Josh, Anne-Marie, and Aylia Colwell’s Gazette

We sent Aylia off at the crack of dawn this morning on a transcontinental flight to LA. As of this evening she is safely in her new (tiny) dorm room at Occidental College. Tomorrow she begins training to be a Resident Advisor.

I flew to Paris via Frankfurt Tuesday night for a workshop on Saturn’s rings that I organized. About 3 hours before landing I got quite sick, and after repeated trips to the lavatory to throw up, passed out outside the lavatory, hitting my face on something on the way down. The result below is looking much better in this picture than it was just 24 hours ago. The workshop went quite well, and now I’m off to London for another meeting.

This is looking much better than when it first happened, I’m happy to say. I must have hit something on the way down to the floor.

In Montreal for the 37th COSPAR assembly, we had a very good dinner at a restaurant recommended by Lance and Sylvie.

At the Boris Bistro in Montreal

We went to the Olympic Park, a return after 32 years for me, where we rode up the largest inclined tower in the world. When I was here as a twelve-year-old for the 76 Olympics, the tower had not been completed. The Olympic Velodrome has been converted to a “biodome”, a zoo of sorts. The olympic pool, however, is still a pool, and we were able to witness what appeared to be Canadian olympic divers training for next month’s games.

I return to the Olympic stadium after 32 years. In 1976 the large inclined tower, meant to support and retract the stadium roof, was not completed. The tower is completed, but the roof is permanent. We rode up a funicular on the back of the tower.

Inside one of the habitats of the “biodome”.

A ring-tailed lemur at the biodome.

We rode a tandem bike over to an island where we saw the “biosphere”, the former U.S. pavillion of the 1967 World Expo.

At Aylia’s prompting, a new family portrait:

July 12, 2008

We had noticed the remarkably aggressive behavior of our backyard mockingbirds when they detected an interloper that they felt was too close to their nest. Even the sight of our cat inside the house was enough to bring them to the window where they would chirp angrily until he left. Recently while walking Dusty I saw this mockingbird attacking a young hawk atop a light pole. I don’t know where the nest was. But I had enough time to walk Dusty back home, get my camera, and return to the scene to catch this picture (and others).

A neighborhood mockingbird tries to frighten a young raptor away.

As for our own family of mockingbirds, we counted three young birds. Two are visible on the edge of the nest below. The third one was smaller and weaker, and it died within hours of the birds coming down from the nest. We have good reason to believe that at least one, if not both, of the other two made it.

Two of the three baby mockingbirds are visible on the edge of the nest, shortly before leaving it forever. The third was much smaller and did not survive long after leaving the nest.

A pair of mockingbirds built this nest in what appeared to me to be a very precarious position on top of two interleaved palm fronds from neighboring palms in our back yard. But the birds have a much better instinct for nest building than I do. One bird is hanging out there permanently now, so I suspect eggs have been laid.

This bird doesn’t react to our presence and appears to be staying put to take care of eggs.

This shows the rather precarious positioning of the nest on palm fronds. It has survived some pretty vigorous thunderstorms already.

I was in Rome last week for the Cassini Project Science Group meeting. This view is from a new viewing platform at the top of a national monument to modern Italy, built about 100 years ago. Behind me is the Colosseo, named after a long-lost 30-plus-meter statue of Nero. I had some time to visit the colosseum on Friday which is impressively huge but which has such a bloody history that it was also somewhat repulsive to think about what happened there. At least according to the audio guide, the depiction in the movie Gladiator captured the bloodletting there fairly well.

A night shot of the colosseum.

A view from the interior of the Colosseum.

The spot of sunlight is crossing a brass strip that runs diagonally across the floor of this church. The Sun shines through a whole high on the southern wall, and the meridian line shows the location of the Sun at local solar noon. With the seasons, the position of the image of the Sun moves up and down along the strip.

Today’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery was our first attempt to view the ascent literally from our back yard. The shuttle was clearly visible for more than a minute, rising high above the horizon on a column of flame and smoke before disappearing behind a cloud shortly before solid rocket motor separation.

We were told that “winter” here is the dry season, but during the months that are elsewhere known as winter it seemed that we had fairly regular rain, though certainly not as much as during the months that are elsewhere known as hellishly hot and humid. Perhaps high temperatures in the low 80s kept things from drying out very much so that the ubiquitous water retention ponds remained filled until this month. Since mid-April it has been very dry and increasingly hot. The ponds dried up. Perhaps this happens every year; it’s our first pass through the seasons (technically: early summer, summer, high summer, late summer). But yesterday we got a couple of good vigorous summer thunderstorms that dumped enough water on the ground to cause the spontaneous creation of approximately 2.4 billion frogs. Unfortunately, several of these frogs were created on asphalt and immediately smooshed by motor vehicles. The more fortunate frogs found themselves in the newly replenished holding ponds, now awash with upwards of three inches of water over their mucky beds. These frogs celebrated the water with a cacophony of croaks and ribbets that was almost painfully loud when I took Dusty for her morning stroll today.

Not much activity on the blog lately, but now that the UCF semester is over I can at least give a status report on where we are and what’s next. I have a crazy travel schedule starting in a couple of weeks that will keep me away from home for most of the summer. The trip list at the moment is:
Ft. Lauderdale
Houston
Rome
Boulder
Washington D. C.
Montreal
Paris
London.
I won’t be in any city more than 6 days. Anne-Marie plans to accompany me on the Montreal trip which will be, I think, her first visit to Canada and my first since the 1976 Olympics.

Aylia gets home from a busy and successful semester at Occidental College tomorrow morning, and Anne-Marie is in France for her mother’s 80th birthday bash in the Pyrenees. Last week we bought a new car so that we have two for the summer while Aylia is here and commuting to whatever summer job she lands. We’ll sell Anne-Marie’s beloved beetle in the Fall in favor of the more practical four-door hatchback Nissan Versa. We had a fun visit from Brad a couple of weeks ago when he delighted us by eating his pancake with blue cheese dressing. After a year of spats I’ve finally broken up with Microsoft PowerPoint. We’ll still see each other for lectures in the Fall, but for the many talks I have to give this summer I will use Apple’s Keynote which, while strange at first, has the virtue of stability. On Guitar Hero III my career progress has slowed considerably at the “hard” level where I’m about 3/4 of the way through. Postings over at “According to Colwell”, my personal blog, have also stalled for the same reasons they have stalled here. After getting grades turned in I am now dealing with proposal and paper deadlines.