Author Archives: Sydney

The excitement at Cornell these days surrounds a big flower we have on campus. A very big flower. And a stinky one. Hence the name “Wee Stinky.” The flower has its own blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, live webcam, etc. … Continue reading →

By this point, finding new bird species for me to see this side of the Rockies is quite difficult. But I had some great birding excursions on our recent trip to Iowa and, among the 149 species I spotted, I … Continue reading →

[I wrote the following eulogy for my mom’s funeral on Thursday.] It would be impossible to say anything much about my mother and her life without describing her in terms of her human relationships. She was: a daughter a sister … Continue reading →

The Guardian has an interesting chart up, showing the decline of state of the union addresses as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. See here. Or perhaps it shows the improvement of presidents’ ability to speak intelligibly … Does anyone … Continue reading →

A couple of years ago I took a lovely photo of Katherine chewing on a raw beet. Now it’s Nathaniel’s turn. He has recently really taken to eating raw beet slices. Yellow beets in this case:

I hadn’t had much time to look for birds in Kentucky so far, but this weekend was a nice start. Yesterday we went to Raven Run Nature Sanctuary and, while it was a bit late in the day and the … Continue reading →

Although both kids have been a challenge for Sydney the past two weeks (to put it mildly), we have been seeing some improvement in their behavior as they settle into their new routine.  Occasionally we get a few moments of … Continue reading →

Although I’ve been spending a lot of time at the office recently, we’re all really enjoying our new home.  I may have moved our things in, but Sydney is slowly putting his stamp on the kitchen and upstairs office, and … Continue reading →

I was reading an article that included data on the safety of different modes of travel and I had just seen this nifty website that allows you to easily create graphs online, so I gave it a try. Here are … Continue reading →

On my only full day in Iceland, I took a tour a little ways north to Snaefellsnes, a long, narrow peninsula jutting out west into the Atlantic. One of the things that surprised me was how colourful the mountains were. … Continue reading →