The Bridge Building Contest in Chicago

My son and his friend needed a ride to Chicago for the bridge building contest. Four entries from each high school in the surrounding area went.

The kids build bridges from kits of balsa wood supplied by the contest organizers. There were specifications regarding length of span and size and such. The bridges were then stressed by loading on weights until they failed at a contest at the high school. The four kids whose bridge load to bridge weight was highest went on to this regional event. Obviously, they had to rebuild the bridge for the regional event, as their original was destroyed, so they could apply what they learned from other bridges and from how theirs failed to make a better one. Usually that means beefing up the places your bridge failed and paring away weight from areas that held strong to make your bridge both stronger and lighter. The variety of entries was amazing, but the geometry gave them all an inherent beauty. It was fun to watch them be loaded and startling to hear them fail and just a great time to hear all those kids excited about a physics project. Smart kids can be so much fun and I had a great time talking to my son and his interesting and smart friend and to some of the other kids there. The camera is a great way to get to talk to someone about what interests them. I'd ask if I could take their picture because they were the first one to break their bridge in the contest, or because their bridge was especially pretty or some other little unique thing and they always said sure and always told me more and answered my questions. I had more fun than I thought I would and it reinforced my views that this generation of kids is pretty darn amazing.

Here is information about the contest.
http://www.iit.edu/~hsbridge/database/search.cgi/:/public/chicago/2009/announce_regional

Here is the page where you can click on links for the data on the bridges such as their weights and the load at which they failed.
http://www.iit.edu/~hsbridge/database/search.cgi/:/public/index

Crazy Kind of Plants

The Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago: It's just a glass house full of plants. They are organized by plant families or by habitat type or by function. They are but a sampling of the plants growing in places far around the world. They are but a tiny slice, the few that are adapted to greenhouse life and small and polite enough to fit the confines of the structure and predictable enough to be green year around: Deciduous plants need not apply here. Yet on a day when the temperatures stay in the single digits and we are just grateful the numbers are not preceded by a minus sign, it is a warm and welcome change to retreat to the house of strange and varied plants under glass.

Layers of Leaves

To catch the most light possible from the sun, plants align their leaves with minimal overlap, in layers and lines and patterns. The aesthetic rhythm of these leaves is soothing to me when I find them, showing order in the apparent random medley of root, branch, trunk, leaf, flower, seed, light, shadow. Plants would never have to flower to give me joy, and yet! They do! What abundance of beauty!

White

White flowers lack the splashy color of their brighter siblings, but they have everything else. The soft petals with delicate glistening surfaces, with curves and lines that reflect and transmit shades and tones of light. They have centers with waxy pistils and pollen covered stamens. In fact, the yellow of the dropped pollen grains can be very beautiful on the petals of a white flower. The fragrance of a white gardenia is like none other, deep and sweet, almost intoxicating. I never liked fall and I never saw much in white flowers until I reached a certain age where I appreciated subtle beauty as much as a riotous show. That white flowers do not need color to be beautiful should make us look beyond superficial flash to what is behind and beneath and beyond.

I Buy Art at WomanSong

WomanSong has music and drumming and talks and workshops and vendors who are musicians and artists.

I try to buy a little something. I wish I could buy more. This past WomanSong, we were thick in the middle of building the house so all the money was going there. But I bought this piece from Suzie. Isn't is amazing? I was fresh into crows last year. So was Susie. Still am. Send me a crow story or a crow poem or some crow artwork, please! This one has a mama crow and many baby crows all out on a limb. In the nest, there is a beautiful egg, unhatched. I guess permanently that way. The name of the piece is "Mother Can't Fix Everything." There is joy in the world, and a little sadness too. Great things happen to us, but once in a while we lose something too.

Leaves Under Glass

What are leaves? Leaves contain cells that have the chlorophyll which is the chemical that allows sunlight to be made into the food for the plant. That food is made into new cells that make more leaves and eventually, spores or flowers and then seeds in order for there to be more plants. The best way for these cells to maximize exposure to the sun is to be arranged in thin wide layers to form a flat appendage. This flat appendage has tubes that we call veins for water to come from the roots and the manufactured food to be carried down to other parts of the plant. But the ways in which these leaves are built up, their colors, their textures, their arrangement relative to the veins, are apparently infinite and very beautiful. These are only a few of the kinds of surfaces to be found on leaves.

Flowers in February

What are flowers? The sex parts of plants! Have we talked about this before? Spores of 'early' plants such as ferns and mosses are very very tiny and they float on the wind and land in potential sites for new plants. Complicated things happen under the right moisture conditions. New plants happen. Flowering plants are different. The girl part with the ovary is on the plant. Pollen, the plant equivalent of sperm, needs to get to the ovary. Some primitive flowering plants make pollen that is very light and can float on a breeze.








But if the pollen is heavier, it will just fall to the ground, so it begins to be beneficial for the plant to engage some moving creature to carry the pollen to the pistil which is the part of the ovary that sticks out of the plant. So the plant invests some of its energy into making a show to attract a pollinator. And it offers a reward of nectar, sweet plant juice, for the pollinator. Some plants make a big bright show and other plants make lots of little shows. Some plants rely on vision alone to lure in the pollinator while others offer olfactory inducement: Fragrance! No, the flowers are not there for our enjoyment. Rather, they are there for the plant to trick some insect or bird or bat to help it have sex. Do you know that if you click on the photo, a new window will open with the photo greatly enlarged? Enjoy!

Reflections at the Conservatory

The reflection is an imperfect copy of the original. But the muted colors can emphasize the shapes, the waves in the water add pattern and interest. Which is more beautiful, the thing itself or the thing reflected in the water? Or does the juxtaposition make each more beautiful? What do we reflect and how accurately? Do the imperfections in what we reflect make for better or worse? Do my photographs reflect the beauty of the place enough to make you want to go there? Or some conservatory like it that is near you?

Garfield Park Conservatory

It's almost too much to take in. There is the structure of it all, the amazing glass houses with their lacey geometric framework and arches and angles. Each room is a little different, inviting compare and contrast and begging you to make your way back around again to see how an element is done in another room. Just the nerve of people to defy the climate and its weather to grow tropical ferns and desert succulents indoors in Chicago is inspiring. It is sort of a celebration of engineering and industry and science and ideas and beauty all wrapped into one destination. And it is warm and humid on a cold day in February. A refuge from the winter and the traffic, a place where the noise is from steam creaking the radiators and hissing through pipes and maybe of children's voices if you are there on the day of a field trip from somewhere. I've been there many times and yet, each visit brings new discoveries and a renewed sense of awe at the diversity and natural beauty of the world we live in, this lovely planet Earth.

Second Floor Floor

The installation of the pre-finished cherry flooring on the second story had begun. This is the last of the 'big dramatic' steps that will make the place finally after all look like a finished home! It may take a few weeks, but it is the kind of job where you can lay down quite a few square feet in a short bit of time and stand back and feel like you really DID something!

The Break Room

It is recliner. It is by the fireplace. There is a little end table for coffee or soda and a book. Just a few minutes there to remember why we are working so hard on this place . . .

My Brush With Golf

I went golfing once. My husband and my friend Marty and my son rented a cart and headed out. Marty and my husband played fairly regularly and my son had had some lessons. They intended to play the game. I was baggage, the designated driver of the golf cart. It was fun to be with the people and there were some patches of prairie. I think golfers call those 'hazards'. To me they were the 'best part'. And the course bordered a forest preserve, so there was a nice perimeter of tall oak and maple trees. I think golfers call that 'extreme hazard'. To me it was 'wish I had my camera'.
There is a psychologist, Thom Hartmann, who says that regular people are 'farmers', content to do routine repetitive things over and over day after day year after year. He says people with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) are the 'hunter/gatherers', spontaneous, 'distractible', able to dash off after the prey with no notice, able to switch to bigger better prey should it present itself, yet able to hyper-focus on a task like gathering seasonal berries or nuts or shelter materials.
Soon enough, I had gone from driving the cart on the paved path and watching my party of golfers to driving about the grass just any old where I pleased, looking at the bugs on the leaves of the prairie plants and trying to find as many balls as I could at the edge of the ponds. I think golfers call those 'water hazards'. To me, they were 'potential ecosystem'; there might be frogs or little fish or mayfly larvae in there! The golfers got tired of yelling for me to come back when they needed a new club so pretty soon, they just carried the few they used most. After a while, I had my son more interested in helping fish balls out of the edge of the pond and I had Marty more interested in driving the cart as fast as we could.
I had a blast golfing that one time, but for some reason, we never did that again.

A Country Road

November, I think it was. He was probably on his way to or from hunting with his brothers in North Dakota. He called from somewhere in Minnesota. "The Northern Lights are just amazing. I've been watching them for miles and I've never seen them like this. You should take the boys out to see them." So we drove the Jeep west. That's where you have to go here to escape the light pollution. We stopped now and then to get out and see, and still, we were not that much impressed. A little wavering glow over there and maybe a bit over there. Finally, we got to a point where trees blocked the lights of towns and we watched for a bit, thinking they were lovely, but hardly worth the big deal. Then they flared and shifted and rolled and wavered and flickered. They were green and over here. Then orange and over there. Then they hung low like cliffs of blue ice for way many miles along the horizon of our view. They appeared to fade away and we contemplated heading for home, but when we glanced back, they had flared red high above in great rays and arches. I don't know how long we lingered there, watching them come and go, watching them change and shift, talking to each other, pondering the nature of things and sharing our awe. It was a magical and precious time with my boys that are so grown up and independent now. Any time I hear reference to northern lights, I am taken back to that night of the magnificent show in the sky and the wonder of my sons.

Names and Women

I have been wasting time lately on Facebook.com looking for old friends. It occurred to me that one can mine the "Friends" lists of Friends for people one knows and invite them, thereby finding out who lives where and what they are up to. It is fun.
It is frustrating.
Men are there, to be plucked like apples from a tree for your "Friends" list. Joe Dixie then is Joe Dixie now.
But the women? More elusive. Married and not going by the same name you knew them as when you knew them in high school or college or the early years of a job. Or even if you were at their wedding, now 25 years later, they might be remarried and have a new name again.
I kept mine when I married, though it was accident that gave me the reason to follow through with that whim.
I anticipated much progress for "women's lib" in the 80's, after I had been told in 1976 that I should not bother to go into architecture because women would just quit to have babies, and after signing up anyway to find I was one of 3 girls in a class of 80 some architecture students, and after giving up due to a terrible couple of quarters where the instructor would not give me or the other girls the time of day or any critique or guidance on our projects. I switched to interior design school where the genders were represented more equally and treated more fairly. There, one of the senior projects was to, at great expense, make a resume to be printed at a print shop and a portfolio of photographs and design statements of our projects. Without thinking, I used my full name on those items. So keeping my own name when I got married that summer meant I didn't have to redo the expensive resume and letterhead. I might not have had the nerve, "women's lib" progressing or no, to fight the tradition and keep my maiden name but for the great investment in the resume and portfolio coupled with the odd notion that a quirky last name might be of benefit in a creative field.
I wasn't too worried about bucking tradition because I figured it would soon be the norm. What did it matter that a woman had a different last name than her husband and maybe even her kids? It was my name. I expected keeping ones name for life to become "normal".
But apparently few of my generation or even generations since have felt this way. Making it very difficult to recognize from a first name and a 50-plus-year-old-face in a photograph whether Sue Harper is the Sue Wilson I knew in college or not.
What happened to "women's lib" anyway?
Why hasn't this been part of the "progress", that women get to keep their names their whole lives?
Women, why haven't more of you kept your names when you married?
Men, do you really need a woman to take you name to feel married? Why don't YOU encourage women to keep their names?