Our nearly-total solar eclipse was awesome. At its height and through the safety glasses, it looked like a crescent moon that had chosen a really odd horizontal orientation. Thank you clouds for staying away, thank you Richard for lending your cereal-box pinhole projector, and thank you Watertown Public Library for creating a space for everyone… Read more »
the universe
Today’s Election-Free Zone: Earthset and Earthrise
From October 2007 to June 2009, a Japanese spacecraft called Kaguya orbited the moon. Kaguya had cameras, and the cameras recorded, among other things, views of the Earth rising and setting over the moon. Here’s Earth setting over (or under?) the south pole of the moon! (BTW, if you get my posts as emails and… Read more »
I have the solar system on my fingernails
This was pretty challenging, especially because in order for everything to line up correctly, the more complicated planets had to end up on my dominant hand. Turns out it is really hard to paint a tiny Saturn with a nail polish brush and toothpicks, right-handed! I tried to represent their relative sizes correctly, more or… Read more »
Rainy Tuesday Randutiae
Apologies for the broken link in my dresses post from May 5… the link was working for a while, then it broke, and I can’t for the life of me find that page anymore. Agh! Here’s a slideshow of dresses from the Met Gala, from another source entirely. From NPR, Here’s What People Are Saying… Read more »
More on Being Small
A friend who read my blog post yesterday sent me this lovely video of Peter Mulvey performing “Vlad the Astrophysicist”. Melancholy, sweet, centering, and exactly what I needed. Thank you, Rosa.
Locating the Moon
There are stretches of time in my writing life when I wake up eager to work and have one productive day after another. Then there are stretches like this week, when I wake up feeling like it’s intolerable to be on page 12 of a difficult 400-page revision, and am I really supposed to be… Read more »
Randutiae That Reflect the Scattered State of My Brains
I’ve been a very poor blogger lately. I have a list as long as my arm of things I’ve been wanting to blog about, but the spirit has not been moving me. In particular, I’ve been going through a period of grievously fractured focus with my writing, and have been wanting to blog something about… Read more »
Reading and the Cosmos
I’m almost always in the process of reading a book; often I’m reading two. It’s not unusual for me to be reading three. (There’s also a scattering of a half-dozen books that I read at the pace of a snail across years, but I’m not counting those here – I’m talking about books I’m actively… Read more »
Links for a Sunday
As we move nervously toward election Tuesday, I’ve got no juice for the post I would like to write. Chances are, a lot of you have no juice to read it, so maybe it’s for the best. Here’s what I do have: a beautiful photo of the recent Hunter’s Moon rising above the Alps. And,… Read more »
Interviews, ARC Giveaways, Reviews, Perspective
In lieu of a post today, I’ll link you to Cindy Pon’s interview with me about Bitterblue, over at The Enchanted Inkpot. Cindy is running a Bitterblue ARC giveaway, so head over there if you’re interested! Many thanks to Cindy, who asks really good questions :). My 30-second Hunger Games movie review: I had to… Read more »
