Professional Development

Day 1, we fly to Lima
I am riding to Houston with 3 women whom I don’t know very well. Over the course of the 3 hour car ride that changes, as we talk about whatever comes to mind – teaching, husbands/men, traveling – but not necessarily in that order. More of the group meets us at the airport, we eat some lunch, wait some more, and finally board the plane.
We are scheduled to depart at 3:55. We take off at 5:10. Apparently there is trouble with passengers. Two men sit in business class but they have economy tickets. They refuse to move, so they and then their luggage are removed from the plane. Then there is a woman and her 12ish year old son who want to sit in the emergency exit row because there is more leg room. He is too young to sit there, their tickets sit them elsewhere, and finally after they are threatened with removal they go back to their original seats. And we take off.
After 6+ uneventful hours of flying, in which I can’t see anything out the window because I am in the middle (albeit on the aisle), we land in Lima, Peru. The bus meets us, it’s hot and humid – like Houston – outside, and we drive 40 minutes to Miraflores, one of the rich areas. Our hotel is not a rich one, but it has a bathroom with a toilet (you still have to put the paper in the trashcan) and Internet. We sleep.

Costs of Globalization

Rainy Weather

Visiting Seattle during the winter is not for the outdoorsy. We have been here a couple days and have had rain, brief sunshine, and snow.
Today we're in Bremerton running errands. We went from snow in Seabeck on the Hood Canal to rain on the Puget Sound side of the Kitsap peninsula.
Such a short distance yet way different weather due to the water and topography.

Greener on the Other Side

ArcGIS online

View Larger Map
We begin studying Latin America next week, and our first lesson has students analyzing the relationship between population density and terrain/landforms. I thought I'd try out ArcGIS online. I attended a training session about it at NCGE in Savannah this past September. Turns out it will work well, and I can even embed the map in my website. How cool is that!

Fear and Sanity in DC

Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear
Jon and Stephen - "I'm More American Than You"
www.comedycentral.com
Rally to Restore Sainty and/or Fear The Daily Show The Colbert Report

I have never been around so many people in my life. CBS estimates the crowd at 215,000. Sounds about right to me.
We saw LOTS of signs, but didn't carry any ourselves - we took a cat on the plane, instead. Really. Kelli carried a Siamese kitten from Austin to DC for the Austin Siamese Rescue folks, and we turned it over to her new owner in DC. Fortunately she was very well behaved.
Then Euni's carry-on bag got taken by mistake (but we found it). Karma works.
Saturday was such a beautiful day - perfect weather, great company. My favorite part of the rally (except for Cat Stevens/Yousef Islam and Jon's closing remarks) was the song in the clip above. We all sang along with the chorus, and other than 4Troops singing the National Anthem, and the O Jays, and everything else, it was my favorite part.
The only downer (except for the part where it took 45 minutes to go 1 block as we were leaving the Mall) was the plane ride home. 1 hour into the flight they decided we should turn around and go back to Dulles. I had been feeling a weird vibrating through the floor, and they announced that it wasn't supposed to be there, and we were heading back. So they got us a new plane and pilots from Rochester, and made it to Austin at 3 pm instead of 11 am. But we made it.
And it was fun.
Signs and pictures:

Been There, Seen That

via New York Times:

It has huge reserves of coal and natural gas, a fast-growing economy and a property market so sizzling hot that virtually every house put up for sale here is immediately snapped up.

There is just one thing largely missing in the city’s extravagant new central district: people.

Ordos proper has 1.5 million residents. But the tomorrowland version of Ordos — built from scratch on a huge plot of empty land 15 miles south of the old city — is all but deserted.

I was there in June - the new city was eerily quiet, but our guide was bubbling with praise for the buildings.
Lots of cranes and new buildings, but no traffic and few people.

Glad I'm Not in China Today!

NASA Image of the Day

In early October 2010, a high-pressure weather system settled in over eastern China, and air pollution began to accumulate locally for nearly a week. By October 9 and 10, China’s National Environmental Monitoring Center declared air quality “poor” to “hazardous” around Beijing and 11 eastern provinces. Citizens were advised to take measures to protect themselves, and visibility was reduced to 100 meters (330 feet) in some areas.

It sounds like it was even worse than when I was there, which I can't imagine. It was incredibly bad in June - all along the eastern part of China the smog was so thick all of my photos look like they were taken in the rain. This is supposed to be even worse.

Hummingbirds

I LOVE hummingbirds. I went out front to feed the fish a few minutes ago and a female black-chinned came up and hovered a foot in front of me. She turned away and fed on the Turk's Cap in the front flower bed, then came to look at me again before flying off.
Of course I didn't have my camera, but the pic above was from last weekend, when another female was guarding "her" backyard against invading migrants. I ran in to get the camera when I saw what I think was a Ruby-throated male, but she had run him off by the time I got back outside.

Squatty Potties

As part of my Fulbright-Hays scholarship, we had to create a "personal narrative" of our trip. Here's mine.