The Carved Block: Mesa Verde, Dolores Canyon, and the San Juans

Happy summer!! Especially to those who spent last boreal summer in the southern hemisphere...This weekend some new-ish friends and I went on a mini-roadrip through the San Juan Mountains to Mesa Verde and Dolores Canyon. Here is the full gallery. Selected shots are at the end of this post, general life update here:

I recently wrapped up a month or so of “outreach” activities and have taken on a few projects. In addition to steadily working on my thesis research, I am playing in the dirt at the Nederland Community Garden, mainly preparing beds for daikons, greens, and raspberries. After re-reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, I realized I know almost nothing about the Spanish Civil War and couldn’t come up with a good definition of “fascist.” So this summer I am becoming familiar with the “reactionary right” by reading on a diffuse range of topics: the nature of fascism, the nature of its 20th century opponent (communism), the Spanish civil war, recent conflicts in Europe surrounding immigration, and corruption in the Trump administration. You can look forward to a synthesis essay later this summer. My main question is, "how can we go about sorting right-wing rhetoric from legitimate policy concerns?" but my reading list is leading me through a wide range of ideas:
The Spanish Civil War: a Very Short Introduction (Helen Graham)
How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley)
The Anatomy of Fascism (Robert Paxton)
The Strange Death of Europe (Douglas Murray)
The Mueller Report (Robert Mueller et al.)
The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)
Road to Wigan Pier (George Orwell)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

I will also be putting together a detailed explanation of my “bird diet” which, contrary to popular belief, has been a nearly-constant theme in my food theories for something like three years. I am maintaining detailed food accounting from January-June to come up with “robust” estimates of my daily expenditures. This is somewhat of a task, as I buy food in bulk (most recently, 25 lbs. each of sesame and flax seeds). I am traveling to Minnesota on July 2, and will stay until at least July 18! With this time, I plan to visit with friends and family, work on research, ride bikes, pick raspberries, and play tennis.

I dabbled in outreach work pretty steadily for the past month and a half. This was mostly of my own design: I gave a series of “Austral Weeks” talks throughout April, led a Boulder Creek Critical Zone Observatory station at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research open house, and presented a similar set of demonstrations at the Trinidad Water Festival (near the border with New Mexico). The hillslope demo is used to explain how “aspect” (e.g. north- vs. south-facing) produces differences in solar radiation and snowpack accumulation that can contribute to different groundwater flow paths on the slopes. The water pollution demo is a 3D map of “Denver’s Playground” which, in combination with Kool-Aid and water, is used to demonstrate how watersheds transport pollutants. I also volunteered for nearly a week at a Fulbright enhancement seminar in Pittsburgh attended by foreign scholars working on graduate degrees in the United States. This was not necessarily “outreach” as much as a working vacation: runs along 2 (3?) rivers and 5+ bridges (just like loops I do on the Ford, Lake Street, Franklin, and Northern Pacific #9 bridges in Minnesota!), ~3 hours of research work per day on average, and various tasks related to the seminar. The entrepreneurship theme of the seminar reminded me of my various un-pursued “business” ideas: zero-waste caterer, canoe guide, primal café etc. I was reminded of the positive aspects of the health care industry by an inventor of many innovative devices that improve disabled folks’ mobility, independence, and quality of life (whereas my year in the medical device industry was more on the finance-driven end of the spectrum).

hillslope demo (left) and water pollution demo (right)

I had a great time throughout all of these experiences! Of course, the PhD thesis problems are inescapable, but I typically benefit from taking a step back and focusing on the bigger picture. In a post-PhD world, I think I would like to work part-time on technical communication activities, maybe contributing translation, editing, presenting, synthesizing, storytelling etc. I wonder whether my curiosity would be satisfied working on other people’s science, or whether the recent experiences have more to do with the relation to my current work? I do enjoy coding in Python, which may present more opportunities for remote (or not) employment. There are plenty of Python coders, though, and few scientists who can write well and communicate research to a wide range of audiences.

Ouray, Colorado