All posts by ehilge
A good neighbor
At my former apartment I became friendly with our upstairs neighbor, Lucy. She is about the age of my parents and is absolutely delightful. We’d leave leftover desserts at her door and she’d occasionally drop by with some extra lasagna. That sort of neighbor. One time I ran into her outside and we got into…
About this Life
The following passage comes from the end of the introduction to About This Life, a collection of essays by Barry Lopez that, using his own word, “gives a sense of how one writer proceeds.” I think it would behoove most any writer to follow his guidance. Once I was asked by a seatmate on a…
The Mappist
I recently read Light Action in the Caribbean, a short story collection by Barry Lopez, because (a) I really like the title and (b) I was curious what Lopez’s fiction writing was like since he is largely known for non-fiction. Honestly, I think I’ll stick to the non-fiction. The stories in this collection leaned towards…
Air travel
I recently flew round trip from Los Angeles to Boston, the width of an entire continent. On the outbound flight I had a middle seat and absolutely no one near me opened a window for the entire flight. Air travel is a modern miracle. For thousands of years, humans locked to the sky and surely…
Borders and boundaries
We all learn about shifting, borders in elementary school. Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire (neither very holy nor Roman as it turns out), Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, they have all come and gone in different ways. I intellectually know that national borders are not permanent, but things have been relativity stable in my lifetime…
Mt. Wilson
I’ve never really liked homepages. I don’t want to see the news, nor do I care for a version of my browsing history to show up and be reminded of all the websites I click on too much. I had a fun idea a couple of weeks ago though to set set my homepage to…
Failure Mode
A few things to keep in mind if you have a major test failure: Take a big deep breath and don’t touch anything. Our inclination as engineers is always to poke things and try to fix it right away. That is a bad idea. Leave the room. Go home if its the end of the…
If only we had taller been
If you’re at all interested in space exploration or even scientific advancement make sure to listen to Ray Bradbury’s poem “If Only We Had Taller Been”. In the words of the author himself it encompasses, “why I love space travel, why I write science fiction, why I’m intrigued about what’s going on this weekend on…
Goodnight Oppy
I don’t think I had been into any theater or even large auditorium since the beginning of the pandemic until this week. I attended an advanced showing of Amazon’s wonderful new film Goodnight Oppy which chronicles the 15 year odyssey of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. Its not so much a story of the…
Left of the blue wall
One thing I have learned from reading authors like Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez over the last year is the power of language to shape our world view. Both authors believe that the words we use directly affect the way we see the world, and that the current evolution of our language, away from specialized…