2021 Life Logs, Day 33: Ant-Man and Arctic Meltdown
Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Weather: Overcast and Misty; High 35, Low 27 Degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
The day started with Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow. So . . . six more weeks of winter are predicted. I think we would have at least six more weeks of winter anyway. But hats off to the ground hog for letting us know.
Now to Ant-Man and the Arctic Meltdown. These two things are, of course, not related. One is a video involving quantum space and the other is the title of a New Bedford Whaling Museum Zoom presentation I attended tonight. I’ll begin with Ant-Man. I picked Ollie and Jonah up just after noon due to a school Early Release Day. I invited them here for a video afternoon and we watched Ant-Man and the Wasp, a superhero film based on the Marvel Comics characters. I enjoyed it more than I anticipated and actually want to go back and watch the original Ant-Man. Jonah and Ollie promised they would return to watch it with me. By the time I took them home, made a second trip to take Ollie his Chromebook that he forgot, and returned home to take Shadow for a twilight walk, it was time to eat dinner and get ready for the 7 pm Zoom presentation. Susie Klein, a good sailing friend, emailed me this morning inviting me to join her and her husband Jim tonight for a New Bedford Science Café Zoom presentation on arctic meltdown. The New Bedford Science Café series is sponsored by the New Bedford Whaling Museum and tonight’s presentation was made by Jennifer Francis, a Senior Scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center where Heather works. And Jennifer Francis is a friend of Susie and her husband Jim. So, I accepted the invitation and very much enjoyed it. Jennifer Francis was on her sailboat in the Virgin Islands which made me very jealous, but it also caused a few technical problems. Thankfully, those got worked out quickly and the show went on. Her presentation brought together global warming, sea-level rise, tropical storm, and extreme weather events and how they are all connected to the rapidly warming (and melting) Arctic. I loved the way Jennifer Francis used real life examples showing the impact each of us makes on this global crisis. My favorite example was one that claims that just one person flying from the East Coast to Europe is responsible for the melting of a piece of Arctic ice the size of a dining room table. That doesn’t seem like much until you add up the number of people traveling around the world. Our choices make a huge difference.
I made no progress on my writing project today, but I got a call from friend Alan Kanegsberg tonight with a tip that might speed up the project significantly. He suggested that I might make use of the dictation part of Word. I tried it and it works beautifully. I just press a button, speak, and my words appear in the document. I will try this tomorrow morning as I launch into the writing of Chapter 4 of The Voyage of Windbird and report tomorrow night on how it works for me.
