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I went traveling for work this week - spent the weekend with my parents, then Monday and Tuesday at work. My parents and I watched The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which is Based on a True Story about a Malawian teenager who built a windmill to generate electricity in the middle of a famine so they can pump water to grow crops. It was generally pretty good, though short on the details of how he figured the construction out in favor of shots of him staring intently at nothing. When I went looking for info about the True Story, I found out that while they did the usual sort of streamlining to up the drama, they skipped over the fact that he learned how to build the windmill generator from diagrams because he couldn't read English very well at the time, and why would you leave that out??
We also spent an afternoon at a local botanical garden focused on native plants. The weather was lovely and so were the flowers. The historical house on the property is also nice and has beautiful wallpaper of birds and flowers on a golden background, but there were no details about the house, only the plants. The phlox was in full bloom, and now I want a patch of it - they are beautiful and cloudlike in big bunches. My dad picked up a couple of perennials from their shop, and when we got home I helped weed the path in the forest out back and took a peek at the ripening blueberries.
Working in person was a bit of a wash - the trip was very last-minute, my boss was out on vacation, and apparently not everybody knew I was coming because my department shares space with the sister department and the sister department wasn't told I would be there - but I got to meet our new research lead (the main reason I was there). I also got to know some coworkers I wasn't familiar with through getting rides to places. Although I don't generally super enjoy the days I am there in person because my home environment is more comfortable, I do like my coworkers. Haven't met a rude one yet.
On the train trip home, you could see the haze appearing as this creepy yellow fog. I felt the effects of the wildfire smoke the next day - I hadn't realized I'd left my office window open while I was gone until the morning after I came back, so I think there were a lot of particles in there compared to the rest of the house. The air felt better once I mopped and left a fan running for a bit. We weren't even that badly hit in the air quality compared to some places.
Just before I left, I finished my library book - Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police. I'm glad they got it when I requested it, as it's an academic book and thus expensive in ebook form, and after I returned it, I noticed that several people had it on hold. Still getting my thoughts together on it, but tl;dr is that it's mostly good for what it is (very focused on Nadia and also Bela as viewed from the Securitate documents, not a complete biography of Nadia), if sometimes overwhelming with detail on who was informing on them and all the names, and it also disappointingly kind of falls into the old traps about weight even while criticizing the coaches for doing so.
(That reminds me, I was talking with my mom over the weekend and she mentioned that she is thinking of leaving one of her professional organizations due to thinly veiled antisemitism. Through that, it came up that I don't think much of people who say that we shouldn't talk much about or promote Russian athletes because of the genocide in Ukraine - a stance with which I generally agree - and then turn around and squee over the state-sponsored PRC-representing athletes (look at these cute new gymnasts, look at this adorable figure skater whose mom is openly abusing her, we hate Russian doping but China quite possibly faking skaters' ages need not ever come up) despite the PRC government also currently carrying out genocide. My mom agreed and mentioned the police surveillance when she was traveling in Tibet years ago - she was constantly being followed on the street, all of her documents were checked and copied at every possible opportunity, she got screamed at by a policeman because someone at the hotel forgot to copy a document that had already been copied half a dozen times. I, uh, don't remember her talking about that when I was a kid. I guess she didn't want to scare me. Anyway, then we looked at some Tibetan-made dolls. I don't know any kids or doll-lovers, but the yaks are especially cute and I suspect I may end up with one as a gift.)
We also spent an afternoon at a local botanical garden focused on native plants. The weather was lovely and so were the flowers. The historical house on the property is also nice and has beautiful wallpaper of birds and flowers on a golden background, but there were no details about the house, only the plants. The phlox was in full bloom, and now I want a patch of it - they are beautiful and cloudlike in big bunches. My dad picked up a couple of perennials from their shop, and when we got home I helped weed the path in the forest out back and took a peek at the ripening blueberries.
Working in person was a bit of a wash - the trip was very last-minute, my boss was out on vacation, and apparently not everybody knew I was coming because my department shares space with the sister department and the sister department wasn't told I would be there - but I got to meet our new research lead (the main reason I was there). I also got to know some coworkers I wasn't familiar with through getting rides to places. Although I don't generally super enjoy the days I am there in person because my home environment is more comfortable, I do like my coworkers. Haven't met a rude one yet.
On the train trip home, you could see the haze appearing as this creepy yellow fog. I felt the effects of the wildfire smoke the next day - I hadn't realized I'd left my office window open while I was gone until the morning after I came back, so I think there were a lot of particles in there compared to the rest of the house. The air felt better once I mopped and left a fan running for a bit. We weren't even that badly hit in the air quality compared to some places.
Just before I left, I finished my library book - Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police. I'm glad they got it when I requested it, as it's an academic book and thus expensive in ebook form, and after I returned it, I noticed that several people had it on hold. Still getting my thoughts together on it, but tl;dr is that it's mostly good for what it is (very focused on Nadia and also Bela as viewed from the Securitate documents, not a complete biography of Nadia), if sometimes overwhelming with detail on who was informing on them and all the names, and it also disappointingly kind of falls into the old traps about weight even while criticizing the coaches for doing so.
(That reminds me, I was talking with my mom over the weekend and she mentioned that she is thinking of leaving one of her professional organizations due to thinly veiled antisemitism. Through that, it came up that I don't think much of people who say that we shouldn't talk much about or promote Russian athletes because of the genocide in Ukraine - a stance with which I generally agree - and then turn around and squee over the state-sponsored PRC-representing athletes (look at these cute new gymnasts, look at this adorable figure skater whose mom is openly abusing her, we hate Russian doping but China quite possibly faking skaters' ages need not ever come up) despite the PRC government also currently carrying out genocide. My mom agreed and mentioned the police surveillance when she was traveling in Tibet years ago - she was constantly being followed on the street, all of her documents were checked and copied at every possible opportunity, she got screamed at by a policeman because someone at the hotel forgot to copy a document that had already been copied half a dozen times. I, uh, don't remember her talking about that when I was a kid. I guess she didn't want to scare me. Anyway, then we looked at some Tibetan-made dolls. I don't know any kids or doll-lovers, but the yaks are especially cute and I suspect I may end up with one as a gift.)
