I have no problem with snow. It’s only when it sneaks up on me while I am ill-equipped to deal that snow and I have words. Last night, Ms. No Hat And “Fashion” Boots here walked out into slick, snowy, did I mention slick northeast Ohio. Behold.

That’s what it looked like out there. Yup, all blurry like that, because when it gets cold and dry outside, the contact lens in my gimpy left eye decides to act up, which defeats the whole purpose of ditching glasses that fog up in lieu of contact lenses, innit? Achilles had his heel. My mother forgot to dunk my left eye in the Styx. Probably didn’t want to have to deal with any obviously impending infection. Dettol, take her away.

All wheel drive, not 4-wheel drive, D corrected as we inched towards the grocery store. “You don’t need all-wheel drive to drive in weather like this. You can have one-wheel drive and just drive real slow, like you’re supposed to anyway.” Ok, fair enough, but then, in these moments of Northwoods he-manhood, D goes on and on and rips off his shirt to reveal a big glowing W and launches into, “I’m from northern Wisconsin, where the only time I’ve run off the road and into a snow bank in my little, piece of shit, rear wheel drive car is when I was doing 65 and hit the brakes.”

Me: “What did you do that for?”

D: “For fun.”

Me: “How did you get your car out?”

D: “Leave it there or call Tom McDonald to come pull me out.”

Back in those days when they didn’t have cellphones, this means that he would have to get out of the car, bundle up like Randy from A Christmas Story (yeah, “my kid brother looked like a kid about to pop!” Randy) and trudge through the snow uphill both ways to the nearest friend’s house and use their phone. Not like my cellphone works in 90% of this godforsaken county, but I’ll take my chances with the 2000s, thanks.

Seasons Greetings! beamed down from the front of the grocery store as we drove into its mess of a parking lot.

D: “Expectant Mother parking. What a load of shit. What’s next? Chimps With Limps parking?”

Me: “That is SO rude. Pregnant women need every break they can get. You don’t know what it feels like to carry a big, squirmy, frontal weight along with your fat ass for nine months.” (Neither do I, but I’m not the one in fascist opposition to simple concessions made for someone with a bun in the oven. Hell, had I been D’s mom and given his birth weight, I’d have demanded parking inside the store.)

D: “I sure do. I’ve had one for fifteen years. Where’s my break?”

Me: “Well, if you slip and fall while crossing the trans-Siberian parking lot, your fabulous beer gut isn’t going to get hurt.”

Just then, a sound descended upon us like a thousand broken trumpets heralding the arrival of a lesser angel. Great, I thought, it’s end days and God said, “Hey, Yomvael or Kawkabel, what say one of you runs on ahead and takes care of northeast Ohio? Gabriel will bat cleanup later when he’s done filing the Armageddon Phase I project plan and budget with me.” But, no, it wasn’t junior flunkie nephilim, but a flock of Canadian geese jetting southward with a startled urgency that can only be likened to the look on Admiral Ackbar’s face timbre of Admiral Ackbar’s voice when he realized It’s A Trap! Poor geese, the wind blew so hard they couldn’t even stay in their consummate V. Vaya con dios, save a margarita for me.

I’m not one to let things go. It’s not that I don’t want to, but much like an ancient, rusted bear trap, I can’t. “So, you’re saying pregnant women shouldn’t be given special consideration. They shouldn’t be able to park close by like the handicapped.”

D: “No. What? Can we just buy our groceries and get out of here?”

Me: “Wait, did I just refer to pregnant women as handicapped?”

D: “Look. Handicapped parking. Senior citizen parking. Expectant mother parking. Chimps with limps parking. Where’s the line? Anyone can fake a limp. Soon, you’re going to have chimps all over the place saying, ‘I can fake a limp like a pro. Look at me. I’m like John Wayne with a load in his pants.’ Where’s the line?”

Me (squealing with laughter while imagining a chimp in a cowboy outfit dragging his fake broken leg across the saloon floor): “You’re just awful.”

Our conversations never end. They simply end up like this.

JANUARY - Krewe du Vieux was All Fired Up!

FEBRUARY - The New Orleans Saints won SuperBowl XLIV which made QB Drew Brees our Bacchus XLII. All hail!

MARCH - Attended my second Where2.0 conference in San Jose, CA, where I did not play pool with OpenStreetMap founder, Steve Coast.

APRIL - In Madison, WI for the Department of Geoscience Alumni Board meeting. Of great interest then was the meteorite that had just landed in southwest Wisconsin and a sample that the UW Geology Museum obtained. The BP oil spill had also just begun.

MAY - Memorial Day weekend brings the Class A Arabian Horse Show to the Ohio Expo Center. These beauties were our neighbors' contestants this year.

JUNE - Hay baling in Northeast Ohio

JULY - Downtown Columbus, OH

AUGUST - Back in New Orleans for the launch of A Howling In The Wires and the fifth annual Rising Tide blogger conference. I moderated the Treme panel of Eric Overmyer, Becky Northcut, Dave Walker, Lolis Elie and Davis Rogan. The smell of Sardines In Louisiana Hot Sauce that Davis placed in my hand has still not washed off.

SEPTEMBER - Fort Collins, Colorado

SEPTEMBER - Chicago for a weekend with Athenae (and her adorable ferret trifecta), Anne and Lisa. And a record number of photographs from the Art Institute.

OCTOBER - The Dude at the Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear in Washington, D.C. What point the rally made I do not know, but we had a blast wandering amongst our own on a beautiful day in the nation's capital.

NOVEMBER - A wonderful week in and around Dublin, Ireland (as opposed to Dublin, Ohio) with Domingo and Mark. The 20+ pubs we hit were great, but what call me back are the hills and hiking trails of the beautiful glacier-carved Glendalough and its monastery. I have to return soon. Like tonight.

DECEMBER - Orlando, FL for the annual I/ITSEC conference. It was very nice to catch up with old friends and take pictures of domesticated hotel ducks without a) scaring them or b) falling in their pool.

Note: Thanks to geobloggers Silver Fox and GeoTripper for inspiring me to do this post. Check out their beautiful travel photographs, too.

You have got to be kidding me.

SBNation Cleveland’s Martin Rickman: “It’s good to see that they went out and grabbed a branding firm worse than the one that did that atrocity of a GAP logo earlier this year. The Big Ten refuses to be outdone. Should we hire Jim Tressel’s six-year-old nephew to draw something up?”

And the dropping of the other stinky cleat: the new Big Ten Twelve Ten’s division names are … wait for it … Legends and Leaders. The shock of 6000+ Chicago Tribune readers is nicely encapsulated in the results of this poll.

Didn’t the internet get GAP to reject its cheesy new logo in one week’s time? The Big Ten and its money deserve better than Jim Delaney and this.

I love taking pictures of this painting. Talk about recursion. Heh.

I love that tongue-in-cheek Magritte and how he forces us to keep looking.

I could stare at this painting in its 96 x 72 in. glory for hours. So soft, three-dimensional in its transparency and layering and mildly spooky, and thus comforting. Points for tasteful use of desi colors.

The Earth may be a man, but which one? Read The Granite Controversy: Neptunism vs. Plutonism at David Bressan’s excellent History Of Geology blog.

An alternative, even contrasting theory to [Abraham Gottlob] Werner’s Neptunism was proposed by the English naturalist James Hutton: primordial rocks, and their exposure, are due the effect of magmatic intrusions and eruptions. This theory was named after the Roman god of the underworld Plutonism. The resulting conflict divided geologists and an intense research begun to solve the riddle of rock formation.

If you are in Chicago right now or plan to visit in the near future, you should check out Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice 3 and the special exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography.

You may miss Kallat’s installation because it is, quite literally, underfoot and everyone is usually busy being lost or staring up at the skylights in the quest for Real High Art to realize that, hey, these shiny LED letters are not normally here. OF COURSE there was a part of me that wanted to run up and down the stairs to see if the lights would go off and on as I yelled “Billie Jean is not my lover.”

Remember those words? No, not Michael Jackson’s lyrics, but the ones on the steps. I had to rummage through my memory for a few seconds until it hit me. Pictured above is the first part of the speech with which Swami Vivekananda, the English-speaking, orange-clad monk who brought Hinduism to the west, opened The Parliament of World Religions at the Art Institute on September 11, 1893. As you walk up the stairs, the rest of his words unfold.

A couple of weekends ago, I finally got to meet the famed dingos of the temple of Athenae. And there was much chaos.

Q: What is a group of ferrets called?
Survey says: A group of ferrets is called a ”business” or busy-ness.

They’re not kidding about the business part. The Chicago mob ain’t got nothing on these critters. They get in everything. Everything. For instance, here’s Bucky looking for his cellphone to call a raccoon about a shipment. Or football bets. Or both.

And here’s Riot right before he tries to rip my shoe off while Bucky negotiates his piece. Nothing is sacred.

They are truly adorable and warm and cuddly and squishable and whole lots more, especially gentle little Claire bug. Thanks, As, for sharing your squirrels and lovely home with me!

Here’s the phull Phlickr set of pherret photographs. Come back for ones I took at the Greater Chicago Ferret Association. One word: Cloverfield.

Mi Martillo Estwing, shared by Caribú

This month’s Accretionary Wedge geology blog carnival. Almost forgot about it. Topic: “What is the most important geological experience you’ve had?” Consider this my official entry.

One would think it occurred on an outcrop. One would also think it happened on a field trip or at field camp, as it did to rock stars such as Brian Romans, Geotripper, Tuff Cookie and Callan Bentley. One would imagine it transpired while I stared longingly into a microscope at those mesmerizingly birefringent thin sections.

One would be wrong.

Admittedly, what led me to study the discipline was an outcrop which today I can locate only as being somewhere between Salt Lake City and Reno along I-80. I am aware that is around 500 miles of Basin & Range to choose from. It’s on the north side of the highway, if that helps. I know also that the terrain, especially along the highway, doesn’t lend itself to great revelation as does say The Grand Canyon, the Himalayas or even the Baraboo Hills of Wisconsin. Furthermore, I painfully admit that, many years later, discovering the photograph I took of said hill after the epiphany leads me to believe there was much sleep deprivation involved. It’s a sad, grey, talus-dripping pile of Unimportant and you don’t want me to scan that picture and post it here. Trust me on this one.

Also, my field camp sucked. Not the Wasatch-Uinta Summer Field Camp Experience® per se, but my crappy six weeks there. A persistent upper respiratory problem, an abraded and severely-dehydrated left cornea and two professors acting up due to personal problems does not a positive field experience make, however liberating and interesting the field setting. S’il vous plait to leave me at Chateau Apres with le chicken soup.

My most important geological experience happened in 1995 at the department of geology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. What no outcrops, planely erratic through no fault of their own, subduct Illinois for popcorn, Flatland, your state’s so boring and flat you can put the car in cruise control and take a nap in back, etc. Yes.

Having told my Indian-immigrant parents what I thought of a future in medicine (not much), I embarked on the aforementioned road trip westward, stayed a while and then returned to Illinois after almost losing my eyeballs to the high cost of California living, and enrolled in accounting and science classes to see what would stick. I kicked Accounting’s rear so hard I could be Lord Comptroller of the known universe right now. Both professors, both semesters, gushed over my attention to detail, the excessive tidiness of my paper balance sheets (you down with OCD? yeah, you know me!), that I would wake up in the middle of the night with solutions to activity rates for cost pools and that I cracked jokes in class and livened up their otherwise dull classrooms.

But, every once in a while, the little lab-coated girl in me who wanted to be a scientist when she grew up would rear up and say, “Accounting is really tidy and happy-making, but its rules are so arbitrary, sometimes silly and not as inherently open to inquiry as natural laws. What more, this is easy, memorizable stuff. Where’s the challenge?” During that second semester of accounting, well on my way to a corner cubicle at Deloitte & Touche, I was simultaneously enrolled in Geology 101. It was Rocks for Jocks through and through, with full-to-capacity stadium seats oozing out hungover frat boys there for those easy five credits, but taught by a highly intelligent and eager professor named Wang-Ping Chen. I didn’t know what this man was on about with his bright-eyed, impassioned lectures on everything from surficial mass wasting to deep mantle dynamics, but I was determined to see this class through even if it meant arriving early to catch a seat up front (didn’t have to try too hard for those) and staying late to ask real questions about geology and the curriculum, beyond the usual “My roommate peed on my assignment. Can I turn it in late?”

Of great importance to me and the point of this post is that, through the course of the semester, Professor Chen noticed this curiosity and indecision on my part, and went out of his way to convince me to enroll in UIUC’s geoscience program of study. During office hours, he would honestly and tirelessly list all of the degree’s challenges and, like every good Asian parent, none of its rewards. That mineralogy required chemistry and optics, being able to identify thousands of minerals and late hours in the lab. That the geology curriculum required geophysics which in turn needed linear algebra and differential equations and three physics classes including electricity & magnetism. That structural geology was difficult for many but I should take it the following semester when it was offered. That much field and lab work was required on weekends. That distinction and honors in the program (and he expected no less) came only with undergraduate research and a thesis. That beyond here were graduate school, more graduate school and, maybe some day, a postdoctoral position and then the tenure track. Was this man insane? All of this extra work was supposed to entice me into the world of Earth?

But it clicked, didn’t it? For three years, I did all that Professor Chen suggested and more (like the insane goat rodeo that was Sed-Strat, only because we were between decent instructors that semester), and went on to graduate school in structural geology and geophysics. It occurred to me recently that the science-rich life I have now is my reward. I would never have made it in the confines of an accounting firm, and I believe the professor saw that and talked me out in time. Again, he could have very easily told me to go to the department office and fill out a form, but it took the candid scientist and teacher in him to tell me what I was up against, should I choose to accept, and to offer me context and realistic goals. While I talk about my love for the University of Wisconsin as a great scholarly and research institution on par with Stanford, MIT and other global academies, these schools have a lot to learn with respect to the extra care given to those critical undergraduates. For simply read all of the entries in this Accretionary Wedge exercise and then look at the point in the stratigraphic column of each of our careers that we label “Important.”

So I lied. Professor Chen did have a tangible and very cool reward for me at the end. After the Geology 101 grades were published and I had submitted my application materials to the geology department, he invited me back to his office. I was offered a brown paper bag (no, not a fifth of Wild Turkey; that comes in graduate school) which contained a hammer I’d never seen before. Its handle was blue with the word Estwing on it in bright yellow letters and in the place of its claw was a sharp pick. “This is a rock hammer, an essential tool for the geologist. You’re going to need it for your upcoming field trips. You will get a bigger version of it if you’re outstanding junior and a Brunton compass if you graduate from this department at the top of your undergraduate class.”

To this day, I count those two rock hammers and Brunton compass as some of my most prized possessions. They are very easily replaced if lost, but they wouldn’t be the ones I earned. They would not be symbols of their trade that were offered out of encouragement, pride and these geoscientists’ faith in my abilities at a time when I couldn’t see past that Saturday. One of these weeks, I’ll have to email Professor Chen and let him know that I keep the rock hammer he gave me under the passenger’s seat of my car at all times (you never know when a rock sample needs liberating and a hammer is just more me than, say, a baseball bat) and how important and lasting his efforts as an instructor were.

It appears Professor Chen is head of the department now. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

YOU WUZ WARNED CHICAGO