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August 2008 update

My thesis adviser once told me that he felt like it took about three years of "banging his head against the wall" before he began to feel like he was making progress with his writing. As I like to tell people now, I am only about 8 months into my own "head-banging phase."

I do have a couple fun things to report. My article on the life of Richard B. Knight, the founder of the Oregon Zoo, was recently reprinted in the newsletter of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. (I didn't know such an organization existed till they contacted me for permission to reprint the piece.) You can see the original article on the Oregon Zoo Web site. I also have a short piece scheduled to appear in the Nov/Dec Psychology Today issue.

I am still plugging along on the butterfly book proposal. I'm scheduled to visit an evo-devo university lab in Kentucky that uses Buckeye butterflies in research next month. This book proposal research has been an expansion of my master's thesis, Silverspot: Biography of a Butterfly, but I've been fumbling for the right direction for most of this year. It seems the process of writing is as much about figuring yourself out as it is about figuring out the story amidst the flurry of quirky facts and amazing people you encounter in your research.

Fire! Fire! Fire!

We got a glimpse of the Mt. Adams wildfire last Sunday on our way home from a saber (fencing) lesson; I'm guessing we saw it an hour or less after it started, because we didn't notice it on our way into Portland. I used my Blackberry to photograph it as we drove I-5 back into Washington. In the photo above, it's the "cloud" to the left of the tree.

Now, living in Vancouver puts us about 50 miles southwest of Mt. Saint Helens, and coming back home from northeast Portland had us driving toward the smoke. Being that I didn't grow up with any volcanoes in my backyard, and that I'm a bit geographically challenged, the conversation went something like this:

Me: Is that Mt. Saint Helens erupting?
Carl: No, Mt. Saint Helens is over there. See?
Me: Okay. Maybe it's Rainier?
Carl: No, Rainier is over there. See?
Me: Hmmmm... are you sure it's not Mt. Saint Helens?

So it wasn't the volcano exploding. At least I wasn't the only one who thought it was.

Here, and gone again

I'll be leaving for Santa Fe tomorrow for the Santa Fe Science Writers Workshop, driving despite the ever-rising gas prices. The drive is worth the cost to me. Let's face it: If I wanted to save money, I just wouldn't go at all.

I've yet to pick a writing sample to take with me to be critiqued at the workshop, though I want professional guidance with all the silverspot butterfly material I collected while working on my thesis. I fear the workshop instructors would take one look at the jumble that I call a book-proposal-in-progress and snicker, and shake their heads, and say, "Give it up already."

On a happier note, my short article "The Dean of Beans" appears in the June 2008 issue of Psychology Today Magazine. I'll add a link once they make it available online.