Tag Archives: birthday

a little more 2024

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Taking a photographic walk down memory lane for the year and there are three of you who might want to join me.

Quinn turned 17!

I hatched some eggs!

I went to Galveston, saw dolphins, drove boats.

Jazz band went to state!

Rich and I went to New York! There were fireflies.

A family portrait was taken at Oregon Country Fair by a kind stranger.

I went tidepooling! (I plan to do much more of that in 2025.)

I went to Kodiak twice… love it there. Fin whales were my favorite wildlife sighting, but there were many contenders for that role. Practiced my new boat skills. Backed the boat trailer down Anton Larsen Bay ramp successfully!

 

I did not take gratitude for a grade. But I am grateful for this year!

 

 

 

~seventeen~ supersingular

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Happy seventeenth to Quinn.

In keeping with tradition, here is the grid of birthdays:

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We will celebrate Quinn’s seventeenth birthday next weekend when he is home, but I could not let the day pass without marking it in my usual way, wandering through random tidbits of science and math and literature while reminiscing about this young man I have had the privilege of raising.

My photos of Quinn as he approaches seventeen are of him playing in band, and of him holding kittens. These seem to be the two moments he doesn’t mind having his photos taken, so I will take what I can get. Luckily, others were holding cameras at Quinn’s winter band concert, and I have another band parent and Quinn’s English teacher to credit with some of those images.

Seventeen is the seventh prime number. It is the only prime number which is the sum of four consecutive primes (2 + 3 + 5 + 7) because any other set of four primes results in an even number. It’s a lucky number of Euler, which is different from the way 13 was lucky, but still quull. In abstract algebra, seventeen is a supersingular prime, the explanation of which I had no comprehension of, which is probably a sign I never took abstract algebra, but I still think supersingular sounds intriguing.

Quullest photo. This was taken by Q’s English teacher.

Quinn is not taking math this year as a junior, but he would still be the only person I know who will find some of these tidbits quull, like the fact that the Pythagoreans abominated the number seventeen (I imagine he will giggle at this). I think he will be tickled that Carl Gauss chose mathematics as his profession because of his proof that heptadecagons (polygons with seventeen sides) can be constructed with a compass and unmarked ruler, and that this is because seventeen is a Fermat prime, whatever that is. Quinn likes Carl Gauss as much or more than the next seventeen-year-old. I think Quinn would like that there are seventeen fully supported stellations in an icosahedron. And I also think he will find it interesting that seventeen is the minimum number of givens needed in a Sudoku with a single solution.

According to MIT, seventeen is “the least random number,” which is because it is the most commonly chosen number when someone is asked to choose a random number from 1 to 20, according to several experiments.

Quinn is taking chemistry this year, and the element with the atomic number 17 is chlorine (which rhymes). Also, it reminds me of swim lessons. The element with a molecular weight of seventeen is ammonia. Which reminds me of diapers. Doesn’t time fly?

But the subject Quinn has been the most excited about this year (possibly with the exception of band) is English. So it will bring me great joy to remind him that the Haiku form has seventeen syllables (5 + 7 + 5). In other literary greatness, seventeen is when a wizard comes of age, and is the number of sickles in a galleon in wizard currency.

There are the same longings as ever. I wish I had more time with him. I wish I had his birthday with him. I wish I could fully support his stellations.

When we left off at sixteen, NASA was getting ready to launch a mission to space object 16-Psyche, an asteroid made of iron and other metals. The launch was successful in October, and in December, the spacecraft turned on its cameras successfully, the moment on a space mission called “first light.” The craft will fly by Mars in 2026, receiving a gravity assist from the planet named after the god of war, and then will continue on to Psyche, arriving in 2029. This asteroid may be a planetesimal, the building block of a planet, or in other words, an opportunity to look at what our own planet looks like on the inside. Our own earth is a hunk of metal at its inaccessible center, and this is our chance to learn more about our own core. Maybe. Or find out something else.

Messier space object 17 is the swan nebula. What is a nebula, you might ask? So might I.

A nebula is

Luminescent star-forming

Interstellar stuff

From my vantage point crowd controlling the middle school band at the winter concert, I got this back-of-the-band shot of my tall drummer.

Nebulae are those colorful, foggy space places whose images would make good Trapper Keeper covers, and they are full of cosmic dust. They are the places where the particles of cosmic dust clump together and attract tumbleweeds of more material until they give birth to a star. I picture a grain of sand in the mushy mantle of an oyster gathering ocean bits to form a pearl, only space. After the stars get born, the remaining material leftover is thought to be the makings of planets and their rings, their moons, their comets and asteroids. A nebula is like a solar system womb, then. And the swan nebula is one of the largest star-wombs in our Milky Way.

NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team and ESA

 

Wombs. Milky ways. Quick subject change before I get too weepy.

Cicadas! Some species of cicada have a seventeen-year life cycle. Probably a lot of people already know this, but every time I hear it, I still think it’s miraculous. Between mating seasons, they are buried underground for seventeen years. This seems excessive and impossible and also has very cool ecological reason and rhyme. Also there are fossil cicadas dating back to the Triassic in Australia. Automatically quull.

Also, the periodical cicadas (including the 17-year varieties) are part of the genus Magicicada. I just learned this and I think it’s magical.

Magicicada

Underground for seventeen

That seems excessive

Cicadas are of course known most for their music, and as musicians, they are basically percussionists. I can keep going.

Did you know that the different stages of nymphs that develop during the 99.5% of their life that takes place underground are known as instars? There are few words I love as much as “instar.” See star-womb nebula discussion above.

There are a hypothetical thirty broods in the Magicicada genus, which are exclusive to North America. Many of the hypothetical broods have not been observed. I try to wrap my head around this and picture the type of nerd whose job it was to hypothesize mathematically occurring cicada broods, and I am picturing someone not that different from Quinn. (They numbered the broods with Roman Numerals. Am I wrong?)

We will not be enjoying roasted cicadas for Quinn’s birthday, though this is a culturally important delicacy to the Onondaga people.

Despite the hypothetical brood abundance, only fifteen of the broods are known to survive today, and their timelines are mapped out for our entomology ecotouring convenience. Brood XIII, the Northern Illinois brood from the Midwest, is a seventeen-year cicada expected to emerge in 2024. The next time they do, Quinn will be turning 34.

Least random number

Happy Birthday Quinnigan

You’re Interstellar

 

edited to add belated celebratory photo epilogue…

sixteen ~ oxygen

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It’s time for the traditional Quinn’s birthday post. First of all, sixteen is a very satisfying number for making a grid of birthdays:

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Some facts about sixteen… that’s XVI for you Roman numeral fans.

 

 

One of my favorite photos of Quinn this year, embodying his drum sticks with the football team in the background.

Sixteen is the fourth power of two (which makes me think of the Indigo Girls… “I’m stronger than the monsters beneath your bed, smarter than the tricks played on your heart….”)

 

Quinn says 16 is the basis of hexadecimal, whatever that is, but that he hasn’t learned hexadecimal quite yet. Apparently it is a goal.

It’s the atomic number of sulfur, the element of “brimstone,” but it’s also the molecular weight of oxygen, making up 21% of the atmosphere, literally the air I breathe, and 86% of the weight of the ocean, a big reason I breathe it.

 

Timpani are quull!

There are sixteen pawns in a chess set, and each player has sixteen pieces to start a chess game. Quinn is as insatiable with games as he always has been, at least last I checked, which was when he was 15 years and 361 days old, roughly 15.99, over this past weekend when we played several rounds of Tiny Epic Dinosaurs.

 

 

A sixteenth note is also called a semiquaver. I think it will be fun to discuss hemidemisemiquavers with him at some point. A true highlight of life right now is watching Quinn emerge on the stage of high school life through his involvement in concert band, pep band, and now jazz band.

 

Rich’s awesome birthday present find, a “Dungies and Dragons” shirt.

 

He’ll be marching in the spring and jamming in his bedroom with new cymbals added to his drum set.

 

There will also be more cowbell.

But don’t expect him to be able to blow out sixteen candles in one go. He’s a percussionist, not a wind player.

 

I see two things: my brother Brendan’s laugh, and some light-trick butterfly-hearts fluttering.

Traditionally, I look for astronomical associations with Quinn’s age, and 16 did not disappoint. My favorite find was a huge asteroid called 16-Psyche named for a Greek goddess associated with the human soul. NASA plans to launch a mission to visit it this very year of 2023. Some planets and space objects are given iconic symbols, and the symbol given to 16-Psyche is  a butterfly wing topped by a star.

Quinn is the lucky recipient of a snow day from school for his birthday (and his mama was the lucky recipient of a snow day from work, hence she had time to write this post!). Happy sixteenth birthday Quinn!

fifteen~love

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The first player to score in tennis earns fifteen points. Fifteen-love. I guess no one is sure why zero in tennis was originally called love, however “the most accepted theory is that those with zero points were still playing for the ‘love of the game’ despite their losing score.”

Maybe it’s immature to think of this coparenting journey as a tennis match but sending a child back and forth between two households was a never ending volley, until it wasn’t. Many times I remind myself I’ve consistently chosen to play the long game when it comes to parenting, that I may be in a streak of losing game after game, I may be about to lose this set, but if we’re lucky, it’s still early in the match. In the long game, maybe I have a chance. The long game is the basket I have all my eggs in.

In the short game I’m at zero. Zero is love. Love is zero. Love is a big goose egg. Love is missing the egg I could be finding. Love is emptiness. Empty spaces. Empty nest. Empty loft bed with dinosaur stickers on the side, dinosaur flannel sheets, fuzzy owl blanket, and a quilt each from Grammy and Mama. Empty seat at the table. Empty green plate that I’m sure is too small for him to eat off of now. Except for maybe eating birthday cake. Which he isn’t going to eat from it this year.

Image credit Roberto Mura

 

We left off at fourteen, chatting about galaxy NGC 14 and a quasar called the Einstein Cross in the constellation of Pegasus, the winged horse. Well, 4.2° west-northwest of the brightest star in Pegasus, there is a globular cluster called Messier 15. M15 is 360,000 times the luminosity of the sun, contains pulsars and a planetary nebula, and wouldn’t you know it: astronomy suspects its center may contain a black hole.

In another galaxy called Holmberg 15, a supermassive black hole was recently discovered, one of the largest black holes ever known (40 billion solar masses, I guess that does sound big). I thought, huh, I wonder what constellation Holmberg 15 is found in. Wouldn’t you know, it’s in Cetus, the whale. (I’ve said it before, you can’t make this stuff up.)

This little planet Quinn has now taken fifteen trips around our sun on, rotates 15 degrees per hour, making the sun and stars appear to move fifteen degrees per hour over our heads.

From the music of the spheres to the music of our own solar system, fifteen is a special number. Not a lot of time signatures involve 15, but there is one I know of:

15
8

Which is sometimes called compound quintuple meter. Or it can be called triple quintuple time. Marking time in our ongoing separation feels complicated, like it might need a special time signature. It feels compound, in the sense that a fracture can be compound. It feels like I need to concentrate hard. Then it feels like I need to avoid thinking about it at all. I think compound Quintuple meter fits.

My ability to document the lifelong learning that is still ongoing despite our separation has ebbed and flowed. The notes have been tucked away, and I have not given up on one day backtracking to revisit this time, but for now, my heart isn’t ready for much of it.

A few of his presents are Rubik’s cubes. He recently solved his 6 by 6 Rubik’s cube, so I got him the 7 by 7, as well as some other shapes that remind him of D&D dice, and finally, a Molecube. He told me about solving the 6 by 6, detailed step by step his approach to solving it, which reminds me that I’ve never entirely trusted the evaluation that disqualified him from being on the tippy end of the autism spectrum, and come to think of it I wonder about myself sometimes, and if you’re still reading this verbose sentence you must really love us for who we are. Example:

“The three by three is interesting to solve, because you can’t move the centers in relation to each other. You can only move other things in relation to the centers. You have to solve all the corners, of which there are eight in any cube puzzle, and you also have to solve the grand total of twelve edges between all these corners. My method solves four adjacent corners that are all on one face, then solves all the edges between those corners, all with the center obviously solved for those. Flip the cube over, solve the other four corners. I always do the same colors. I go to the yellow, I solve the yellow corners, along with the yellow layer, like not just that side of the yellow is solved, but like the green and the red on the side of it, whatever. Then I flip, and I solve the four white corners, then I flip it like this with yellow on the left and white on the right. And from that there are some other sequences you can use to solve the white edges. So, you use sequence A1 and A2, E1, E2, E3 and E4 to solve the yellow side. Flip it, and use sequences C and A2 again to solve the white corners. Then flip it so the white is on the right. And using sequences G1 and G2, solve the white edges….”

At this point in my audio file we are at 4:41 of a 39:43 minute “dialogue” concerning cubing solutions and it will probably take me until he is sixteen to type in the rest.

 

As usual with birthdays around here, there are the mathematical fun facts. Fun facts about 15, according to Wikipedia:

15 is a lucky number.

Fifteen is a triangular number:

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When I first made a grid of Quinn’s previous nine birthdays as he turned ten, I reflected on him being halfway to 18 one year and halfway to 20 that next year.

Now he’s halfway to 30.

15 is a hexagonal number:

 

hexagonal grid of circles oe each for Quinn's 15 years

Fifteen is a repdigit in binary, and there are few people who love binary counting as much as Quinn, age 1111.

15 is a magic constant of magic squares.

In pi, 15 comes after 14:

3.1415….

All of which is to say that 15 is quull.

In navigation, every 15 degrees of longitude equals one time zone. These lines of longitude, also known as meridians, are farthest apart at the equator, but they come together at the poles… eventually.

In the meantime, we can span time zones on computers, even three of them if we need to, as Quinn recently has to connect with his cousins Mario and Luigi on Discord. The three of them are peas in a pod still, even online, where Quinn is leading his cousins on a D&D quest for which he prepared a nine-page campaign script, five spreadsheets worth of maps, and an ancient scroll to introduce them to the quest.

Fifteen is the number of months Quinn had been out of the womb when he started walking. Now that he is 180 months of age, the moments I am going to look back on are our walks together. Our pre-birthday hike was a good one, and we noted that our spot in the forest is also visited by owls:

Someone has pruned a lot of the regenerating trees on either side of the trail, limbing them up so they will grow taller (the trail goes through former clear cut). On the way back down the hill, the light was just right for me to see what is left of some of the mother trees, still present there, still supporting the lanky youth.

Quinn, you are the magic constant in this mama’s life. Wishing you a happy fifteenth birthday today!

fourteen ~ quasar

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In recent years, I have been learning math concepts and obscure number facts for each birthday Quinn reaches, in keeping with his own fascination with math. It helps me grapple with things like the slippery acceleration of time, and learning how to accept that my baby is growing up. It brought comfort to me that 10 was an order of magnitude, 11 was indivisible, and 12 was sublime.

I wasn’t sure numbers would be consoling this year. On the day before Quinn’s fourteenth birthday, the United States surpassed 500,000 Covid19 deaths, so the flag today outside my work was flying at half-staff. Quinn has been living solely at his dad’s house since March 14, pi day, so we have now been separated for 346 days with only a few in-person social distance masked hikes infrequently taken. These are numbers from which I can derive no comfort on this birthing day.

That 14 is part of pi, however, is a pleasing aspect of Quinn turning 14. He was born at 3:14 PM, pi o’clock, a time that catches my eye on a digital clock occasionally and makes me smile. So I thought I’d find out if there was anything fun about 14 that might help me create some joyful meaning on a day when I am painfully aware of some numbers whose meanings are devoid of joy.

I asked Quinn during our video call last night whether he thinks 13 and 14 feel different and he said a definitive yes, though he did not articulate the difference. I wrote last year that, “Thirteen is cleaning his room independently, having a passport, opening a checking account, getting a debit card, taking ownership of his google account, having an A in Algebra, reminding me not to buy anything “too dorky” when I went to buy some paper party plates at the dollar store. It’s sitting here writing this blog post while some new teenagers sing Take on Me and fling themselves around the trampoline, then carry out a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, emptying bowls of snacks while one of them strums my guitar. Imagine thinking 13 is unlucky. In Italy, where Quinn is heading soon, fare tredici (translated literally, to do 13) is to hit the jackpot! Any way you calculate it, 13 feels incredibly lucky to this mama!”

At least, that’s what it seemed like thirteen was going to be. Instead, we found ourselves in a global pandemic, and so much of what we anticipated about lucky 13 was irrevocably changed. No trip to Italy, nor even to the bank to obtain the debit card, no more friends on the trampoline, not even emptying any bowls of snacks on my kitchen table.

So I hesitate to say what I think fourteen will bring, unsure if the trip to Italy or other much hoped-for events such as reunion with each other and with beloved family members will be occurring during the year he is fourteen.

But I’ll give it a shot anyway. I think fourteen is: taking charge of his own schooling in unprecedented ways. Being informed and opinionated about the wider world. Humor that grows deeper, darker, richer, funnier all the time. Empathy that grows long tendrils reaching ever outward. The first taste of cynicism, of disappointment in his fellow humans. Realism, but also relentless hope. A fervent belief in the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice if we push on it right.

I’m going to forgive myself if my assessment of fourteen doesn’t sound as perky as some years. It’s taking courage to show up and write today at all, and I am cutting myself some huge slack if the light of my metaphors does not escape the event horizon of the black hole that has been sucking my motherly soul for nearly a year. I also took myself to the beach briefly, as the sun came out after days of rain on this day of celebrating my son. The first thing I saw in the sand was a fossil, of course.

Then I met Quinn in the lab parking lot and delivered him his “birthday garbage,” a big trash bag full of presents, and I took this one photo of him. Tonight I will watch him open presents over zoom, where they will be piled at the foot of his bed just like in Harry Potter.

And now for some other fun facts about fourteen…

Silicon has atomic number 14. Quinn is a big fan of the periodic table, especially as written by Theodore Gray in his book, Elements:

“Silicon based life forms have been the subject of speculation in science fiction ever since chemists pointed out that silicon, of all the elements, is most like its neighbor, carbon (6), in its ability to form complex molecular chains, in some ways not unlike the long-chain carbon molecules that are reading this text. (That means you.)

“About the only thing that doesn’t have a lot of silicon in it is you: while some sea sponges grow bones of silica glass, your bones, assuming you are not a sea sponge, are calcium phosphate, in the form of rigid hydroxyapatite foam with almost no silicon.”

An honorable mention goes to nitrogen, with its atomic weight of 14.0067 g/mol. As an indispensable component of fertilizer, we depend on it for food. In its liquid form, it cryo-preserves specimens to -196 degrees C, useful for, say, ensuring the integrity of a coronavirus vaccine, or preserving elephant cell lines into which you might want to splice woolly mammoth genes, or putting Han Solo into cryogenic stasis. (Oh wait, that was carbonite).

Quinn has been making an elaborate D and D scenario (character, map, script) for his dad to play, and said that on the province-level maps he makes, the side of one graph paper square is one mile. “Or, square root of two, going diagonally.” Just showing off his knowledge of right isosceles triangle geometry.

Speaking of Diagon Alley, we are closing in on the ending of the final book of Harry Potter, and Quinn was delighted to hear that I had spied someone wearing the sign of the deathly hallows printed on their face mask. I made Quinn some math equations to graph that turn into a message for him that I think will remind him of that symbol. But the message really says I cardioid U Q.

 

In other comfortingly familiar pop culture, 14 appears in Star Wars when Rey, in The Force Awakens, realizes she’s on the Millennium Falcon. “This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in 14 parsecs?” Han of course barks, “Twelve!”

But back to the square root of 2. Last year we were thrilled for Quinn to celebrate a Fibonacci birthday, but 14 also belongs to an infinite sequence of numbers called companion Pell numbers or Pell-Lucas numbers. The closest rational approximations of the square root of 2 in fractions follow a sequence

1/1, 3/2, 7/5, 17/12, 41/29…

The denominators of said fractions are the Pell numbers 1, 2, 5, 12, 29…

And if you double the numerators you get the companion Pell numbers 2, 6, 14, 34, 82…

14 is in that group!

Like the Fibonacci sequence, the Pell companion sequence grows exponentially, like other things that shall not be named, but in this case to powers of the silver ratio 1 + √2. Quinn would happily embrace this ratio, irrational though it may be. Like the golden ratio of Fibonacci, the silver ratio can be represented visually as a spiral. My forever favorite symbol for the passage of time as a mother.

Spiraling outward, we can look at the universe at large for more instances of 14, like Messier object M14, a globular cluster in the constellation Ophiuchus. Better yet, NGC 14, an irregular galaxy in the constellation Pegasus! Not as far away as GNZ11, maybe, but located in a winged horse from some of Quinn’s favorite mythology is good!

His birth story aside (let’s just say maybe his mother was a bit misunderstood), it is said that when Pegasus was born, he flew to where thunder and lightning are released. Everywhere he stepped on earth, springs of water sprouted (naturally, as his dad was Poseiden). My favorite detail: when Zeus rewarded him by transforming him into a constellation, a single feather fell to the earth.

He earned that reward for helping Perseus rescue Andromeda from the sea monster who was going to eat her as punishment for her mom bragging her beauty exceeded that of the sea nymphs. Perseus turned the monster to stone by showing it the decapitated head of Pegasus’s dear old mom Medusa, and they lived happily ever after. So Pegasus will forever shine in the night sky, as will Delphinus, the dolphin who comforted Andromeda while she was chained to a rock at sea.

Anyway, NGC 14 galaxy is irregular because it appears like it is separating apart. I feel that. Separation can feel pretty irregular. It’s not the only galaxy inside Pegasus – there’s a whole cluster. There’s a spiral galaxy in there, some 40 million light-years from Earth. A supernova exploded there in 2014 while astronomers watched. One of the stars in the Pegasus constellation is also the first star known to have a planet orbiting around it, also known as an exoplanet, about fifty light-years from Earth.

Then there’s the Einstein Cross, also located in Pegasus. It’s a quasar, which starts with Q, and is therefore awesome. This quasar is 8 billion light-years from Earth and does a nifty thing called gravitational lensing. Because it sits behind a galaxy from us, one that is 400 million light-years away, and because quasars are intensely luminous, the gravity of the galaxy bends this intense light to project four images of the quasar around the galaxy. And that is just rad.

just a beach picture that reminds me of galaxies

So this Q thing, with its extreme luminosity, gets its powerful energy from matter being sucked into a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. It took a while to work this out. Around the time of the flu pandemic just over a century ago, astronomers were figuring out that some of the objects they were looking at in space were galaxies like our own. In the 1950s, some of the objects being detected out among the galaxies had properties that defied explanation. They were thought to have very small sizes, but to put out the amount of light they did, they either had to be enormously powerful for their size, or be traveling at a velocity beyond the speed of any known star. These astronomical puzzles were named quasars. In the 1960s, measurements and observations were made and their implications debated. Were unknown laws of nature invoked?

Though no mechanism could explain the enormous luminous power of quasars, some astronomers held this as the most likely scenario – that they were very small and very far away but packed a lot of punch – more than the energy conversion of nuclear fusion. In 1964 the currently accepted explanation was put forth but was rejected by many because black holes were still theoretical. Now we know that many galaxies, ours included, do have supermassive black holes at their center, but at the time this was unconfirmed.

Quasars played a big part in drawing together the fields of physics and astronomy. In this time of separation, I like to think of things that are instead drawing closer. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted the gravitational lensing of quasars, and in 1979 this was confirmed by astronomical observation.

In summary, quasars are found at the heart of galaxies; they are some of the most luminous Q-named objects in the universe, with an energy output greater than the hundreds of billions of stars of our Milky Way. The light from some of the most quasar-y quasars had to have left its source only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang in order to be reaching our eyes, that is how profoundly distant, and bright, quasars can be. And if light from such a corner of the universe can meet our eyes, there are far shorter distances we can hope to traverse in far shorter periods of time, even if the times are unknown for right now, and that is a nice thought. Distances larger than the distance light could travel in the 13.8 billion year history of the universe have been traveled by quasars, because space itself has also been expanding. Wrap your head around that.

And even those distances are smaller than the size of my love for another luminous being with a Q name: fourteen quintillion light-years traveled by the light of a quasar. To me, Quinn is out of this world. Happy Birthday Mighty Q!

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ my backstory is yes

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Three parties and a dance, not bad for a birthday month!

Quinn got to have a sleepover on Sunday of MLK day weekend. Sunday afternoon Aragorn invited Quinn, Legolas and Goldberry over, and they played D&D. He described some of the action to me, and a lot of it seemed to center around Legolas’s character’s tendency to eat foreign objects in his environment, which strangely is a tendency the real-life Legolas has been known to exhibit. His character got eaten by whale, only to eat the whale from the inside out, and so on. It sounded like Quinn had a ton of fun. Goldberry of course left before sleepover time, but I love that she was there up until that time. I suggested to Quinn that he could invite the three of them for D&D on his Sunday birthday, but of course without sleepover since there will be school that Monday.

Pancake W came for a visit (Christmas observed)! She loves Quinn so much. She wanted to eat his Hawaiian burger, used him to push herself up to standing a million times, held onto him for balance, crawled over to him and climbed onto his lap while they played with the big duplo legos.

He is so good with her, and she already adores him like B and Z seem to do. He is a big enough kid now that he is game to build things for her to deconstruct, because that is the phase she is in developmentally. As soon as he heard that, he built structures all night for her to take apart. He just laughed as she opened his Christmas present for him. Rich and I reminisced about how he was a bit less flexible when B was the baby pancake deconstructionist, and Quinn was only five. Q got a lesson in backgammon from his brother in law; my game knowledge is finite, so it’s good he has a large pool of adults to glean games from!

Another find-out-at-last-minute middle school dance, this time Rio theme. He said, “I think bright colors?” I loaned him my Hawaiian shirt that I bought in Fiji twenty years ago which FITS HIM and he put on his gray owl hoodie over it and no one ever saw what he wore. He said Goldberry wore all black, the boys just wore their normal stuff but friend M wore light blue. Apparently, M and Legolas are “together” so that was the big deal of the evening.

same shirt size, but his hands are now wider than mine.

mammoth tooth

baby mammoth femur

coprolites!

We went to “fossil fest” at the marine science visitors center. Quinn spoke with a few people who have found some cool fossils in Oregon, including mammoth teeth and bones, parts from sharks and turtles. He had me take pictures of coprolites and some of the fossils and send them all to him. One guy gave us his card to call him so we can send Quinn floating down the Yamhill river with him looking for fossils (including snorkeling – which inspired some “I’d better practice snorkeling!” on the way home) over the summer.

Lots of building lego robots this month. Still to come: the programming of said robots!

We got to go to a friend’s birthday party being hosted by Goldberry’s mom, and when I asked if 13 year old boys were wanted at this party, Goldberry’s mom said “Goldberry would love to hang out with Quinn.” I had been wanting to connect with their family more… they are also theatre folks (Goldberry’s mom was dear sugar in tiny beautiful things). I let them know Goldberry was invited to Quinn’s birthday party in two weeks and they said she can come!

The biggest deal of the weekend (for me) was Quinn started independently cleaning his room! I mentioned on Friday that he’d probably want to think about cleaning it this weekend, since when he gets home the next time, it will be time for his birthday party and having room for friends would be good. After we got home from the party he really started turning onto the idea of cleaning, and Sunday he worked at it a whole bunch. “I knew how to clean a room, I just chose not to.” He’s being thorough, putting things in reasonable places, pulling things off his desk, organizing it, making it so he can use the surface again, organizing legos into their cases, thorough. All this time I’ve been invested in my hippie approach of not nagging/requiring room cleaning with the optimistic hope that one day self-motivation would actually occur. It is a wonder to behold. He’s doing it cheerfully!!!!!

It may seem that not much academic learning is going on; it is, and it’s not that it’s unremarkable to speak about, it’s that time is racing by. I have these funny images of Quinn letting me know how he knew the exact dimensions of the unit of measurement “hogshead” and if I had not taken them, I would have completely forgotten the hilarious memorization moment of him showing me the inside cover of a composition book.

We had a Friday night karate class with Sifu Diaz (our sifu’s sifu).

Then a Saturday trip to go to a birthday party for pancake W. Cuteness overload, and a special big sister got Quinn and her little W each their own special giant birthday cupcake. She said, “I hope he likes lemon…” it’s only his favorite!

Then on Sunday we had a Quinn birthday!

His friends are so cool. Goldberry showed up first, just before 2:00. She was so sweet, “your house is so nice! I love it here!” and loved our cats, too. She did the same with Quinn’s room, “oh your room is so awesome!” and he gave her the tour of his (clean!) room. I was still baking cookies but eavesdropping of course. She gave him a card and a pack of peeps! “I didn’t know what to get you for a present!” I thought her choice was perfect.

Legolas came next, and his present was also food: ramen! Ahh, he must have had good memories of last year’s Naruto/ramen birthday. Then Aragorn showed up, and he gave Quinn a tiny 3D printed D&D figurine.

Then the snack bowl emptying/D&D playing began, and Aragorn had my guitar in his hand as soon as I gave him permission to use it and apologized for the old strings and out-of-tuneness. He can play quite a few tunes! After they worked on their characters (and emptied all the snack bowls) for a while, they took a break and went out and swept off the trampoline and jumped.

They came back and worked on characters some more, the conversation was entertaining. Quinn was being dungeon master (“DMing” is the lingo) but the other three were making characters. Legolas had John the paladin who apparently ate his family. Goldberry worked on her dragon-born bard Bob, who played death metal on his ukulele. Aragorn didn’t have a character because he had been DM the other times they played, so he made up Swaylor Tift, a ranger. “My backstory is yes,” he announced. They drew stick figures of their characters in the box provided, and Legolas and Aragorn both had pretty pathetic drawings, but the banter about their stick people was gold: “he missed leg day; he has muscles on his muscles; he has a keleven-pack….” just hilarious. One of them said something about Bob, I don’t know which pronouns were used (male for Bob or female for Goldberry?) but she responded, “don’t assume my character’s gender!”

There were singalongs galore. All star, Africa, Bohemian rhapsody, etc….

At dusk, the teens just came inside briefly to stack pizza on plates and take it back out to the trampoline – it was dark out! I couldn’t help feeling like they’re such teens already!!!! Wahhhh! I finally lured them inside with ice cream and lemon cookies, and every one of them had seconds. All cookies gone.

After they left, I asked Quinn if he wanted to blow out candles but he said that he had done that the day before, and one wish is enough, but that lit candles would be nice. He finished his thirteenth birthday reading by candlelight.

~thankful thursday~ a time to refrain from embracing

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~timeline~

Saturday 3-28 In between posts about “arm yourselves” and “protect your 2nd amendment rights,” last night there was a post about how the police of my hometown (including guys I went to school with) had a standoff with a guy who had 500 rounds in his house, across the street from one of my brother’s good friends. The post was by the friend, who was hiding in a corner of his house fearing stray bullets. One officer was shot, but this morning he was giving the thumbs up from the hospital and our friend had made it through the ordeal safely. Praying the officer is protected from the virus while protecting my town from those whose second amendment rights feel like the only things that are really safe.

Fedex delivered my purple asparagus crowns that I pre-ordered in February, and I have to decide where to plant them. I am grateful to have started 2020 with some gardening goals.

Rich is working this morning and I’m not, which is unusual for a Saturday. Grateful for his steady job. Everything about him is so steady, actually.

Alberta succumbed to world domination, so Quinn and I finished our hour-long phone call with a couple logic puzzles. Quinn’s paleontology camp director has sent out feelers for a lecture series delivered by zoom, and I plan to have him watch them for quull school.

I had a tearful moment watching video of the whole city of New York applauding health care workers at the 7pm shift change.

Turn turn turn sung by Dolly Parton made my evening. A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing… to everything… there is a season…

~meme of the day~

“This is the dude. The dude is not panicking. the dude does not get uptight. The dude is not buying in bulk. The dude takes it easy. The dude is not arming himself. The dude does no harm. The dude is staying home in his own private residence man. The dude abides. Be the dude.”

~timeline~

Sunday 3-29 I couldn’t sleep in on the one day I could have, and finally got out of bed around 6.

I made a big breakfast, and we had a mellow morning. In the afternoon I sat in the trout lily patch for an hour with my camera to see if a hummingbird would visit again.

So much is so serious. Especially when I’m in a New York state of mind. Real people close to people I know are very sick or have died and it is heartbreaking. I am feeling very scared this evening after talking to my mom, hearing my dad has “a husky voice, but it’s nothing to do with coronavirus.” I couldn’t breathe very well. I went back down to the trout lilies one more time and sat there for another hour to listen to the birds and feel the wind and watch the flowers sway in the breeze. It took a while but my breathing went back to normal.

Climbed into Rich’s recliner with him to listen to Dave Grohl play there goes my hero from his home studio. Then Rich serenaded me with Lukas Nelson playing to make you feel my love.

~3-29 gratitude~

Rich and I have both been wearing our new t-shirts from the 50th anniversary of the Oregon Country fair last year, which feature hummingbird art. It reminded him of his hummingbird encounter and he retold the story. His cat Spot brought him a hummingbird that was still alive but its legs were tangled up in spider webs. He worked hard to pick off all of the bits of web, trying not to hurt the hummingbird while doing so, and when he was done it was very still. So he held it on the palm of his hand, marveling at the colors of its feathers, and then suddenly it was off his hand and in the air, hovering in front of him, saying thank you. It came and visited him at some point later that same day to thank him once more.

I had my own hummingbird brought to me by my baby kitty one time as well, and held it in my hand just the same way, holding my own breath as I watched its tiny rib cage heaving, unsure if it was able to fly. Then zip! Up it went, and just like Rich’s, it hovered nearby briefly before zooming away.

Tiny hearts beating inside tiny ribcages heaving to catch their breath but being pressed down upon by the jaws of this threatening time is a metaphor that feels relatable… but so is holding hope in the palm of my hand that we will rise, set free to fly again, to joyfully spring forth into the world. I am grateful for hope and hummingbirds, the things with feathers, today.

~timeline~

Monday 3-30 Quull school starts today and I think it will mean an extra hangout later in the afternoon to touch base on how his school day goes.The best thing ever is he is so prompt every day for our hangouts call at noon and they are always over an hour long. He is accessing it through his own email which he is truly in control of now that he is 13 and he is getting so grown and these are all such good skills for him to be acquiring, showing up on time for meetings and screensharing.

fibonacci spiral with nets; we’re math doodling together

More internet one-sided arguments about constitutional rights, government overreach, whether our December colds were Coronavirus… OHSU health workers are testing positive for the virus.

~3-30 gratitude~

It has been noted that in a time of crisis, we have relied heavily on the arts to get us through. Today I am grateful for music. I listened over and over to Mirko and Valerio the twelve-year-old Italian twins who played Coldplay’s Viva la vida in their quarantined home. It really made me smile. The Rainbow Girls sang Angel from Montgomery, and a lot of other John Prine songs have been making the rounds as the singer songwriter fights for his life. Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell have been playing every night live, and that has been a nice part of our quarantine routine. They are all wearing sunglasses tonight. They are Amanda’s trademark but also I can tell there have been tears.

~meme of the day~

Chronologically beset memes have transitioned from uncertainty about day of the week to the duration of this month. “In case anyone forgot what day it is, today is March 97th.” “30 days hath September, April, June, and November, all the rest have 31, except March which has 8000.” “This was a pretty big leap year – February had 29 days and March was five years long.”

~Tuesday 3-31 timeline/gratitude~

Speaking of how we’re leaning on the artists, I am also grateful for writers. As I am thinking ahead to posting a thankful Thursday on 4/2 i read rarasaur’s blog post soft voiced and this quote resonated

“In my perfect world, Rarasaur blog is a dinner table full of food, a place of nourishment. If there is wine here at all, it is for the celebrating, not the aching, not the barding of aches. Here, I want to talk about the harvest. I want to say soft-voiced grace and have it reach the furthest chair. I want to lean forward, elbows on the table, and just, look at you.

Just look at you.

You’re so beautiful.

When I’m ready to leave, I want to be full.”

I drove into Newport to pick up Rich’s birthday present painting at 8 am and an incredibly bright rainbow appeared that accompanied me along the highway for a mile or more. It was so bright I could see its end down by the horse barn and sitka spring farms, and on the other side in the swamp. The painting is amazing, and it felt good to support an artist friend, especially right now. I paid via paypal for it and I picked it up off her front porch – no contact birthday shopping.

Then I was going to drop off the rent check but the bank drive-through wasn’t open yet so I drove down the coast to scope out if any beaches or waysides were open so that I could walk with Quinn on the beach on Friday. Almost none were, and even one out of the way favorite spot had some of its parking blocked, but the one closest to the highway was unblocked and there was one space available for me so I parked and got out on the beach for a few minutes. This was needed. Somewhere near lost creek a pair of bald eagles was circling above 101, and they were still there when I was driving back north again. A rainbow/eagle blessing felt fitting for my husband’s 50th birthday present.

I dropped off the rent; after handling the tube I touched nothing but my hand sanitizer and only after that rolled up the window and put the car back in gear. When I got home, I sprayed isopropyl on all knobs and handles I had touched on my way inside, and sprayed down the outside of my hand sanitizer for good measure. Seems circular, and yet does not feel like overkill.

I measured egg diameters all day, while enjoying a tilt parenting podcast on executive function during a pandemic. I had video calls with Quinn at noon and four. His schedule is coming along and gaining lots more detail. On our first call we got him set up to use zoom for his paleontology lectures. On our second call he told me about geometric morphometrics, which he explained very eloquently. I know he found that area of study quite intriguing – math plus fossils.

On our mailbox date, Rich and I received our pre-ordered Pearl jam album Gigaton. Happy birthday to us both! And then we walked to the bayou and had yet another hail rainbow vista.

~Wednesday 4-1 timeline/gratitude~

The Age of March has ended.

Teleworking rhythm established, phone check-in with my therapist friend, placed order for birthday dessert from Arr place, ordered GTF VSA box for next week (week four box… wow. Four.) Sent Sifu a check, a friend’s 84-year-old mom a birthday card.

Q sent me a photo of his organized resistors for making a foot pedal for his dad’s guitar. “Electronics day 1” was his caption. This is something he’s interested in, without being interested in playing guitar, just for the electronics learning. So quull.

Sewed my first facemask.

Talking with Rich about what we want to keep doing vs going back to normal fully. The obtaining of food from people in our near vicinity feels so good, the intentional spending of our dollars on goods we feel so good about supporting; let’s keep doing that. We are reflecting on how this time provides an opportunity to take stock, be intentional, choose what to embrace and what to refrain from embracing as a wider variety of choices open back up again after all being retracted for a time. I am feeling grateful for the meaning that can be found even in this difficult time.

~Meme of the day~

John Cusack holding up the boombox in Say Anything, playing In Your Eyes. “Gen X. Expressing love from a responsible distance since 1980.” Tied with the Pacman version of going to the grocery store. “Avoid everyone, get the fruit, and take any route to avoid contact.

~Thursday 4-2 timeline/gratitude~

It’s my birthday eve, and my husband woke me by telling me so.

I have been alternating sleeping hard and being restless/waking up in the middle of the night. Last night I slept hard. I prefer those nights. Getting off social media early in the evening is helpful.

Food is like the sleep, some days it is snack all day, some days it is forget to eat all day. Weird.

The sun just came out so I got outside and now I’m finally making lunch which I will take and eat out there too. Quinn is quull. He has been having me watch Vi Hart videos with him and some of them I have not watched so the one today called the science and math of frequency and pitch was like her version of my tide thing/rabbit hole/post/learning endeavor. Sine waves and graphing and math and such great stuff. He is always learning.

Brene Brown has a podcast and I am so grateful for her work and plan to listen to every one. This one on grief and finding meaning, and long spoons, was particularly moving.

Also grateful for friendship and this exchange from camp boss came at such a good time:

CB: I’m sure you have seen this article already… I saw it on a blog I really think you would like. the article kind of made me think of you/ something you might say.

MB: YES I did see it and appreciated it a lot. It is such a head game. one of the very first links NOAA leadership sent around was the article about how Isaac Newton developed theory of gravity while quarantined. Not helpful!!! Not for perfectionists anyway. Love you.

CB: I’m working on my first plasma laser so hide the cats!!!

MB:Rofl!

CB: No dispersed bundles here!! It is ALL syncing as I wish it to be!!

MB: Oh yes everything is stellar here as well. Shipshape.

Grateful for good friends and humor. (Camp boss, I can’t find the Robin Williams video clip to reference, so send it my way if you can locate it!)

While I made dinner, I watched several you tube videos of different ways of making facemasks, including the vacuum cleaner bag method and the pocket mask that can accept a filter.

~Friday April 3 gratitude/timeline~

Rich woke me up with a snuggle and told me happy birthday right away – he always remembers before I do. Then he serenaded me first thing as I made coffee and breakfast.

In the morning, I spent an hour making face masks with pockets (organic knit cotton).

I worked on egg diameters after that, diligently until it was time to go. First I stopped by Arr place and picked up my bag of goodies I had ordered for birthday dessert. I put the ice creams into my cooler and went south to a wayside beach. I had a little time before Quinn would get there so I got out and wandered down the beach. It had been raining until ten minutes before I left the house, and now it was beautifully sunny and gorgeous, with a little wind.

Quinn and I had a wonderful walk for an hour and a half. We inspected tiny treasures in the sand, Quinn told me about things he has been thinking about, we peered into tidepools, he found a green worm, I found squid egg cases, we absorbed all the sunbeams.

The two treasures I brought home…

smooth round stone (as small as a world and as large as alone)

and a tiny, imperfect sand dollar.

 

So many treasures I just took pictures of, but these two came home. I wish I could have taken home the lanky teen treasure, but I just took pictures of him as well.

The origami yoda birthday card he made for me:

I went to Local Ocean and picked up our dock box for dinner. Receiving packaged food outside two buildings where I knew the actual person who had handled them felt much easier to deal with than going inside the grocery store.

A sweet friend made a socially distant no contact treat delivery.

Tuna kabobs and crab cakes for dinner that took only a little bit of effort to prepare. Rhubarb crisp with rhubarb and cinnamon ice cream for dessert. Whiskey and coke. A lovely evening. Really, I have had far worse birthdays than this shelter-in-place birthday. And now I am 42, the answer to life, the universe, and everything!

~rainbow mondays~ light seeker

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~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow mondays~trout lilies and tutus

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Rich brought me home this rainbow!

Quinn wrapped up his birthday reading by rainbow candlelight.

Gray, but with rainbow edges if you look closely; my recent days have been spent staring through a microscope at the miracle of life, specifically, arctic cod embryos at 24 hours post-fertilization. Anyone else see a butterfly?

red hot! my lumberjack.

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

lucky thirteen

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I sent this photo to my bff a few weeks ago on a Friday afternoon when Quinn came home to me after his week at his Dad’s:

Her response was, “wtf. Did he become an adult in a week?”

Straight to the point, exactly what I was thinking. She always does that.

When I was pregnant with Quinn I had the requisite pregnancy dreams, but I could never see my baby’s appearance, no facial features at all. Just one time, in one single dream, I saw him clearly, face, hair, posture, but as a teen, maybe sixteen, not a baby or even a young child. And this person standing in front of me looking me almost squarely in the eye is becoming exactly the boy I saw in my dream.

It’s a Fibonacci birthday for Quinn! The next time he has one of those, he’ll be turning 21! Eek! Time feels like it moves along like a Fibonacci sequence, spiraling ever more quickly, in bigger bites each year. It does feel like he was 1 for a while, then 2, then 3, then started jumping from 5 to 8 to 13, soon he’ll be 21 and before I know it he’ll be 34!

This spiral I printed on Quinn’s birthday card represents the Fibonacci sequence up to 13, and I have talked before about how I love the idea of spirals as a metaphor for watching my child develop, and the way we are both now able to look back together on his younger years from our positions higher up our spiral staircases, a feeling I couldn’t have anticipated when I was having a baby, or when he was little. I couldn’t picture coming home from our w pancake’s first birthday party yesterday, pulling out the baby book to show Quinn photos of his own first birthday, and listening to him make comparisons between his one-year-old self and his little niece.

Prime numbers are just cool. When he has his next prime birthday, I imagine he will look exactly like the teen of my pregnancy dream. How crazy to think seventeen is such a short few years ahead of us.

Thirteen is the smallest emirp, any prime number that is also a prime when its digits are reversed (31).

Thirteen is also a Wilson prime, and there are not very many of those! A Wilson prime is a prime number p such that p2 divides (p − 1)! + 1.  I checked the math on this: 132 is 169; 12! +  1 =  (12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1) +1 = 479,001,601; and 479,001,601 divided by 169 is 2,834,329. It divides evenly! The only known Wilson primes are 5, 13, and 563, so Quinn’s next Wilson prime birthday is way off in the fourth dimension!

Though a year contains twelve solar months, part of the thirteenth lunar month is also included in one year. A baker’s dozen tide cycles to enjoy!

Thirteen is cleaning his room independently, having a passport, opening a checking account, getting a debit card, taking ownership of his google account, having an A in Algebra, reminding me not to buy anything “too dorky” when I went to buy some paper party plates at the dollar store. It’s sitting here writing this blog post while some new teenagers sing Take on Me and fling themselves around the trampoline, then carry out a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, emptying bowls of snacks while one of them strums my guitar. Imagine thinking 13 is unlucky. In Italy, where Quinn is heading soon, fare tredici (translated literally, to do 13) is to hit the jackpot! Any way you calculate it, 13 feels incredibly lucky to this mama! Happy birthday, mighty Quinn!