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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
The Rat Race
Wednesday. 7.26.17 6:43 pm
Well, the last month has been pretty crazy. So crazy that I can't even keep track of all of the things that have happened. I will try to summarize them here.

Beginning of July: I flew to France to give a talk about Mars. I am starting a new side business where I get paid to give talks about Mars. At first I thought it would be easy, and they would just pay me, but in the end I've been spending hours reading about whether or not I have to register myself as a business, whether I have to register myself as "self employed" in France, whether I need to incorporate, how to issue invoices, and how to pay taxes. It isn't straightforward, mostly because French people like every piece of paper to be stamped in triplicate and sent as a registered letter.

The next week I attended a little conference where we were discussing the benefits that we might get by controlling robots on the surface of Mars (or other planets) using humans that were in orbit around that planet. It's much harder (and sometimes impossible) to get down to the surface of a planet with humans (see: Venus), but controlling a robot from nearby would mean that we could be way more efficient with our data collection. We were trying to figure out what exactly we could enable and what kind of changes in technology we would need. They had astronauts, Department of Defense people, planetary scientists, field geologists, neuroscience people, everything. It was pretty fun. Unfortunately I had a proposal deadline at the same time, and they didn't allow anyone to be on their laptops or on the internet during the whole workshop, so that was a bit stressful and required one almost-all-nighter to overcome. I hope they fund our proposal-- we proposed to download every paper in the Martian literature and then scrape them using computer algorithms to get all of the latitudes and longitudes that they mention in the papers. This way we could georeference the Martian literature, and as we surfed around on Google Mars we'd be able to see all of the papers that had been written about any given area of interest. It got high scores last year but wasn't funded. Cross our fingers for a better outcome this time.

After that I went to Napa Valley to run a half marathon with my older sister, pinkcoconut . It was so fun! I can't believe I ran that many miles. My legs were exhausted. I was being very good about keeping in shape before the race, but after it was over I've done nothing. :D

I had two days back in town, during which I had to communicate with everyone on all of my projects and tend to my interns. On Thursday night, I left for the mountains for a retreat that I was running for an 8-week professional development seminar that I invented for my coworkers. It was really fun. I had divided up the participants into small groups and they all had subjects that they had to report about. They had to make their reports in creative ways, and there were some pretty creative ones! We also just hung out and played camp games.

Immediately upon returning from the mountains on Saturday, I showered and washed my dog Juan Pablo and hit the road for San Diego, where I was attending Comic Con to be on a NASA panel. I arrived too late on Saturday to get a badge, but
ranor and I walked around and did some things that didn't require a badge, like an Escape Room. Ranor and I defeated the Escape Room in a ridiculously short time, with about 1% help from the other members in our group. We won a free season of "The Expanse". The next day we walked around buying things and I went to my panel and told stories about working at NASA. It was fun. Someone asked for my autograph and said, "You guys are the real heroes".



I had a long dinner with Dennis, where we hypothesized about why we weren't married to anyone yet and eventually decided that we just had to try harder.

On the way home I was one car removed from being in a hideous multi-car accident, which I instead watched play out before my eyes as if in slow motion. I don't think anyone was horribly injured, but there was a lady lying on the pavement with a broken leg and blood all over her arms, totally dazed and confused. I blocked the accident with my car and helped pick up a bunch of random pieces of car that lay strewn around the highway, and then, when the cops came, I headed off down the road, a little bit more jumpy than before.

This week I have five days of relative calm before things start happening again. But this only means that I have to take a shovel to the huge pile of outstanding tasks that have been accumulating continuously as I've been away.

I have come to the conclusion that I have to find a way to graciously exit from at least half of the things that I am committed to do, but I can't figure out how to do it, and I can't decide which things I should give up. There is only one task that I am sure that I should give up, but that's the one sending me camping for four days in the middle of Utah next week, and the flight is already booked. Plus I get to spend four days driving a Jeep around amidst some of the most fossiliferous rocks in the country learning about stromatolites from world experts, so who wouldn't want to do that?

Today I have to turn in four abstracts for a conference in December, two for myself and two for my interns. I also have to organize the last two meetings in my 8-week professional development series (for 62 people), and decide what I'm going to say during the one that is happening tomorrow, which I am leading. My teams have been earning "points" throughout the series, and I also have to go back through my email and add up all of the points to see which team is winning. I also have to write the newsletter for my larger professional development group (>320 people) and organize all of the events that will be happening in August. It's crazy how fast a month can go by.

I decided to stay at home so that I wouldn't get too distracted, but look at me, here on Nutang procrastinating by writing down all of the things that I have to do. Oy vey. I might have to stay up all night tonight. But I am taking off about 5 hours to get a tour of Universal Studios from my new friend Soroush.



I almost forgot: yesterday, when I was driving out of the driveway, I saw a rat flopping around in front of my car. It was not moving like a normal, healthy rat, and I stopped the car and watched it. It flopped around a bit more, then lay on the ground, panting, until it died. It reminded me of one of the opening scenes in The Plague, when all of the rats are dying, and people don't realize that the plague will soon consume them all. I sort of hope that someone had poisoned it, because at least that would explain why it was acting the way it did. Last I checked it was still there in the driveway, flattened by one of the neighbors' cars. I don't really want to get close enough to it to touch it.

The End.
1 Comments.


Something about your life makes me half-surprised you're not a secret agent as well.
» randomjunk on 2017-07-27 02:48:18

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