The Silent "I"

Edgar Mitchell: To the Moon and Back

During our trip to Alaska, we spent some time with Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell.  Dr. Mitchell was invited to speak at the dinner banquet as part of the EIPBN conference, at my husband Frank's request. He is a fascinating person, and it's not every day you get to meet someone who actually walked on the moon.

The reason Dr. Mitchell was asked to speak is that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser.  The conference keynote speaker, Dr. Tony Siegman of Stanford, gave a retrospective on the history of the laser in the conference's opening session.  Dr. Siegman mentioned that one of the most unique scientific uses of the laser came in the early 1970's, when the Apollo astronauts placed laser retro-reflector arrays on the moon.  Because of this, scientists on earth can bounce a laser signal off the reflectors and measure the distance from the Earth to the moon, within a few centimeters of accuracy.  As Dr. Siegman got to this dramatic point, he invited Ed Mitchell up on stage with him, as a surprise to the audience. 

Dr. Mitchell related to the rapt audience that he actually didn't know much about the experiments that were planned with the lasers, but was under strict orders from NASA not to kick any dirt on the reflectors or he would be in trouble.  He showed a picture of one of the reflectors, with his footprints around it, and it looked like he accomplished his mission of keeping it clean.  He was told at the time that they would be in use for twenty years or so, so they needed to last.  That was in 1971, and the same retro-reflectors are still being used by NASA today, nearly forty years later.

It was Frank's idea to invite Ed Mitchell to speak at the conference.  As Conference Chair, Frank wanted to make it a memorable experience for the attendees.  As a boy, he admired the Apollo astronauts, and remembered the laser experiments as he grew up and became a laser scientist himself. He diligently researched which of the Apollo Astronauts were available for speaking engagements.  Sadly, many of them have passed away.  He was overjoyed when Dr. Mitchell agreed to speak. He was thrilled that our son would have the opportunity to meet someone who had actually traveled to the moon.

Our family had the pleasure of spending a little time with Ed Mitchell during our stay in Anchorage, at the official conference functions and by being his unofficial chauffeurs and guides.  He is a delightful, charming man, and was gracious in giving autographs and posing for pictures.  Alex got to meet him at the airport, and he signed one of Alex's stuffed animals for him, a little bear wearing a space suit that Frank bought at the National Air & Space Museum.  He even brought a photo of himself on the moon with him, and signed it "To Alex."

At the banquet, he spoke about the Apollo 14 mission, most of which is well documented in history and science books, in movies, and TV documentaries.  The part that interested me most was hearing about the profound personal and spiritual impact going into space had on him, the beauty of the earth from so far above, and the feeling of connection with the vastness of the universe.  Dr. Mitchell has written about his mystical experiences in his book, The Way of the Explorer.

Sustainable Foods Information Fair

After the wonderful, thought-provoking cooking demonstrations at the Cooking for Solutions event,  I wandered into the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  As part of the weekend's events, there was a Sustainable Foods Information Fair inside the Aquarium and out on the deck overlooking Monterey Bay.  Aquarium-goers were treated to a variety of booths, talks, and cooking demonstrations by some outstanding chefs, including Rick Moonen, Jesse Ziff Cool, and Sam Choy, all of whom are leaders in the local and sustainable foods movement.

I wandered out to the deck, where there were a number of tents set up by Whole Foods Market, and a Viking cooking station and grill for the demos.  Chef Rick Moonen of RM Seafood at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas was getting ready to start his demo, and joked around with the crowd. Chef Moonen is a featured chef on Top Chef Masters, where established, world-renowned chefs compete for the title of "Top Chef Master." 

Moonen recently released a new cookbook called Fish Without a Doubt: The Cook's Essential Companion, the product of four years of work applying his culinary expertise to making preparing seafood at home less daunting for the average cook.  He was passionate about seafood, sustainability, and the debt that people owe to the oceans. I bought a copy of the book, since my husband recently converted to a semi-vegetarian to lower his cholesterol levels.  I've never been particularly good at cooking fish, but I aim to try it out.  The recipes look fantastic, and hopefully I will get over my fear of fish with this book.

Chef Moonen, like the three chefs I saw in the morning, was an engaging, charming speaker with a passion for his craft. He prepared a grilled salmon with a homemade barbecue sauce that we all got to try, that was just delicious. His secret weapon? Clam juice, which he claims could "cover up a multitude of sins" in the kitchen.

Book Review: Insight Guides "United States on the Road"

I recently received a free review copy of a beautiful USA travel guide from Insight Guides called United States on the Road. I was interested in this because of our road in 2008 through the western states, and our visits to Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and Mt. Rushmore.  The book served to bring back a host of great memories of our road trip, and inspired me to want to take another.

We love traveling outside the US when we can, and often forget the amazing bounty of beautiful, scenic places we have to visit in our own country.  When time and budget constraints don't allow it, it's easy enough to hop in the car or board a train and see the USA.  Every part of the country has something unique and special to offer.  This book, chock full of gorgeous photography and interesting places to see, should serve as a great source of inspiration, whether you're taking a day trip from home, or coming to visit the US for the first time.

The book is divided into geographic routes with selected cities, towns, and attractions along the way. It has a simple straight line map to guide you to some pretty fantastic highlights.  You won't find "where the locals eat" or a lot of detail on each place, but this is a great book to start with when planning a road trip.  If you know where the highlights are, you can use the web to search for points in between and where to find the best barbecue or a cheap hotel.  That's not the focus of this guide.

I really enjoyed looking through the book, and reading the sections about places we've been.  The Pacific Coast section is spot-on in it's description of a trip down Highway 1, mentioning Big Sur and Hearst Castle.  We spent last weekend winding up the coast from Monterey to Half Moon Bay and through the mountains back to Palo Alto.  It was nice to see portions of our weekend getaway in the book, along with a special section on San Francisco.

Part of the reason we took our western road trip in 2008 was to recreate a little of the magic my husband felt 40 years earlier when his family did the same trip.  When I think of road trips, I think of family vacations, singing along to the radio, and gazing out the window at some unexpected delight, whether it's a moose by the side of the road in Yellowstone or the crashing waves of Big Sur or the skyscrapers of Dallas off in the distance.  I hope that your family finds a little inspiration to see the world around you.

This book reminded me of the passage in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy returns from her journey to Oz and says, "I learned that, if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again... I shouldn't look any further than my own backyard."

Perhaps if you want to go looking for your heart's desire, you should look no further than Insight Guide's United States on the Road.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book, but no other compensation or incentive for writing this review. The opinions expressed herein are my honest assessment.  If you wish to purchase a copy of the book via Amazon.com and use the link below or a sidebar link or ad, I will receive a small commission through the Amazon affiliates program.

South America: Going South

In 2004, we traveled to South America and visited Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Easter Island (which is technically part of Chile, but a world unto itself).  It was one of the best trips we've taken as a family.  Alexander was three and a half, out of the "terrible twos" and growing up to be quite the little man.

We took this trip before I started blogging, so I haven't written about it yet, and I wanted to record it for anyone interested in traveling there, and to relive a great experience for us.  Like our Northern Adventure, I have notes and journals from the trip, and about 1,000 pictures to share.  Since I gave up scrapbooking a while ago, this is the closest we'll come to having a complete record of our trip south.

We started planning the trip in 2003, when Frank and I decided that it was finally time to live out our mutual life-long dream of seeing the ancient Moai (stone heads) of Easter Island.  That would have been enough for me, but Frank thought that it would be a good opportunity to see Iguazu Falls, since it was "in the neighborhood." 

Part of my fascination with Easter Island came from a TV show I watched in the 1970's called "In Search of..." with Leonard Nimoy as the narrator.  The show would go off in search of answers to ancient mysteries, and the episode on the people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) left me particularly enthralled.  How were these ancient statues built? What caused the demise of the Rapa Nui culture? Was it war? Or perhaps Visitors From Beyond? Space aliens always seemed to be a plausible explanation for the unexplained, according to this show. 

Both Frank and I had also read Thor Heyerdahl's books Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft and Aku Aku: The Secret of Easter Island as kids. His theory that Polynesians were decended from Incans has largely been discredited by anthropologists and DNA evidence since Heyerdahl built a raft and sailed from Peru to Easter Island. Still, Heyerdahl's spirit of adventure and inquiry was something both Frank and I were fascinated with kids.  Now, we didn't have to build a raft, but could hop on a jet and be there in less than a day.

Frank wanted to visit Iguazu Falls he had some grad school friends from Brazil who raved about the beauty of the falls.  To be honest, I'd never heard of Iguazu Falls until he mentioned it, and maybe saw the falls on an episode of Amazing Race.  It sounded like a nice place for a vacation, and hey, if we were in the neighborhood, why not?

This Blog is Grad Student

TV Reviews

I saw this nifty gadget over at LawyerMama's and had to try it out.  So, I typed in my URL and lo and behold, my blog is supposedly reading at a post-graduate college level.  Even though I've ignored it for weeks on end, evidently, my blog is out there reading Proust and Descartes while I'm not around.

As for me, I'm not reading much of anything lately.  I'm mostly trying to get through the holidays without losing my mind completely.  We have some traveling coming up. Last weekend, we went to Disneyland.  Next weekend, to New York to celebrate the bat mitzvah of my BFF from college.  After that, we have grandparents visiting for Christmas, a whale-watching trip to Monterey, and at somepoint during all this, trying to get some cleaning and painting done on our house.

So, if you don't hear from me, you and my blog can hang out and form a book club.  Here are my favorite books from my college years:

• The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics) by Stendahl
• Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text (Modern Library) by William Faulkner
• The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyefsky
• On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Jack Kerouac
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions) by T. S. Eliot

If you have books you'd like to rid yourself of and don't mind shipping an extra box this holiday season, check out Borneo Chica's great book collection effort to a needy high school in Chicago.

Book Review: The Ultimate Tea Diet

I got a free copy of The Ultimate Tea Diet by Mark "Dr. Tea" Ukra from Parent Bloggers Network to review.  I was interested because I need to lose weight, and thought this might be the push I needed to get going.  I'm not exactly sure how it got to be the end of January without me actually starting a diet, but eventually, I'll get around to it. 

I did read the book, and followed some of the advice, but not whole-heartedly.  I think it would probably work, not because tea is some miracle drug, but because it advocates sensible eating, exercise, and a reduction of caffeine.

He starts out by recommending weaning yourself off of coffee by replacing it with tea that you like--any tea will do.  I did this part, and found that I really enjoyed the tea.  I didn't get the normal caffeine-withdrawal headache I normally get when I stop drinking coffee cold-turkey. 

Ukra explains the different types of teas, and has some recipes for cooking with tea that went from things that sounded good to bizarre.  I have not been cooking much lately, so I didn't get to try the recipes yet.  I haven't followed the diet carefully, but it seems as thought what he is recommending is not terribly radical.  It couldn't hurt, and seems much more enjoyable than South Beach or some of the other popular diets out there. 

I enjoyed reading the final section of the book, which is a history of tea throughout the world.  It's interesting to me that so many different cultures enjoy tea in different ways, and in some, it's an almost religious experience.  It reminded me of our travels around the world, and how tea time in England is a completely different cultural experience than the tea house I visited in Beijing, that came complete with sipping lessons. We had the chance to participate in a Japanese tea ceremony some years ago, and it struck me then that ritual was somehow as nourishing and warm as the tea itself.

I liked the folksy no-nonsense tone of the book.  He isn't offering any miracle solutions, just some dietary instruction, recipes, and a great enthusiasm for tea.  He didn't recommend any particular tea for optimal results, just a general switch from coffee/soda to tea.

He claims that tea contains much less caffeine than coffee, but I have to say the biggest caffeine buzz I ever got was drinking green tea in Japan.  I don't know what was in it, but I felt like I was vibrating at one point.  It's not the same thing we have here, and the taste was quite different. 

So, if you're looking to lose a few pounds in a not-terribly-stressful way, check out The Ultimate Tea Diet.  Whether or not you lose weight, it just might soothe your soul.

Cross-posted at The Silent I Speaks, my review blog where I occasionally review stuff when people ask me to.

Book Review: New Clothes for New Year's Day

The very nice people at Kane Miller Publishing sent me two books to review a while back, and I published a review of one of them, Yellow Umbrella here.  I loved the second book, New Clothes for New Year's Day by Hyun-joo Bae as well, but sort of forget to post my review.  I was going through some of my son's books today, and came across this lovely book, and thought that it  would make a great holiday gift for a child with a Korean heritage, or for any child or family interested in cultural traditions.

This beautifully illustrated book from South Korea chronicles a young girl's excitement over her family's Lunar New Year celebration.  As she dresses for the event, she shows each piece of her elaborate clothing, from the "rainbow-striped jacket" of the hanbok to the silk pouch on a string for luck.  The drawings start out simply, and build in their richness of design and detail as the little girl adds a new piece of clothing.  At the end, the author explains Korean New Year celebrations, including the ceremonial soup that makes everyone a year older.  It is gorgeous book, and one I hope to pass along to my grandchildren some day.

My family didn't celebrate Korean New Year in the traditional way, so this was new to me.  It's wonderful to find a book that explains some of our cultural traditions in a way that both my son and I can enjoy.

Interestingly, when my son interviewed my mother for a school project, he asked her what her favorite holiday memory was, and she said, "New Year's, because I got to wear pretty, new clothes."  Now I know what she was talking about. I think my mother would enjoy this book just as much as I did.

Disclosure:  I received a free copy of this book to review.  Cross-posted at Kimchi Mamas.

Matt Bai's The Argument

Last Sunday night, I found myself wandering around a toney art gallery in San Francisco, surrounded by a Who's Who of NetRoots types, young-ish, earnest-looking bloggers and people who hang with bloggers.  Despite being a co-founder of MOMocrats, I am not that plugged in to the whole Netroots thing, so I didn't know who most of them were.  The only one I recognized was Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, "Kos" of The Daily Kos.  The only reason I recognized him was that I saw him on The Colbert Report a while ago.

Somehow, I received an invitation to attend a book signing for Matt Bai's new book,The Argument:  Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.  I thought it was going to be a panel discussion or some kind of reading from the invitation, but it turned out to be a cocktail party with the author and some of the people he mentions in his book.  Instead of a panel discussion, it was more of a "salon" style event, with people milling around, and eventually focusing on Bai when he got up to speak and answer questions.  Not exactly my normal scene, since I had to quickly change out of the shirt I was wearing before I left the house, which was covered in pumpkin guts from the neighborhood Jack-o-Lantern carving party.

Bai was introduced by Gina Cooper, who organized Yearly Kos Convention, which recently changed its name to Netroots Nation.  Bai started out by thanking the organizers of the event and pointed out that some of the people mentioned in the book were in the room, including Markos.  Markos make a point of shouting back, "I don't read books!"  as if that were some kind of blogger badge of honor.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Bai's fascinating book.  Bai seems to have genunine affection for Markos and the other netroots, and they come across much more favorably than the billionaires referenced in the subtitle, who just come across as self-important, unfocused jerks.

The premise of The Argument is that many people are disenchanted with the way the Democratic party has evolved in the past twenty years, and a few groups and individuals are emerging to take charge of the party and the message it portrays.  "The Argument" should really be called "The Agenda" since apparently, the argument is really about what agenda or ideas the Democrats should be putting forward.  This resonated with me, since I have gotten sick of the tone of the ranting on both sides of the aisle, which seem to be moving closer and closer together policy-wise, but shouting different rhetoric.  Democratic politics of late seems to be mostly reacting to whatever the Republicans are up to, without giving much of an alternative other than, "not that."

Room to Read

I had the great pleasure of attending a Stanford Breakfast Briefing last week, to hear John Wood, Founder and CEO of Room to Read.  Room to Read is a non-profit based in San Francisco that is dedicated to building schools, providing books, and supporting girls' education in third world and developing nations.  John is the author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World and was a terrific, engaging speaker.

His story is a compelling one, as is the cause that he champions.  Only a few years ago, John Wood was a burned-out Microsoft marketing manager who went on a trekking vacation in the Himalayas.  While there, he met some local people who offered to show him their school.  It was basically a dirt hut with minimal furnishings and about 400 students.  They showed him the school library, which was an empty room with tables and no books.  When he asked about the books, they showed him a padlocked closet with 20 books left behind by backpackers, none of which were suitable for children (Hermann Hesse, Gunter Grass and Danielle Steele seemed to top the list).  He was rightfully appalled at this and offered to come back and help.

He went home and collected children's books from friends, and returned with a yak-load of books.  This was the beginning of a career change for him, and the birth of a new non-profit, and a new way of thinking about how non-profits operate.

Book Review: The Little Black Book of Style

I recently joined the Parent Bloggers Network, a great network of sites that have banded together to review books and products of interest to parents.  So far, I've either been too busy or not quite the right demographic for most of the products offered.  When Julie and Kristen sent an e-mail asking for reviewers of Nina Garcia's new book,  The Little Black Book of Style, my virtual hand shot up and I shouted, "Pick me! Pick me!" 

Okay, maybe I just sent them an e-mail really, really fast, but you get the idea.  I was eager to get my hands on this one, for several reasons:

1.  I am a total, unabashed, unashamed to say-it-out-loud fan of Project Runway. 
2.  I love Nina Garcia's sometimes bitchy, yet usually spot-on analysis of the designs. 
3.  I am completely and utterly devoid of any fashion sense whatsoever. 

So, those three things combined made me a willing participant in this review.  I was expecting a short, concise, utilitarian black book of pointers on how to avoid being a Glamour Don't (or in this case, an Elle
Don't) for someone who doesn't know Oscar de la Renta from Oscar de la Hoya.  I was hoping for something with a cheat-sheet I could tear out and take along with me to Nordstroms or Target, and be able to find some things to assemble a decent work wardrobe, to replace the yoga-pants and big t-shirt SAHM Uniform and the boxy, shapeless Working Mom business suits and twin sets with slacks.  Instead, I got a fun, rambling book of fashion philosophy.  Oh, with some practical advice thrown in for good measure.