Category: My life

Posted on

Brasília Days

It rained for four days w/o stop. Sometimes it rained little less and sometimes it poured really hard. I walked to the grocery store on Sunday while it rained only enough to make you feel a little damp, but I don’t think it stopped raining completely for a full hour during those four days.  Today it rained too, but it didn’t rain all day.   In fact, the sun came out strongly.  While I was eating lunch, outside but under a roof I saw it rain a little, rain a lot, become very sunny and then rain again.  In other words, today was more like the “usual” summer weather here.  This time of the year in Brasília, it usually rains every day but not all day. “Todos os dias, mas não o dia todo,” is the phrase I learned in Portuguese.

The four days before today were rainier than usual, but the weeks before were dryer.  It rained only a couple times a week, which is strange.   It was sunny and it got a little hot during the middle of the day.  But the temperatures in Brasília are nearly perfect.  It gets down to around 65 at the coldest and never more than 90, w/o much humidity.

Brasília is pleasant, although the original design is not conducive to things like walking, biking or generally being a human not sitting in a car.   It improves as you get away from the original plan, but the parts of the city are disconnected.  Riding my bike to work, even during the dry season, takes significant commitment.  The city represents what some intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s thought the future would look like.  It is purposely car dependent and unfriendly to pedestrians and bikes.  There have been some improvements, but it is hard to fix the core of the city because of various protective rules.  Lago Sul where I live is better than the planned city and there is a nice bike lane along the main road, but it tends to end where cars merge and it is dangerous at these points.   In general the places where you can more or less ride safely are separated by nearly impassible stretches.   When I ride to work, I use some sidewalks, where there are sidewalks.  After that, I have to cross a bridge on a “sidewalk” about three feet wide, then ride on the grass, pass as quickly as I can under an overpass, then get off the bike and run up a grassy bank.  I finally get to the end of a road that leads to the Embassy.   The way home is a little easier.  I take the back road to one of the main highways at a point that features one of Brasília’s few stop lights.  When the light turns red, I run across the street – RUN across the street before the traffic catches up with me.  If you are not quick you will be dead.  On the other side of the big road, I ride through a series of parking lots until I come again to my bridge and the way home.

The sad thing is that it could have been such a great city.  With this marvelous climate and mostly flat topography, Brasília would be the perfect place for sidewalk cafes, bike trails and tree lined boulevards. Brasília is still a nice place in spite of the plan.  It could be fairly easily improved with a few pedestrian crossings and sidewalks and trails.  

My pictures show some of the pleasant little places on my walk to the grocery store.  As I wrote, Lago Sul is nicer than the center city, but it is still designed such that there are lots of dead end streets.   I think the trees with the spikes on the trunk are floss silk trees. My pictures show some of the pleasant little places on my walk to the grocery store.As I wrote, Lago Sul is nicer than the center city, but it is still designed such that there are lots of dead end streets.I think the trees with the spikes on the trunk are floss silk trees.

Posted on

Merry Christmas

I am glad that Espen is here. We had a Christmas on Skype with Chrissy, Mariza & Alex. I read the Christmas story from Mathew as I have for many years. The kids seem bored, but that is the way it is. Ceremonies are important.   We use the King James Version. Whether or not you religious, the King James Version is beautiful from the literature point of view.

Our Brazilian neighbors put on a big firework show at midnight. It went on for about five minutes; it was very close and very complete. They celebrate Christmas more festively here.

This is also the time for my “look back”. It’s easier to look back than forward, so my technique is to imagine a place I want to be and reasonably can expect to be in five years. I then write how it happened. It has been useful since I started to do it back in 1991. I have never been right, but the exercise makes me think more deeply about priorities. I came fairly close in the early 2000, but that was a little bit of a setup, since I knew I was going to Poland well in advance and options were limited. Otherwise I get no closer than if I played rock-paper-scissors. 

I think that is the true lesson. You really cannot make detailed plans five years out, even with a fairly predictable life like mine. I suppose I am being silly. I have the same career with a little different specific job. Predictions are not and really cannot be that far off, unless I do something like win the lottery, which is especially unlikely since I never buy tickets. My “black swan” was being promoted to senior FS. It was not really so unexpected but I just didn’t expect that upside surprise. Good thing. My plan for post-FS life was a little vague and I would have come out just in time for the bad economy of 2009. Of course, what seemed impossible now seems inevitable. Life is such an exquisite mixture of chance and preparation. The operative skill is not the ability to make precise predictions, but rather a kind of Bayesian approach that allows for changing probabilities and effective adaptions.

The difference with this five year retrospective is that it takes me past my 62th birthday. They almost certainly will kick me out of the FS by then and I will be doing something else. That is hard to predict. I thought of posting the plan on the blog, but it would not be a good idea. 

Posted on

New Orleans walk-about

It is always interesting to take a kind of journey and I like to walk so I walked from the French Quarter to my Marriott Hotel near the Causeway.  I am so far from downtown because of the football game, BTW.  I could not get a hotel nearer the center within government rate because so many people are coming in for the game.  No matter. The walk was good and I had no other pressing business on Saturday. Took me a long time and according to Google maps, it was nine miles, but I cut off a few miles by catching the streetcar.  I took pictures along the way, so I have my illustrated journey. Up top is the start at Jackson Square at the bottom of the French Quarter.

Above is just outside Jackson square. There are lots of street performers and fortune tellers. The most interesting was the Voodoo Bone Lady, above. I don’t know what she does with Voodoo bones.  Didn’t want to get too close, lest I be turned into a zombie. Below is Bourbon Street. The word to describe the French Quarter is raucous.  People were loudly partying, drinking and carrying on.  People walk the streets with big cups of beer and other drinks. And this was just after noon.

Below are little houses on the way out of the French sector. 

Below is Louis Armstrong park. Top is just the pond.  Below that is a statue of Louis himself.  Louis Armstrong was a great trumped player. I still remember him. He sang with a distinctive gravel voice.

After passing out of the park, you enter the 9th Ward, made famous by the flooding of Katrina. There were lots of people just hanging around, but there were also lots of empty lots that probably had homes before the hurricane. I talked to some people about the lost community.  It was interesting and sad. The talked about a community of small homes, homeowners who passed their property to their kids and how the hurricane literally swept it away. They said that some people were returning, but it won’t be the same.  One guy told me that he had set up a kind of phone tree and the old 9th Ward people keep in touch. They have a big picnic in the City Park every year. Meanwhile, services have not returned but wildlife has.  There are deer, rabbits and even wild boar, I was told.  Brad Pitt is running an organization building flood resistant housing in the area.  People were generally happy about that, but that is just one point of light. Rebuilding it taking a while.   Below is … I don’t know what. But the photo is interesting.

I was getting a little worried that it was taking me too long to get back to the hotel. Fortunately, I could catch the streetcar.  I rode from Broad Street to the end of the line.  It cost $1.25.

The line ends in a big cemetery. Evidently, the water table is so high in New Orleans that they cannot bury bodies underground.  They would float up.  So the tombs are above ground, creating a true city of the dead.

It was starting to get dark, so I didn’t take more pictures. At the end of the graveyard was a nice neighborhood in the Jefferson Parish. Legally I was out of New Orleans into a place called Metairie.  It was truly a long walk. I would have taken a taxi, but I found none, so I trudged on, now enjoying the walk somewhat less.  One interesting thing was that the many streets had classic names.  We had Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Claudius & even Nero. The bottom picture I took the next day. This is the causeway that crosses Lake Pontchartrain. It is almost twenty-four miles long.  It looks even stranger at night, with headlights crossing pitch black darkness. Lake Pontchartrain is brackish. Near the north end it is almost completely freshwater. The other end is half seawater. It was flooding from this side that drown so much of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

BTW – I almost made a very bad decision to get a hotel on the other end of that bridge. It was a little cheaper.  I figured, just across the bridge. How far could that be?  Fortunately, I am on the near side. Crossing that thing would be a long and monotonous walks, if you were even allowed to do that.   

Posted on

Moments in time

I am heading to Houston today, where I will meet up with a Brazilian university delegation and go to Rice University. After that, we go Louisiana and then Washington. This is a follow-up to our successful visit in February, but this one will be aimed more at the graduate student part of the Science w/o Borders program. On this visit, we are talking emphasizing oil & gas and biosciences.  I look forward to learning something new. 

I missed the first couple days of the program because I had to stay in Brasília for the presidential election.  My colleagues did all the important organizing work, but I add some value by being around and lending my ostensible authority to decisions.  We need somebody around to do that and/or take the blame if things do not work out as they should.  A lot of leadership is intangible.  When it is working well, it doesn’t seem to matter; when it stops working, everything just seems to fall apart.

But now I am on track. The usual Delta flight to Atlanta is getting routine.  I have traveled this year more than any time before.  I have become a gold member.  This is good, since I can choose better seats, but it still sucks. Travel gives time for reflection. Airports are semi-familiar. 

I decided to write a kind of stream of consciousness in my little notebook to give myself a shot of the day.  I transcribed them below. No big insights.

Coming into Houston. From the window it looks very flat and sprawling.  Flight attendant says that we are in the Central Time zone.  It makes me recall my mother. She died forty years ago, but is not forgotten. Strange that this reference would provoke a recall, however.  Central time is 4 hour different from Brazil.  Will be some jet-lag.

Off the plane easily.  Stopped at Dunkin Donuts for food and coffee I don’t need.  I am early and luggage will take a while to arrive.  It seems odd speaking English to clerks.  Not sure English is their first language anyway, but Portuguese would not work.

Passing adverts for MD Anderson Cancer Center.  Reminds me again of Ma, when I see on about a woman cured of leukemia.  When you are thinking about something, you notice connections.

Signed up for Super Shuttle.  At $24 is it much cheaper than the taxis. My travel budget will be cut and it is always a good idea to save money for Uncle Sam anyway.  Fifteen minute wait, they say. No worries. I still have the Dunkin Donuts coffee to finish.  I like it more than Starbucks, but I drink little coffee in general.


Reading “Concrete Planet” book about cement, probably the most ubiquitous manmade material around.  Concrete reinforced with rebar is doomed. The rebar rusts, expanding and causing concrete to crack and crumble.  This gives us hope that many of those horrible “modern” buildings built in the 1960s will turn to dust, but not such a good thing talking about bridges etc.  Romans used concrete better than we do.  Their structures don’t have rebar and have lasted thousands of years.  Rebar seemed a good idea at the time. Go on the shuttle with two guys going to MD Anderson. Guy next to me is a biochemist/biophysicist now semi-retired.  Used to work at  Baylor, now at the University of Texas in Brownsville. Studies proteins and is interested in dengue.  I told him re our Brazilian mission and gave him my card.  He was very interested in getting Brazilian students and researchers. Don’t know how much he will pay attention, however. He was going to MD Anderson for a serious operation.

Both guys got out. Talking to the driver. He has been in Houston for ten years and loves it. Says that people who live in Houston love it, but visitors don’t.  It is not pedestrian friendly and its hard to know where things are unless you live her.  Told me that the many rich Mexicans are moving to an area called “the Woodlands” and building big mansions. They are fleeing the violence and kidnappings of their own country.

He said he used to work at one of the country clubs in the area. Said that the rich people were often odd and told a story about a woman who could not get her car started. When he check, he found she had just run out of gas.  Somebody had always done that for her. I joked that she was so rich that she could just get a new car when the old one ran out of gas.  He didn’t get the joke and told me that they did indeed fill up the tank.   

My pictures show Houston from the CVS, a sundial at the Gallery and my hotel. 

Posted on

Four days and three nights of the ungulate

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I could get a sheep to eat the grass. I would save time and money on gardening. It would be ecologically sound, as the animal consumes no fossil fuels and fertilizes its own pastures. Beyond that, sheep are picturesque. I thought it would be a biological version of one of those robotic vacuum cleaners that drives around on the floor, turning round when it bumps into something, but generally working automatically. The trouble is that I didn’t know much about sheep.

I thought they were like big dogs that ate grass, i.e. I thought they would be like a pet and behave like a dog. They don’t. Dogs do dumb things, but compared to sheep they are Einsteins. Sheep, I learned to my sorrow, really are just as incredibly stupid as you have heard. The only thing my sheep did, besides eat and shit (see below) was look in the window and baa. They are a lot louder than you suppose. My sheep generally slept when it got dark, but it did not sleep the whole night, occasionally waking up to remind everyone that it was still out there. It kind of warms up, sometime with a low ummm, which sometimes crescendos to a very loud ummmBAA-AAA. I am not sure why it did that. I think it may have seen its own reflection and thought was another sheep.

But that was not the big problem. I could get used to that; maybe even appreciate the bucolic beauty of it all. On the plus side, it did eat grass, and seemed to like the taller grass better, so it was trimming exactly as I had hoped it would. The other end of the process was not so agreeable.

I was prepared for the fertilizer aspect of the sheep. In fact, I considered that a net benefit, as it would make my plants grow better. I have no problem with manure and happily use biosolids on the tree farms. But I assumed that the fertilizer would be mostly deposited on the grass, where it would do some good. No. My sheep evidently walks around on and eats the grass, but holds most of the shit for when it is standing around on the veranda under the roof. Worse, it seems to want to shit as close as possible to the house and most prefers to go right near the doors or windows. And it shits a lot. I soon found my pre-work period would be devoted to shoveling and washing down the patio; I got a similar task when I got back from work. Despite my shoveling and hosing, it was really starting to stink.

I was going to give the sheep a little more time, but the odor was starting to get pretty strong. I planned to be away for a week and a half. The guy who sold me the sheep told me that it would be okay. Independence was a big advantage of sheep. I travel a lot. If the sheep has shelter from the rain, it can be left along. It just stays out and eats grass. I had to make sure it had water, but probably not even that, since the rainy season grass was very wet. The guy told me that it would get enough water from the moist grass it ate. So, I COULD have left it alone, but I figured that if I left it for a week and half, the shit would be knee high when I got back and the smell would knock the proverbial buzzard off the proverbial shit wagon. My plane was leaving that night. I depend on sweet serendipity and a solution presented itself.

The cleaning woman comes by every two weeks and Wednesday was her day. When she showed up around 7:15, she was surprised to see a sheep in the front yard, but not much bothered. Her rural childhood included lots of sheep & goats. She knew what I was just discovering and seemed to find my dilemma very amusing. Courtesy and the fact that I pay her kept her from laughing out loud, but I am sure my story will engender mirth back in the village. It will also provide a sheep. I asked her if she wanted the sheep; she had some relatives with a pickup truck & when I got home after work, my problem was gone, almost. I am not sure where it went, but I don’t really care. I like to think that my erstwhile lawn mowing manure machine is off romping with others of its kind, stinking up somebody else’s yard for an indefinite period, maybe gracing somebody’s table for a somewhat shorter time. No matter. It seemed lonely by itself. After all, sheep are naturally gregarious. The essence of the animal will persist for a while around my house. But I cleaned off the patio and I expect that the strong rains we get around here will do the rest.

My advice, which I allow applies to few people but that I will give nevertheless, is to avoid buying sheep unless you have a way to keep them far from the house. They stink on ice even just standing around and they seem to enjoy crapping where they sleep, not like a dog. If you must get sheep, you probably want a border collie to “herd” them. Just get the collie. Border collies are the smartest of the dogs, they may at least seem to be happy to see you when you come home and don’t crap all over the place.

Posted on

The gift of boredom

I have always spent a lot of time in airports and on airplanes, but never as much as now.  I travel a couple times a month and sometimes to the U.S.  Trips to the U.S. are a relatively new part of my FS life. Usually, we go somewhere and stay for a time. But my involvement with higher education has been in support for Science w/o Borders drawing me to the U.S. We brought a group of Brazilian university leaders to the U.S. in February and will bring a similar one in November. I went to Houston for an educational conference and just got back from the Harvard-Laspau meeting in Cambridge. 

This year, I have flown enough to become a silver medallion member on Delta.  After my next trip, I will achieve gold.  This has a couple advantages, the most important being you get to have better access to seats, especially exit rows.

It is better to get to the airport an hour before you need to rather than a minute late.  I always get to the airport way early if I can.  I don’t mind sitting in the airport; in fact I like it. I can think, write, read or just sit around. It is a good time for reflection.  We do not spend enough time being by ourselves and reflecting on things. 

I also don’t mind flying as much as I used to.  I think this is part of my general increase in laziness. It used to be that I could not stand to sit around for more than a few minutes. Now it doesn’t bother me much. One thing that really helps is scheduling. I made a list of things I should do on the plane.  I don’t really do them, but the procrastination makes the time seem to move faster. Another key is the I-pod and audio books.  That is the most important factor. I find it hard to read on planes, but it is easy to listen to the audio books.

Reading in the old fashioned way is still important.  When traveling in Brazil, I tend to read through news magazines in Portuguese that I would not usually read through if tempted by other attractions and I can buy them right in the airport. I read through the Brazilian issue of HBR. It is easy to read because many of the articles are translated from English (so they keep some of our format). Even the ones in native Portuguese are in the business article format.  The New York Times is going to publish in Portuguese soon. That will be easy and useful to read. It is much harder to read literature in a foreign language.  

I just finished a biography of Hadrian (in English). This took me four years. Yes, four years. I only read it on airplanes and then not so much.  I found four airplane tickets stuck in the book as bookmarks.  It was a good book and I learned a few things.  The total travel time (counting airports and transits) is more than 20 hours, so there is lots of time.  I will kind of miss bringing “Hadrian” along.  I rarely travel with fewer than three books, since my interest wanders.  This time, I had “Hadrian,” “How to Deliver a TED Talk,” and “Swerve” about the philosophy of Lucretius and how it helped form modern thought.  I read a few pages of each, enough to finish “Hadrian.” Now I can move to Marcus Aurelius.

Anyway, airports are giving me a good education. It is important to be unconnected sometimes and have the gift of boredom.  It is akin to when the Marine explained to me that I had to embrace the suck.  You can easily turn liabilities into assets if you just have the right attitude.

My on top picture is a ceremony receiving the body of an American killed in action. I did not take a picture of the actual casket or the family, since I thought that was not right to intrude.  It was very sad watching.  The next picture is from what they say is the world’s only Curious George shop. It is on Harvard Square and I can easily believe that it is indeed the world’s only Curious George shop.

Posted on

Tufts, Harvard & Boston

I am up in Cambridge for a meeting on graduate education and Brazil.  I did not really want to come up because I was travelling a total of around thirty hours to spend about twenty waking hours on the ground here. But I thought the seminar would be worth it given our commitment to help our Brazilian friends.  It has also been worth it for the glorious fall day I got to experience today.

I walked up to Harvard Square and then up to Tufts.  It gave me a lot of time to think and enjoy the weather. I walked to the top of the hill at Tufts and just sat there facing the warm autumn sun.  This is the same place I sat nine years ago when I was assigned to Fletcher as State Department Fellow.  I wrote in my diary that I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have a job that put me in a place like this. Same thing goes today. I closed my eyes and felt the cool but still pleasant breeze carrying the subtle smells of fall.

This place feels like home.  It even smells like home. I did not live here very long, but the environment is much like Wisconsin. The smells are familiar.  Sense of smell is a persistent memory. I mentioned the fall smell that comes from the falling leaves.  Another familiar smell comes from the white pines.  There is a “pine smell” but species are different.  The white pine is distinctive from the loblolly I enjoy in Virginia.  My favorite pine smell remains the Ponderosa pine.  If you were blindfolded and dropped down in a pine forest, I believe you could tell which kind of pine forest you were in just by the smell.  Actually, I don’t think I could identify other sorts of pines, only those three.

Anyway, tomorrow I am busy.  I have a talk at Fletcher School and then the Laspau Harvard meeting.   I plan to walk from my hotel up to Tufts and then back to Harvard.  It is a long walk; I figure about an hour and a half, but a joy the whole way.

My pictures show Harvard and Tufts and environs.  The last two are just funny names. The top is just the result of age. We have “Foo beer”.  The bottom, IMO, is an unfortunate name for food: Yenching just doesn’t sound good. 

Posted on

The (semi) drunkard’s walk

I make no secret of the fact that I enjoy a drink sometimes.  Of course you need to strike the balance between a little lubrication and inebriation.  But I have found one of the more pleasant parts of the process is the walk home.  It gives you time to think and to wear off a bit of the alcohol.

I have some good memories of this going back to college days in Stephens Point.  I recall walking back to the dorms from a place called the Maple Leaf in the Wisconsin winter air with the cold air you could taste.  I recall doing the same in the hot and humid summers.  It is a joy that most people don’t experience, since they drive back (very dangerous) or are driven.  But the short walk between drinking or even a big meal, putting your feet on the ground, is really a joy.

I had two drinks, not enough to get drunk but enough that I should not drive home, so I had a nice experience walking back from a restaurant near the bridge to my house. It takes about twenty minutes, which is just about the perfect amount of time. Of course, I am lucky to live in an area that has not much crime, so I feel safe.  I suppose it would be unpleasant if I had to look over my shoulder constantly.  Anyway, you get that peaceful easy feeling, extenuated in my case by my I-Pod with old Eagles music with the same title. 

Posted on

Washington Updates

It is good to be home, even if only for a short time. Washington area is both unchanging and protean. The Mall stays very similar, although with lots of changes on the margins. The Capitol and the Washington Monument provide the anchors with Lincoln and Jefferson a little outside.  I have taken and posted dozens of pictures of the monuments. They are always impressive. You can see below that they are still working on the reflecting pool. I hear that they are washing off the algae.

Nearer to home, they are building all sorts of things. The area around Dunn Loring Metro will be developed.  They are starting with the parking, as you can see in the picture. They already have some of the town center finished.  There is a Target down the street which will open next month. Below is a new area of shops across the street from our house. Chrissy & I had lunch at a place called the “Lost Dog”.  They serve hundreds of kinds of beer.

Down the street, that is an interesting phrase.  There is currently not much of a street to go down.  Gallows Road is mostly closed.  You can see the progress. This will be a really wide road.  There is supposed to be a median strip, so that you can run from one side to the other with some hope of surviving the adventure.

Most of my meetings were down in FSI. I am very fond of FSI; it is much like a college campus and the walk from the Balston Metro is usually pleasant, lots of big oak trees, takes about twenty minutes. I did get stuck in some really heavy rain one day, however, as you can see in the picture nearby.  I wasn’t properly prepared for this. I didn’t bring my GoreTex coat.  Being down in Brasília with the pleasant and predictable weather has made me complacent.

Below is the parking setting up at Dunn Loring

Posted on

Mariza’s Dance Endeavor

We attended Mariza’s dance show last night.  She did a good job organizing it and seems to have about broken even, which is a great result for this kind of event.  It was hard for me to get good pictures because of the lighting and the quick movements.