000 annually) or from assorted gun violence (17,000). "Normal" flu kills around 36,000 people every year. And these numbers are just for the U.S. The swine flu hysteria is even sillier when considered in terms of global numbers.

So what prompted it? Why were/are people with about as much risk of contracting swine flu as someone living alone on a mountaintop all hysterical at the thought of going to school or getting on a plane or eating in a Mexican restaurant? Why were/are they flocking to already overcrowded ERs because they imagine their tummies hurt?

I've wondered about this personalization of peril before. I was doing some work for a company in Los Angeles right after 9/11. For a couple weeks after those horrific events, a few of the people in the LA office - none of whom had been personally affected by the attacks - were "too traumatized to come to work." Was this their way of empathizing? Of honoring the dead? Or was it an exploitation, however unconscious, of someone else's loss? I hate to think it was anything other than empathy - how dishonorable to attempt to make events like those of 9/11 about oneself!

Why join in the hysteria over something that, if you weren't hysterical, you would plainly see poses no imminent threat to you? Does feeling in peril make people feel important? Or maybe it's the opposite; maybe it makes people feel like they belong, like they're part of the community.

If so, too bad the hysterical community in question is such a silly, self-centered and wasteful one. If we could inject all the energy behind the swine flu hysteria into a community bent on improving healthcare for the poor - or, for that matter eradicating gun violence or fatal car accidents - we'd actually accomplish something important and lasting. Not to mention communal.

Ersatz Wisdom

2009-03-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling bombarded by bumper-sticker wisdom (an oxymoron, I know). It's everywhere! On the aforesaid bumper stickers. On coffee cups and paperweights. In email. Embroidered or stamped on those tacky framed homily things that hang in touristy stores full of kitschy crap. And littered all over social media sites, the online equivalent, it occurs to me, of touristy stores full of kitschy crap.

I guess it's OK for people to take inspiration wherever they can find it, but it's beyond me how anyone could find the following drivel* inspiring:

"If your goal doesn't make you just a little bit sick, then you are not reaching far enough."

"Act as if you have already achieved your goal and it is yours."

"If we set our attitudes by the days of the week, then our actions will remain the same continually."

"Knowing what to do is different than actually doing it."

"I act with balance in my heart. I speak with balance on my lips. I walk with balance in my feet."

"By thought, the thing you want is brought to you. By action, you receive it."

These little gems range from total gibberish to the sort of lame piffle only someone resolutely opposed to employing gray matter could find meaningful, inspirational or worth passing along. There is no legitimate response to this garbage, if you actually think about it, other than a bewildered "Wait. What?!?" or a sarcastic "Really? Ya think??"

I haven't even included coddling codswallop like "Mistakes are the route to success" or treacly tommyrot like "Just as the sun sets & we must find a way to let go of another day, the sun will rise with the promise of a new day & a new beginning." (I also haven't yet used all the synonyms for "nonsense" I can think of without consulting a thesaurus.)

Contrast all this balderdash, if you will, with the following pithy, profound and thought-provoking aphorisms:

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Albert Einstein

"Example is not the main thing influencing others. It is the only thing." Albert Schweitzer

"The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself." Rita Mae Brown

"Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think." Alexander Pope

"Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?" Sai Baba

And if we must have some treacliness: "The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is." Erasmus

I rest my case.

*I'd attribute these quotations if I could, but I've been scribbling them as I see them and, really, who would want his or her name attached to any of them anyway?

I'm a Guest Blogger!

2009-03-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

Charlene Kingston, who will always be @Kinchie (her Twitter handle) to me, asked me to write a guest post for her elegant and useful blog, From the Crow's Nest. Obviously, I was thrilled, and today I am also feeling quite honored as I see my post up on her site, along with her generous introduction.

Pleas click over and read my post "Finding Career Happiness." I'd love it if you'd leave a comment on the post, but even if you're not in a commenting mood, do take the time to browse around and learn more about Charlene and her company, Crow Information Design.

The tag line for Charlene's blog is: "Finding the shortest distance between your message and your audience." Her company provides services that help companies and freelance professionals present themselves in writing for online and print media. Do you see why I'm so delighted to be guest blogging for her??

Ever the Iconoclast

2009-02-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

I've decided to buck the social media trend and reduce the number of people in my online crowd.

I was never in it to rack up numbers anyway. My goal was and is conversation, not reach. I also don't mind the amount of time it takes to interact with my SM community even though it often takes more than I expected to spend.

No, my problem is that the prize isn't currently worth the price. My cost-benefit ratio is off. I'm irritated and annoyed too often. Sometimes, I'm actually angry. There may or may not be an upward limit on how many people one can legitimately befriend/follow/interact with, but too many of my folks aren't holding up their end of the bargain I thought we were making.

I want conversation. I want reciprocity. I want to read interesting, humorous, intelligent updates and click on thought-provoking, well written articles and blog posts. I want to be acknowledged and treated courteously.

I don't want to be bored. I don't want to be told the same thing 20 times. I don't want to feel obliged to read back in time to make sure I haven't ignored a friend, knowing and resenting that the friend has never once extended the same courtesy to me.

I don't want friends who recommend sophomoric or banal content. I don't want to read the work of writers who are evidently unaware that "it's" and "its" are not interchangeable, who think "lot's" is a word, who don't know the difference between "affect" and "effect," who can't spell. (I'm not talking about typos; I'm talking about people who "die" their hair or seek "resoprosity.")

In short, I want intelligent, interesting friends and requited friendships. Not numbers, not users, not talkers who never listen, not nonstop profferers of the self-congratulatory social media Kool-Aid, and not illiterates.

But wait. Who the heck do I think I am?

In social media, as in life, there's no percentage in holding other people to my personal rules of engagement. For one thing, it's not fair. One size doesn't (and doesn't have to) fit all. For another, no one died and made me king. Other people aren't wrong by reason of not defining friendship the same way I do. They're absolutely entitled to their own definitions, their own rules of engagement. The only person I get to be in charge of is me.

As I see it, I have three choices:

I can roll my eyes and wonder what's wrong with people. Resent them for not having the kind of manners, writing style, intellectual sophistication or attention to detail I'd consider ideal. Feel ignored, unacknowledged and taken for granted as I meticulously read everything they offer even when it's obvious they are not doing the same in return. [Insert loud "Wrong Answer" buzzer sound effect here.]
I can accept people as they are. Enjoy what they do bring to the party. Adjust my expectations and meet them on their terms. [Ding, ding, ding.]
If my crowd includes people whose terms I can't manage to meet without excessive teeth-grinding and tongue-biting, I can walk away. Social media is to friendship what Las Vegas is to blackjack tables; it's always possible simply to get up and move to a more agreeable and satisfying table. [Ding, ding, ding, ding.]

How stupid of me to have spent even one minute choosing Option 1! How arrogant to hold others responsible for not making my choices while I blithely ignore my own responsibility for making them. How nice to have woken up!

So I'm culling my list. No judgment, no hard feelings - it's just a matter of placing the responsibility for tailoring my experience squarely where it belongs. On me.

Valentine's Day

2009-02-10T21:30:00.000-08:00

I wrote last year that I don't get the whole Valentine's Day hype. Manufactured feelings smack to me of form over substance, and I don't like to be told how to act by greeting card companies or florists or chocolatiers (well, maybe chocolatiers).

As an alternative - or, if you must, in addition - to celebrating Valentine's Day with silly material crap, please consider the LOVE ebook, now available at Writing Roads. Full of love-inspired poetry, photos and art, the LOVE ebook was developed and assembled by Julie Roads with the goal of spreading happiness and positivity and making a difference for people struggling with the recession. The ebook is available for free, but when you download it you may also make a donation to Career Gear, a national nonprofit that helps men find and keep jobs through skills training, interview clothing and relationship building.

Please click here and see for yourself how this wonderful idea has come to life. Oh - and happy Valentine's Day!

Sexism Hurts. So Does Rudeness

2009-02-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was unpleasantly surprised by an unexpected and ugly instance of demeaning sexism in an email. Not an email just to me, but an email sent to a large distribution list. The offending two paragraphs were written in a joke-y, "of course we all think this way" tone, and they reinforced demeaning stereotypes about relationships between men and women that were already outdated in the 1960s.

Anyone attuned to these things has no trouble finding them everywhere. From the clods on the campaign trail who yelled "Iron my shirts!" at Hillary Clinton to the ignoramuses who write magazine articles insinuating that men are incapable of being nurturing parents (the kind of sexism, like the two offending paragraphs in my email yesterday, that manages both to degrade men and to define women in a limiting way), there is no shortage of prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination on the basis of gender in our everyday lives.

I hate having to be a good sport about sexism, knowing that my silence amounts to tacit approval and makes me a collaborator. Still, I understand that you have to pick your battles unless you want to be battling all the time. I also recognize the need for a sense of humor. Sexism is unfortunately so embedded in our society, our lingo, and our consciousness that even people who do not promote it sometimes find themselves contributing to its continued existence.

As strongly as I feel about this issue, I want to battle it effectively, and I've concluded that taking on every casual instance I run across is not the way to do that. I tend to nod and smile pleasantly and change the subject when people assume my husband's income was what funded our early retirement or ask me who's going to take care of him when I travel on business, or even when someone tells one of those ubiquitous jokes that portray women as for sex only and men as lumbering buffoons.

But yesterday's email came from someone who is widely known and admired. Whether he intends to be or not, he is a role model. I stewed over his sexist paragraphs for a while, then decided that because of his reach, I didn't want to let this one go. I wrote a polite 3-sentence response that gently objected to the sexism. The last of the 3 sentences read: "I seriously doubt you really think this, and hope you won't mind a friendly reminder that stereotypes don't help anyone."

Once my email was written, I thought it over, bounced it off a couple people whose opinions I trust to rein in my more knee-jerk reactions, and then sent it. It's now 24 hours later and he has not seen fit to respond. This rudeness further offends me. We're dealing with someone who is always hooked in, who never lets his cell phone out of his sight, who communicates frequently and well. I have the ability to call him out publicly. Shall I?

2/9/09 Update: Sincere thanks to all who've commented on this post, either below, on Facebook or via email. There was nothing private about the email with the paragraphs that offended me. It went to a distribution list that I understand exceeds 50,000 people. There is also nothing private about my reply to the sender. So here they both are.

The paragraphs I objected to opened the 2/3/09 afternoon HARO email. HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, an innovative free subscription service that connects reporters with sources. HARO emails go out three times per day on weekdays, and each edition is sponsored. As far as I know, Peter Shankman, whose brainchild HARO is, writes the opening paragraphs. In any event, he is the "I" referred to in them.

The edition in question opened as follows:

This HARO is thanks to those words no guy wants to hear: "Why hasn't he proposed yet?!" Well, celebrity relationship experts, TV personalities and husband/wife Matt Titus and Tamsen Fadal have the answer for women who can't get their man to pop the question in their latest book, "Why Hasn't He Proposed?" Go From The First Date To Setting The Date. A real married couple, they have the answer to how you can land the ring on your finger with their fool-proof six week plan to get him to commit without saying a word! This book comes on the heels of their first book, "Why Hasn't He Called? and their Lifetime show, "Matched In Manhattan," a reality show based on their lives as married relationships experts and a real life couple. Plus, Matt and Tamsen are giving away the chance to win a free diamond ring with the launch of their new book!
[Links & contact info deleted].

The above book, which virtually every female on HARO is now buying, is enough to scare me into having absolutely nothing to say in my opening monologue. :)

Here's the text of the email I wrote in response:

Hey, whoa, ease up on the sexism, OK? This female would not only not buy this book if it were the last book on earth, but is disappointed to see someone so evolved playing into outdated notions that women are all about trapping men and men are all about eluding women. I seriously doubt you really think this, and hope you won't mind a friendly reminder that stereotypes don't help anyone.

I should also note than I'd previously emailed him to inquire how one went about becoming a HARO sponsor, and he responded to that email immediately.

Atwitter

2009-01-26T12:21:00.000-08:00

We met in the fall. It was not love at first sight. At first, I wasn't sure I even liked you. You struck me as frivolous, noisy, possibly shallow. A bunch of your friends rushed to introduce themselves, and I wasn't crazy about them either. They were talkers, not listeners, very full of themselves. They seemed awfully pushy. Self-congratulatory, too - always telling me how great they were and getting all agog over some personal "discovery" that anyone not so self-absorbed could have told them has been around since Socrates.

I was cool toward you. But I couldn't shake a sense of fascination, a feeling that you were trying to offer me something great.

So I decided to see you more often. I opened up and let you in on who I am, what I'm interested in, what I care about. Almost immediately, a new bunch of your friends introduced themselves, and this bunch was amazing: impressive thinkers, fascinating talkers, enthusiastic listeners, generous supporters. They introduced me to more people and our circle expanded exponentially.

Suddenly, our relationship was incredible. Every tryst offered a newly woven tapestry of glistening conversational threads, an unending kaleidoscope of ideas, humor, music, poetry, news, recipes, opinions, and intriguing personal tidbits.

I couldn't get enough. I started thinking and answering emails and even occasionally speaking in your unique 140-character cadence. I was tempted to abandon my usual pursuits and spend all my time with you. I couldn't stand the thought of missing even one thing. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I noticed the kind of amusing, eccentric, newsworthy miscellany that I knew would tickle you.

I was crazy about you. After every absence, I eagerly backtracked through our time apart to see what you'd been up to. I listened to everything. I responded, commiserated, offered experience and knowledge, joked around, objected, supported. I was totally exhilarated.

But then a few cracks appeared. Some days, you were more annoying than interesting. You didn't always interact. Sometimes, you took without giving. One of your friends stole something. Another tried to bully me; I stuck to my guns and we patched things up, but it left a bad taste. I felt crowded, pushed, pressed for time. Little, unimportant things started bugging me (who would have guessed that so many smart people can't spell?), and I started to resent your constant bombardment.

So I pulled back - not wholly, but enough to rediscover the joys of my life independent of you. I reduced your claims on my time. I kept listening, but didn't respond every time I had something to say, content to let some opportunities pass. I stopped being offended when every gesture was not responded to in kind. I gave to give, not to get. I got over expecting you to be something you're not and just appreciated you for what you are.

Now we're content, you and I. Our relationship is comfortable and easy, inspiring, educational, fun, challenging, stimulating, non-judgmental and, best of all, reciprocal. Just like a happily married couple. Twitter, I love ya.

Holiday Travels

2008-12-31T10:31:00.000-08:00

For some reason, none of our family trips when the kids were little included the Grand Canyon, an omission we've been hearing about in recent years. So this year, we punctuated our holiday get-together in Las Vegas with a post-Christmas, pre-New Year's Eve road trip. It was great and, I suspect, a whole lot more fun with 20-something kids than it would have been with younger kids (who, after all, can't be expected to appreciate the extraordinary geological implications and would likely have been more interested in the hotel pool than anything else).

Snow, the Aftermath

2008-12-18T10:07:00.000-08:00

OK, first of all, check out the sky in the next-day photos below. Nice, huh? To be fair, I do remember sunny skies immediately following snow in the Midwest too, but maybe not quite so brilliantly blue. My view has reappeared, the mountains are heavily blanketed in white, the rooftops slightly less so, and I can see the patches of snow shrinking in the sun before my very eyes. I imagine the humidity is higher than usual, although it feels cool and crisp. You wouldn't think someone who spent 50 years in the Midwest would be so thrilled by a snowstorm, but hey, context is everything and I like the unexpected.

I especially like the fallen snowman in the last picture below. For some inexplicable reason, people here love to use giant inflatable things as holiday decorations, and the irony of an inflated snowman face-down in actual snow is pretty great.

Click here for a news story about our rare event and, if you do, be sure to check out the picture of snow covering the sides and Sphinx of the Luxor.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

2008-12-17T16:14:00.000-08:00

According to the weather people, we're having something called "a rare snow event" today in Las Vegas. It's incredible. The palm trees look depressed, with nothing but skinny central spikes reaching upward and the tips of all their fronds sweeping the ground, weighted down by snow. Drivers can't negotiate the slightest of inclines or declines and are generally going about 4 mph. I can't see much further out the window than my own backyard; my glorious view of the Strip and the mountains has completely disappeared into a bright cocoon of white, white and more white. And we're doing a great imitation of the Midwest - snow has been falling consistently since mid-morning. I guess I'll have to dig out some non-flip-flop footwear. Do I even have snow boots?

Here are pix:

Pleasures Expected and Unexpected

2008-12-13T16:24:00.000-08:00

I finally finished the last of the items on my current to-do list that fall into the "obligation" category. Since mid-September, I've had more than my usual complement of these things. They're not all bad. Preparing for and giving speeches, co-conducting a business development workshop, writing articles, etc. are all fine. But they have deadlines, and so they usually end up creating some pressure for me. I get all enthusiastic when someone makes a request and I tend to say yes too quickly and then regret the feeling of obligation, the knowledge of a deadline, the compulsion I feel to do a bang-up job. These pressures don't really get in the way of what I consider my real life, but they do take up space in my mind and eventually, even as I resent the distraction, it becomes more trouble to ignore them than it does to handle them.

Finishing the last of them this morning felt absolutely fantastic. I decided to celebrate by writing a poem in response to a prompt from a new Twitter connection. It's amazingly difficult to try to be pithy and rhyme at the same time - and totally gratifying to come up with something you're not too embarrassed to post. My poem is quite bad, if slightly charming, but it does manage to express how I'm feeling about social media at the moment. Just when you think it's all one big self-serving infomercial, you find some cool, interesting people and get inspired to do something unexpected.

(In case you're a glutton for punishment, my poem and several others may be found in the comments to the December 13 post on Blogging Roads, an interesting and thought-provoking blog from a person whose Twitter bio endearingly reads "Marketing Copywriter, Professional Blogger, Mom, Soc Media'er, Lover of Butter.")

Distracted & Slightly Reluctant

2008-11-22T09:09:00.000-08:00

How can it be so long since I've posted? I knew it had been a few weeks, but apparently it's been a month and a half. Yikes! I guess I can stop trying to get used to writing 2008 on things and just start thinking about writing 2009 instead.

The last couple months have been crazy with travel and responsibilities, very much like having a job. And they've been packed full of things to write, too: my new book, two speeches, an article, a treatment for a web-show, stuff for my website, and about a zillion emails (many of them relating to the thrilling election; three conversational threads with new friends/penpals; one renewed conversation with an old friend normally on the opposite side of the political spectrum). I've also been experimenting with Twitter and Facebook. (Feel free to follow/befriend me on either or both. I use my actual name.)

All that was evidently enough writing to stem the flow of blog post ideas. Also, my mind tends to move less along blogging lines when I have a lot of interaction with real people, and I've been face-to-face far more in the last couple months than my life normally requires.

Well, and to be honest, the few times I've thought about blogging, the topic - or my view on it - has been controversial enough to be better spoken/written to friends than blared without context into cyberspace.

I've realized a few times before that I censor myself here, not so much to avoid offending someone (I have no doubt I've already done that, however unintentionally, via some of the things I have posted), but because some opinions and ideas can't be properly conveyed out of context to total strangers. All evidence in the blogging world to the contrary, this is not a private diary. It's also not a written chat among friends who know each other and can recognize inflection and resolve disquieting concerns based on familiarity and shared history. I don't pretend to be someone I'm not here, but this is a public face, not my whole face. And expressing in this forum certain of my "what the hell is the matter with people?!?" views on the ideas and causes my fellow human beings hold dear is something I just don't feel comfortable doing.

Doing It All: Reality and Myth

2008-10-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

I started thinking about balance, priorities and time management because I am frequently asked how I "did it all." I know the question is intended to be flattering and to refer to my particular combination of successful business career, happy marriage, and cheerful, interesting, grown children, but I don't like the underlying assumption. As flattering as the question is meant to be, "doing it all" is an illusion, and a bad one at that. What we need to do is "our" all. Every working mom needs to articulate her priorities and then spend her time and energy - scarce resources both - doing what matters most to her.

Getting your priorities clear isn't impossible, but getting comfortable with the notion that you get to set your own priorities - and then setting them - is evidently close to impossible for many of us. If you can discern between, on one hand, what you really care about, your spin on what's really important to you and, on the other, what's traditionally done and believed, then you can clarify your priorities and allocate your time so as to spend it on what matters most to you.

You also have to shed any all-or-none mentality you might have. It's not necessary to devote yourself 100% to your kids to be a good mother, and it's not necessary to devote yourself 100% to your career to be good at that. (Most men, by the way, understand this instinctively. They have balance issues, too, but as my character Jane says in A Merger of Equals, men don't worry that they're somehow doing the wrong thing by working when they have kids. Whether for traditional reasons or because they're just wired differently, men expect to work and be parents simultaneously. And everyone else expects that of them, too.)

Throughout all but the first few years of my intense and time-consuming career (which I loved), I also had two kids. There was never a shred of doubt in my mind about what was more important, my kids or my career. My kids won hands-down. That didn't mean, though, that everything about having children took precedence over everything else.

When my kids were babies, I found them boring and needy. Somewhat to my surprise, I learned that adoring them didn’t stop their need for constant care from making me want to jump out of my skin, their non-verbal demands from making me long for words. Who knew? Now, I could have seen this as evidence that I was a terrible mother and should never have had kids, but whose rule would that have been?

Because I had clearly articulated my priorities – and because my self-confidence gives me courage and makes me largely impervious to worrying about things like what some magazine defines as appropriate motherly feelings – I didn’t doubt my fitness for motherhood.

Instead, I tried to figure out which parts of traditional mothering were important to me as a mother and to my kids in their development toward becoming independent, happy, productive members of society. Whenever a time allocation issue arose, it was this frame of reference I fit it into and measured it against. With my priority firmly in mind and a clear framework against which to measure tasks and decide which ones were the important ones, I allocated my time as wisely as I could.

I didn’t need to see my kids' first steps or hear their first words to take – and demonstrate – great pride in their development as walkers and talkers. So for me, putting them in daycare as infants was easy and guilt-free. School plays? I’d rather be working. Teacher conferences? After a memorable conference with an elementary school teacher who evidently had our son confused with someone else (the teacher referred to him as a “quiet, reserved boy” and I politely asked her if she had ever met him), my husband and I decided that he would handle this aspect of parenting. (He was also a busy professional, but one whose competencies include bedside manner.)

It also wasn't necessary to define success at work the same way others did. Like many women, I took a far from linear path. My all-encompassing job as a young lawyer was great when I was learning my craft. But after my daughter was born, I wanted to be able to spend more than 30 minutes a day with her. So I left a law firm in the city for an in-house legal position closer to home in the suburbs. Everyone told me I was closing doors; a few people even told me I was throwing away my career. At the time, I figured I was willing to pay the price of a few closed doors (the principal one being law firm partnership) for the prize of a job I could enjoy and do well in fewer than 16 hours a day.

As it turned out, seven years later I became a partner at a different law firm (where I worked part-time for 4 of the 6 years I was there) and that led me to a senior executive position at a $20 billion company. No doors closed as a result of my non-traditional decisions. Even better, other, arguably superior, doors opened.

The point is not the particular choices I made, but rather that I made choices that used my strengths (and compensated for my weaknesses) in the context of my priorities – and then I lived by those choices. I suited myself. And my kids, my career, my husband and I all flourished.

Success and contentment come from knowing and articulating what matters most to you, then living your life achieving those priorities. The balance is not going to be perfect at every individual moment, but it doesn't have to be. It’s the long-term balance over the course of the journey that counts.

(I write about balance-related issues often. Click here, here, and here for other posts you might find useful. You might also enjoy my Suit Yourself Essays.)

Question du Jour

2008-10-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

I don't go to the Post Office very often. I think my experience is sufficiently randomized to be statistically significant and, based on that, I find myself wondering why virtually everyone in the inevitable line is either: (a) ancient; (b) evidently a newcomer to the wonders of the USPS and desirous of an explanation of every available service; (c) mailing 20 or more items of various sizes and bulk, each one seemingly via a different method and to somewhere exotic that requires a separate (and not-filled-out-in-advance) form; or (d) entirely unsure why he or she is even at the Post Office and apparently in need of USPS personnel assistance to figure it out.

Just like at the cashier windows in casinos, everyone in front of you always seems to have an incredibly complicated transaction. Mysteriously, when it's finally your turn, it takes all of 45 seconds to cash in your chips or, in today's case, send a Priority Mail package to Seattle. Wouldn't it be great to end up in a line behind 45-second-transaction people instead of always being the first such one? That's the dream...

Adventures in Air Travel

2008-09-28T07:51:00.000-07:00

The whole airline business is a mystery to me. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be susceptible to the same business principles that govern every other business, but it seems to have some enigmatic ability to swallow money. What other business would lose money when it routinely sold out or oversold its market-priced product? I have been on a couple dozen or so flights in the last year and every single one of them was packed to the gills. In most cases, the time I spent waiting at the gates was punctuated by the now-familiar "We need a volunteer to take a later flight" plea - always entertaining since no one volunteers and, somehow, the flight boards and departs anyway. Are the extra people stowed in baggage? Vaporized?

And don't I remember that the incentives used to grow in value the closer you got to departure time? Said offers from Las Vegas to Chicago, then Chicago to Albany, last Thursday were evidently fixed at a free round-trip ticket for the future and a later flight for the moment. But the later flights were 9 hours later from Las Vegas and over 24 hours later from Chicago. What the heck did they think the volunteers (had there been any) would do in the meantime? Well, OK, 9 extra hours in Las Vegas would be a kick, if potentially expensive, but who flying from Chicago to Albany on a Thursday evening would likely have the flexibility or the interest to wait until Saturday morning?

I usually fly Southwest. Although the flights are tightly packed, at least some of the other amenities of flying are still intact. My US Air and United flights on Thursday were a rude awakening to the new realities of non-Southwest flights. To check a bag now costs $15. This may or may not be an offensive nickel-and-diming of customers, but the upshot is that people now haul on board everything they possibly can, either to avoid this fee or to avoid the potential hassle of lost baggage. But the plane is packed, the aisles are too narrow for rolling suitcases to be rolled, and the overhead bin space is insufficient. So the unfortunates who board last end up having to check their bags anyway. I presume there is no $15 fee in this case - the flight attendant didn't mention any fee in her oft-repeated "If there's no overhead space, bring your bag to the front and we'll check it for you." This bringing the bags to the front business was also ludicrous - the aisles are TINY and packed with people organizing themselves into seats evidently designed for a species much smaller than most adult travelers. Suppose the extra $15 actually collected on bags checked in the terminal is enough to offset not only baggage-handling costs, but the extra fuel it takes to cool the plane during the now even slower boarding process?

Airlines obviously are saving money by deferring decor maintenance. Both my Thursday planes showed all the signs of hard use. I guess the mechanical maintenance is kept up to snuff (we got where we were going without incident), and I'm a firm believer in "first things first," but do the seats and seat pockets have to be falling apart? Do 10-20% of the tray tables, lights and air vents have to not work? Do the wings and wing flaps have to be adorned with what look (alarmingly) like black skid marks? Does the whole experience have to be so much like taking the bus, but at 5-10 times the cost?

On the US Air flight, I was charged $2 for a bottle of water. This is OK, I guess - it would have cost at least that much to buy a bottle of water in the airport - but the collecting of money and making of change was a ridiculous waste of flight attendant time. And how does the money process work? Do the poor flight attendants have to account for every can, bottle, styrofoam cup and dollar to make sure it all matches up at the end of every flight? Does some idiot in accounting think this effort is without cost? Why on earth don't they just charge $5 more for each ticket and keep the complimentary soft drinks, the customer appreciation that goes with free stuff, the extra $5 from everyone, including people who get no drinks or buy alcohol, and the flight attendants' focus on quick service and safety? What passenger wouldn't pay $329 instead of $324 for the ticket? Is whatever the airline manages to net from the airborne-convenience-store approach worth making me think they're cheap bastards with whom I'll not fly again unless there's absolutely no other option?

The flight attendants on the US Air flight were also incredibly cranky. This might be because they're also now functioning as sales clerks or maybe it's because of the dowdy uniforms they still have to wear - the contrast between their 1950s "air host and hostess" apparel and the "I could comfortably sleep in this" clothing of most passengers is hilarious. Or maybe it's because they don't get paid enough or treated with respect. Who knows? But it seems to me that any business that "recognizes that you have a choice in air travel, appreciates your business, and hopes to see you on another [insert name of airline] flight again soon" might also recognize that it would be a plus to instruct its customer service personnel to treat the customers like fellow human beings instead of annoying scum.

Having said all that, both my flights arrived early. I was resigned with my usual air-travel serenity to the connection being a problem, but the only difficulty I encountered (if you don't count feeling like a sardine in a seen-better-days tin) was the distance I had to trudge between the two gates at O'Hare. Obviously, it was my lucky day. Too bad I couldn't stay home and use that luck at a blackjack table.

Oh, Boo-Hoo

2008-09-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

Articles about the so-called "empty nest syndrome" drive me crazy. Conversely, I love that I received this one from my own 26-year-old daughter, who sent it along with a note that read "Here...this will get you all riled up. :)"

The linked article isn't as bad as some. It includes a melancholy dad in with the weepy moms, a rarity for empty-nest commentary, as well as some women who are more exuberant than misty-eyed about their new "childless" status. Still, even leaving the deeply anti-feminist subtext of articles like these aside, all this moaning and wailing over the growth, development and departure of one's children mystifies me. Isn't their maturity the point? Why would it make anyone "sick with sorrow?"

I saw my daughter off to college and through graduation with delight and pride. Ditto with her younger brother, whose departure created the much-ballyhooed empty nest at our house. I can honestly say my pride and delight were wholly undiluted by either grief or relief. (A little smugness maybe, over everything having turned out so nicely.) And I never once wondered who I was or what I might do with myself once I was no longer a resident parent - just as I never considered being a resident parent my raison-d'être or my justification for the space I take up on the planet.

Any parent who believes, as I do, that a parent's duty is to guide his or her kids on their way to happy, productive, independent adulthood ought to be thrilled to see them go off to college and then on into life. Of course, there are nostalgic moments - and in hindsight it's amazing how fast the years seem to have gone by, especially when you remember those interminable afternoons of nonstop infant fussing or the four years of siblings at each other's throats or the terrifying (and blessedly rare) hours of waiting for medical situations to resolve safely. But what's with the "I need them to pace my work life," "I'm so lonely and cranky" and "My life is too far on its way to over" baloney described in the article?

And it's not like this "it's all about me" attitude toward child-raising does kids any good either. Anyone looking forward to hiring or managing the college student in the article who thinks the best way to find Pilates studios, dentists and the meaning of words is to call her working mother in another state?

Book Announcement

2008-09-07T16:39:00.000-07:00

Two of my works were selected for inclusion in Heart of a Woman in Business, an "inspirational collection of stories, strategies and ideas to help working women everywhere." Written by teachers, coaches, experts, businesswomen, speakers, CEOs and others, it's a "here's how" book that combines insight with guidance, ideas, stories and encouragement.

My pieces are:

an excerpt from A Merger of Equals called "The Nature of Leadership and Personal Ambition" and
an essay adapted from one of my popular speeches called "Suit Yourself and Become a Star"

Heart of a Woman in Business is a 288-page 6"x7" gift book that retails for $16.95. Click here to order the book from Sparkle Press, the publisher, or here to order from Amazon.com.

Senescence

2008-08-31T16:50:00.000-07:00

When I was 15, I tore a ligament in my right knee. The ER doc barked, "You would have been better off if you'd broken your leg" and the medical treatment went downhill from there. As I recall, everyone paid more attention to my mother, who was green around the gills and in danger of fainting. (Medical stuff always made her woozy.) And the science of dealing with torn knee ligaments was apparently nowhere near as sophisticated as it is now, at least where 15-year-old girls were concerned.

After the initial injury, my knee more or less returned to normal. It occasionally locked up and made me limp for a day or two, but not very often and it never hurt. People who played tennis with me quickly learned that I wasn't much of one for running to the right, but otherwise the knee was a non-issue. Then, when I was 35, it locked up at a shallow angle and refused to bend further or straighten all the way. If I was insistent about moving it within its limited range, it made nauseating popping sounds that could sometimes be heard even by other people. Clearly, something had to be done.

That something was knee surgery to remove a chunk of cartilage that was jaggedly and irreparably torn, probably as a result of the original ligament tear, the healed scar of which was visible - and quite interesting - on the TV on which I watched the surgery. The recovery from knee surgery featured the worst pain I've ever endured, and I've endured a tonsillectomy, two C-sections, two herniated vertebral discs, migraine headaches, and the removal of my left inner ear. (This is an astonishing list, isn't it, for someone who's essentially been healthy all her life.)

Anyway, the 1989 knee surgery was a success. Once the initial 10 days of agonizing pain were over, I was again back to normal. Until last Tuesday, that is, when I stood up from my desk chair and realized my right knee hurt. There was no wrench, twist or other calamitous triggering event. The soreness continued, neither better nor worse, all week. No problems with strength or mobility, but the sucker really hurts. When I asked my husband what he thought was up, he very calmly, cheerfully even, told me the ligament was probably just degenerating - surgically repaired soft tissue degenerates more quickly than intact stuff, he explained - and maybe even torn again along the scar.

What the hell? Just degenerating? I don't like the sound (or feel) of that at all. I've never had a problem with my age, mostly because I like having already had the happiness and success of kids and career and having arrived at a stage where I can contentedly sit back and enjoy the fruits of both. But at least a little of why I like being 54 is that I look and feel younger. Or I did until I was callously informed that not only might my knee be degenerating, but that's not even big news for "someone my age."

Of course, my husband got more sympathetic the minute he saw the shocked look on my face, and the anti-inflammatory medicine he recommended is already improving things. If the pain goes away and I have no further problems, we plan to go back to ignoring my poor old right knee, whatever may have happened in there. But I have to admit I suddenly feel if not 54, then certainly older than I did before I had to accept that, where my own body is concerned, I no longer get to be alarmed or outraged by a phrase like "soft tissue degeneration."

Extinction, Outlaw Country, Home

2008-08-16T22:05:00.000-07:00

Probably because of our urban roots, we tend to assume that interstate highways will be if not ugly, then certainly less than scenic. This assumption could not be more wrong where I70 is concerned. It's gorgeous in Colorado and gorgeous in Utah. We take it today from Moab to its terminus at I15. Along the first leg of the journey, I70 climbs to the top of the San Rafael Reef, gaining 1,000 feet of elevation and losing 50 million years of geologic time in about eight minutes. Because of erosion and the shape of the land on this anticline, the rocks at Black Dragon Valley are 50 million years older than the ones on the banks of the Green River. Black Dragon Valley's rocks are the oldest we see on the trip. They date from 250 million years ago, just before the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the planet. For unknown reasons, 95% of all species on earth were wiped out. Land and sea were virtually devoid of life; the Paleozoic era had ended and the Mesozoic had begun.

This makes us wonder just how many times this whole life experiment has occurred. Does it take approximately the same number of years each time to evolve from single-celled organisms to space travel? Or are some iterations faster or slower? Does every iteration exhaust some non-renewable resource along the way? Does it cause its own extinction or do external events - plate tectonics, geothermal events, ocean venting of hydrogen sulfide gas, meteors, supernovas, marauding aliens, what have you - typically bring down the curtain? How will the next iteration fuel its transportation if it arises sooner than the 700 million years it took Mom Nature (as our geology professor liked to call natural forces) to create the petroleum we've all but used up in the last couple centuries?

Fueled ourselves by these lofty questions, we drive on - and up. The elevation climbs to over 7200 feet and we reach Ghost Rock, the so-called Outlaw Country where Butch Cassidy and others hid out from the law. It's Navajo sandstone here: buff-colored, stark, spectacular and reminiscent of the zillions of Westerns filmed in this area.

I70 ends at I15, the road from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. We've driven this road before and thought it dull, but either the dull part is north of the junction with I70 or our geology-educated eyes are better able to appreciate its beauty. It has some extravagantly spectacular segments north of St. George in Utah, in the part of Arizona that sticks its neck up into what you expect will be the Utah-Nevada border, and south of Mesquite on the way to Las Vegas. In a spectacular example of engineering short-sightededness, I15 parallels the Las Vegas Strip and creates serious gapers' delays even on the rare occasions when there is no accident. (How did the road engineers miss the obstructive impact on their high speed highway of several blocks of the most eye-popping manmade scenery in the world?) We're so happy to see the Strip - the signal that we're 20 minutes from home after over 7,000 miles - that we don't object to having to crawl along for this stretch.

And then, suddenly, we're home, with our own sandstone and shale mountains out the windows to the west, our own glittering pool of blue water, our own furniture and art, our wonderful, wonderful shower. This has been an amazing trip, full of delights, the last and not least of which is the comfortable delight of being at home.

Utah, the Beautiful

2008-08-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, some 300 million years ago, southeastern Utah was covered by a sea. When the sea retreated 250 million years ago, it left behind thick salt beds. The wind picked up sand grains and carried them to the region, depositing them on top of the salt. By 200 million years ago, the area looked like the Sahara. Then the sand dunes hardened into rock. The weight of the rock liquified the underlying salt beds, which started moving along the ground (not unlike the way glaciers move) and the movement cracked the rock above. Water seeped into and further scored the fractured rock. The effect of water and ice freezing and thawing year after year widened the cracks, increasing the porosity and permeability of the sandstone, which permitted the entry of yet more water and, eventually, created the buttes, spikes, hoodoos, arches and other fantastical formations we see today. It also exposed some of the sand beds, sinuous fissures in the enormous landscape.

As the minerals in the Entrada (red) and Navajo (buff) sandstone met the atmosphere and oxidized, the iron turned red, the manganese turned black, and the clay minerals turned purple and green. The glorious results are on vivid display in Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. Visiting them is like visiting the moon and Mars, too. The grandeur and depth are hard to capture photographically, but I did what I could. (See below.)

You get a strong sense of the vastness of geologic time when you consider that water was and is the main sculpting agent in all this (as it is everywhere on earth), even though this region gets only 10 inches of rain annually. As the professor in our geology course reiterated, we don't have to worry about time in geology - we have all the time in the world.

After spending most of our day in Arches and Canyonlands, we decide to drive the La Sal Mountain Loop Road at sunset. This turns out to be a 50-mile paved loop that climbs up to 8,000 feet or so (with minimal terrifying switchbacks) from the Mars-like red sandstone of Moab up to verdant plains and tree-covered mountain peaks, then back down into the red and buff backside of Arches NP along the Colorado River. It's a drive of surpassing beauty, the calm green of the forested mountain slopes and the cascading water (murky with eroded red rock though it is) providing a restful optical counterpoint to the stark magnificence of the sandstone spectacle.

Utah is a state of extraordinary beauty. It looks, depending on where you are, like the Alps, the Sahara, the plains, the moon, another planet altogether. Although we fell in love with Montana, we recognize that Utah is the money state for scenic travel: five eye-popping National Parks, countless dense forests, craggy escarpments, lush high-altitude plains for grazing cattle, and damn good French fries just about everywhere you go.

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, to Moab, Utah

2008-08-12T20:57:00.000-07:00

Estes Park has a little of that Malibu, Carmel, Aspen sort of pretentiousness - lots of touristy stores and restaurants trying way too hard to be ultra-cool, rather seedy tourists ditto, and aggressively indifferent customer service everywhere except Rocky Mountain National Park, where the rangers and others are as nice and helpful as they can be. But what a beautiful place the National Park is! It's quite a spectacle, from its wide, flat glacier basin, littered with boulders and smaller flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating glacier eons ago, to its subapline slopes streaked with meandering rivers gleaming in the sunshine and dense with evergreens (some of them sadly, but beautifully, showing the brownish-red foliage that marks their impending death courtesy of the western pine beetle), to its giddy alpine heights, where it's too cold and windswept for any but the smallest plants and hardiest animals to survive. The plants are tiny and even closer to the ground than the high desert scrub we're used to; here, they're all but underground. It's 70 degrees or so and sunny at the Park's entrance, 50 and grayly threatening up at 12,000-plus feet.

Unfortunately, our exploration of the Park had to be cut short. At 10,600 feet, I suddenly developed the headache and dizziness of altitude sickness. This never happened to me on past high-altitude trips, so I presume it's another regrettable side effect of having lost half the normal complement of vestibular nerves. Luckily, the cure for altitude sickness is simply to get lower, which we did as quickly as possible. But I can't offer pictures of the higher altitudes because I was too dizzy to take any.

Colorado's landscape is unbelievably peaceful, what with its huge plains that seem to stretch forever, its gentle green and tan slopes rising to steeper, still forested, darker slopes, and then further up to the craggy, snowcapped peaks that scrape the blue cloud-dotted sky. Every so often, there's an exposed granite slope or a ridge of sandstone buttes or those crazy mounds that look like broken mountains loosely reassembled into conical piles, these ranging from boulder-y hunks of whitish limestone or gray-black granite, to smaller chunks of orange sandstone rubble to splintered sheets of flinty shale, some black, some brown, some red. The land here seems as big as the sky did in Montana, and the sky is pretty sizable, too.

I70 is another gorgeous interstate highway with breathtaking canyons, slopes, trees and vistas basically every mile of the way. There were a few tense moments as we crossed Vail Pass. It's a little higher than 10,660 feet and I was driving. Sure enough, as we topped the crest, my head felt rather as if it had suddenly detached from my body. Gripping the wheel and breathing deeply did the trick, though, and I got us safely back under what is apparently my altitude limit for the time being. We have only two complaints about this part of the trip. There are none of the scenic overlooks and pullouts we've come to expect in gorgeous locales. Admittedly, they'd have to post them about every two seconds in this part of the country, but still, it would have been nice to have places (other than the shoulders of high-speed roads) to stop off, ooh and ahh, and take pictures. And Colorado drivers are apparently somewhat immune to the extraordinary beauty everywhere; if you slow even a little below the speed limit on any road to gape at nature, someone with Colorado plates zooms up and tails you impatiently.

After Glenwood Canyon, which is spectacular in a less-forested, more-sheer rock sort of way, we run into the Colorado River. At first calm and narrow-ish, the river picks up width and speed and becomes host to a virtual traffic jam of rafters. We follow the river down the western slope into Grand Junction, CO, and then into Utah. Not too long after we cross the border, Utah starts showing off its high-desert splendor: rounded mounds of gray, porous rock so striped and leathery-looking that it might as well be elephant hide; light tan rock shaped by erosion and wind into folds as soft as suede; high slopes of granite and shale, topped with vertically rippled sandstone buttes that in another few tens of millions of years will be hoodoos, separated along the lines that are already visible. And in the background, seemingly hovering just under the sky or possibly painted onto a gauzy backdrop, cloud-topped bands of hazy gray peaks.

Just before Moab, the buttes stack up into serious ridges and slopes and turn the extravagant red of ferrite-rich rocks. The scenery becomes surreal - bright red, with layers of green the color of silver patina, tan, khaki, sable and black. We're in the country of slickrock, fantastical arches, river gorges, mesas, and enormous mountain ranges. And, of course, the piercing blue sky, clear air, and arid heat of the desert. We breathe easier, literally, and feel clean, pure and, for the first time in a little over three weeks, gloriously dry.

Road to Estes Park Pix

2008-08-12T16:14:00.000-07:00

As promised yesterday:

Plain to Glamorous

2008-08-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

Nebraska is, continentally speaking, like a giant see-saw with a kid sitting on one end. If it weren't for friction, you could put your car in neutral on the western border and coast downhill all the way to the eastern border (which would be a nice way to go, given how dull it is to drive across). As we went east to west, our GPS informed us that the elevation was steadily increasing, a 4000-foot development completely imperceptible to the naked eye. We noticed we were at about 1200 feet in Omaha (double the altitude we left in Door County on Saturday). The elevation had risen to nearly 3000 feet by North Platte and 5160 feet when we crossed the border from Nebraska into Wyoming. Just west of Sidney, NE (about 4800 feet), dusty tan-colored buttes started dotting the flat pastures and the land started to undulate, marking the beginning of the geologic folds characteristic of the build-up to mountains as serious as the Rockies.

We also learned that the Mountain time zone starts a few miles west of North Platte and were pleased to recoup one of the hours we lost on the trip east. I'm always impressed by people who live on time zone borders; it must be both confusing and cool - in terms of the simultaneity of different points in time, one of my favorite concepts - to live in one time zone and work in another. There doesn't seem to be a very large population in the relevant part of Nebraska, but I bet there are still a few people whose lives occur simultaneously in the Central and Mountain zones.

We weren't sure how far we would travel yesterday, but on Nebraska's flat, fast, straight roads we made it easily to North Platte, where we stopped at a La Quinta Inn that turned out to be delightful - not a word I tend to use for hostelry of this stripe. This Inn was a marvel, so much so that it deserves mention here. It was quiet and clean; the staff was friendly and solicitous; there was a generously sized swimming pool kept at the perfect temperature and chlorine level (nothing like swimming laps at the end of a long day of driving to work out the kinks, mental as well as physical); the room got totally dark and deliciously cool and non-humid; and, miracle of miracles, the shower pressure was superb. Just excellent work on the part of the La Quinta people.

Right off I80 in North Platte, there's a shiny silver diner, one of those adorable structures that look like Airstream campers and are always getting hitched to vehicles and hauled to new places in the movies. This diner is called Penny's and inside we found a tall, skinny short-order cook who thought we could do better than our first breakfast choices and told us what to have instead. Can't fault his judgment; breakfast was terrific. Penny's is open 24 hours a day, so if you find yourself on I80 and hungry near North Platte, check it out. If you see the tall, skinny cook, tell him the people from Las Vegas said hi.

We stuck with I80 until Cheyenne, where we joined I25 heading south into Colorado. It must be confessed that the first part of Colorado is like more of Nebraska - except, significantly, for the gorgeous tan, then mink, then blue-gray complexity of successive mountain ridges that suddenly appear in the distance off to the west. Some of the peaks are snow-capped, despite the 88-degree temps in the valley.

We turn west into Loveland, which looks like Chicago's newer suburbs - brand-new stucco strip malls chock-a-block with Barnes & Noble stores, Chipotle restaurants, and every other chain you've ever heard of. But not too far west of this Everytown, USA suburbia, there's a ridge topped with a line of hoodoos and buttes, the road turns sinuous, and bam! We're driving through steep, splintered shale slopes, dense with evergreens standing tall and punctuated by occasional reddish sandstone and exposed dark-grey granite boulders glittering with minerals. We open the windows: 73 degrees here at 7420 feet, no humidity to speak of, and postcard-perfect vistas everywhere. The mountains are so glamorous, so quietly and unconsciously showy, after the plains.

Our destination for today is Estes Park and, in a nice first for this trip, it's only mid-afternoon when we arrive, which gives us plenty of time to explore Rocky Mountain National Park before dark.

(I have pictures, but new technical difficulties have arisen. Swanky new digital camera, no problem uploading to my computer, but when I try to upload the pix here...nothing. I'll figure it out (I hope) and post the pix ASAP.)

Climate Reassignment and Corn

2008-08-09T20:33:00.000-07:00

Well, it was fine spending the last three weeks back in the Midwest. Very relaxing, lots of old memories and a few new ones. But it turns out we really have been climate-reassigned. In addition to the humidity, which we never did get re-used to, there was a problem with clouds. We're accustomed to the desert sun (and to considering it unusual for even one cloud to mar the deep blue perfection of the sky), and we were slightly depressed by 21 days of seeing clouds.

It was dark and/or raining as often as it was light. Even on nice Midwestern days, the clouds can't seem to stop themselves from congregating, piling up and occasionally darkening the sky. As I sat in the sunroom and wrote, I was initially distracted and then somewhat mesmerized by the way the waxing and waning ambient light kept causing the backlighting on my computer keyboard to come on, turn off, come on, turn off. And I remember why I never bothered with sunglasses when I lived in Chicago. My Vegas shades had the unpleasant effect of making the Midwestern sky look gray and threatening no matter what the actual weather.

By Midwestern summer standards, though, the actual weather was great. About half the time, we were able to open the house and live in the fresh air. That was a nice change, both from the hot humid Chicago summers we remember and from the four months of nonstop air-conditioning required during Las Vegas summers. (In the desert, we end up feeling hermetically sealed, all but shrink-wrapped, by the time we finally get to open our windows in late August or early September.)

We left this morning, heading west. Destination: Las Vegas. But not before another few days of travel, including some more National Park hopping. Today, we crossed Wisconsin and made our way into Iowa. The western part of Wisconsin is very beautiful and rather European-looking, with its rolling hills, carpets of green, green, green farmland portioned into neat individual farms, grazing cows, pale blue skies and puffy white clouds. A few dozen miles before the Mississippi River, the hills roll more precipitously and the highway starts to feature sheer roadcuts, first of sandstone, then of sandstone and limestone. The geological layers are as clear and evocative as ever. The mighty Mississippi, which helped carve all this picturesque landscape, isn't so mighty this far north. If you've seen it in New Orleans or Memphis or even Rock Island, it seems surprisingly contained in Dubuque, although it's still a perfectly respectable river.

We cross it into Iowa (state of my birth) and the landscape is as gorgeous as farmland gets. Seriously rolling hills, more of the green carpets, but also acres and acres and acres of the cornfields Iowa is famous for. And what a glorious plant corn is. It evidently rained here earlier today and the gold and green corn stalks, with their distinctive tall layered leaves, are practically iridescent. The vistas are long and wide, and the red and white and silver farmhouses and outbuildings seem to have been placed for maximum charm. There's also some low-to-the-ground leafy crop (soybeans, perhaps?) blanketing many of the hills and fields in neat, packed-together rows. These form a lovely counterpoint to the high, waving cornfields. When we crest ridges, we can see that the corn is in rows, too, and that both crops have intricate row patterns, some neat and parallel, some at right angles to each other, some semicircular.

I feel obliged, as a public service, to include both a paean to, and the proper recipe for, fresh sweet corn. I don't think you have to be from Iowa to think the taste of fresh corn in August is one of the best tastes there is.

On the other hand, you might have to be Iowish (as my kids refer to me) - or a member of my family - to consider the following meal the essence of summer perfection, but try it and see what you think. Make the corn the main event. Have 3-4 ears per person and serve them, buttered and salted of course, with two sides: fresh tomatoes, and tuna salad (just tuna, celery, salt, pepper and a little mayonnaise - nothing fancy). Yum.

In any event, here's the proper way to prepare fresh corn on the cob. Depart from it at your peril.

--Buy firm ears of corn still in their protective green husks. If possible, open a top or two to check that you have fresh very pale yellow ears with even rows of smallish kernels. If you do, pop one of those kernels under your fingernail and listen for the little crack - if the kernel doesn't pop like a balloon-skin tight with water, pick a different ear or maybe even a whole different market or roadside stand. Note: your corn should be from Iowa, Wisconsin or Illinois if at all possible. I've had corn grown elsewhere and I don't recommend it. That said, though, freshness is the key. Your corn should have been growing in a field a couple days ago. If you're close enough to IA, WI or IL, great; if not, go with fresh.

--Enlist everyone you're feeding to shuck the corn and smooth off the cornsilk.

--Drop the shucked ears into a big pot of boiling salted water (the kind you cook pasta in) and leave them there for 2 minutes. Not 3 minutes, not 5 minutes and certainly not the outrageous 10 minutes people sometimes speak of. Overcooking fresh corn is a crime and the squishy result should be neither tolerated nor perpetrated. (I'm not even going to attempt to express my contempt for the use of microwaves in the cooking of fresh corn.)

--After the 2 minutes, remove the ears from the water with tongs, give one to everyone, and let them do their own buttering and salting. Eating with fingers is recommended, and plenty of napkins and dental floss will be required.

Back in the Humidity

2008-07-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

My God – did we just forget? The humidity is like a tangible presence, a malevolent organism that is seeping into our skin, our bones, our cells and, unfortunately, our patience. We’re both so sticky and soggy that we’re short-tempered and headachy.

I remember disliking humidity, but I don’t remember it being impossible to get on with life. Counters feel sticky. Clothes are limp within moments of being removed from drawers and put on. Paper takes on the soft, wet, repulsive feel of some gross worm-like thing. Towels are useless when you get out of the shower, but nevertheless somehow absorb enough water to be still-wet hours later. Air conditioning makes interiors cold, but does nothing for the dampness. Your choices seem to be hot and sticky or cold and damp. And the insects are vicious. They’ve clearly taken over the world in this neck of the woods and they do as they please, inside and out.

My hair dryer makes me incredibly happy because the hot dry air feels like the desert. I consider whining like a child that I want to go home. I go ahead and do it. My husband smiles, as if it's a joke, but he looks pained and equally unsure we can actually stay here.

OK, we decide. We’re being ridiculous. We’ve always liked Door County. The home we’ve rented a few feet from the shore of Green Bay (the actual bay, not the town that’s had enough of Brett Favre) is gorgeous. We’ve gone to the grocery store for basics and to little gourmet markets for cheese and chopped cherry jam and artisan bread. We have enough bug repellent and anti-itch remedies to stay a step or two ahead of the bugs (we hope). The Internet connection works. Although the router doesn’t (so much for wi-fi on my laptop), there’s an adorable bakery/restaurant/gift shop with excellent wi-fi and coffee just two miles away. I pull myself together and whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. While they bake, I work on my new book. The words flow and the time flies and the cookies are delicious.

This is going to be fine.