Masks

I like a series of books by Sarah M Eden. Each book is about a different brother. In one of the books the mother of all these boys says to one of them "You all keep yourselves tucked safely behind various masks and walls, whether it be isolation or playing the fool or clinging to the appearance of impeccable respectability."
One of the reasons I like the series is because each book is about one of the brothers being brave enough to reveal themselves, to come out from behind the mask or wall they hide behind. And they each do it in a slightly different way because their mask was different to begin with.
This week I submitted my book Legend Speaker for possible publication (again). I wrote a cover letter for it that Jeremy kindly told me was boring... he was right and it forced me to confront my own mask.
When introducing myself I immediately want to say something to portray myself as boring as possible. Like telling people an interesting fact about me is that I have brown hair or I like to dig holes. When writing emails or cover letters or resumes I hide behind stiff formality. At first I told Jeremy it was because I hate talking myself up, which is true, to an extent.... but why do I hate talking myself up? Is it really because I hate bragging... or is it more about revealing myself, being vulnerable, showing excitement...
I was able to rewrite it in a way that wasn't boastful but it did show my excitement about what I've done, and yes it was a lot less formal.
I have been surprised at how much marriage reveals masks.... its been good but a bit uncomfortable.

Using Words with Power

Jeremy says I over analyze words....
The other week at church people were asked to describe attributes of God and some of the words that came up were Omnipresent, and Omniscient etc. Which are true and everything but it doesn’t really mean anything to me personally.
I think language is a super powerful tool, but we often don’t use it to its full advantage. I think one of the most annoying ways we don’t use it properly is when we say things that don’t even mean anything to us. We have all these big words that we throw around but sometimes they don’t represent any better what we meant then a simple word. That isn't always the case of course. People make fun of scientific papers for being overly dense, and they probably are but sometimes a really complicated word is so specific that using it can be far more succinct and clear then a lot of more ordinary words.

Big Picture Little Picture

One of our first stops at the petrified forest we saw little wood chips and chunks of logs. We were amazed at how wood-like they looked (see my last post) and also how common they were.

One of the next places we stopped was a lookout on a low plain where huge chunks of petrified logs scattered the landscape. It was pretty impressive, and once we went down in amongst them it was even more impressive because the ground was just covered with tiny pieces of petrified wood, absolutely covered!

Later in the week we went to another area where the complete logs were being eroded out in place and we could see just how long a single log could be.

It was really neat to see how the little picture (just how many wood chips there were) really made the big picture (the long logs) that much more impressive, because we knew that for each huge log there were that many tiny pieces. The reverse was cool too because understanding the larger picture of pretty much an entire forest of giant trees made us appreciate the beauty of each little fragment.

I feel like often people tel you to either smell the roses or look at the big picture... conflicting advice? but really it is both of those perspectives that make the other all the more meaningful and amazing.

Not Believing Our Eyes

For our honeymoon we went to Arizona for a week and spent much of the time in the Petrified National Forest. It was beautiful and deserty and warm and covered in petrified wood chips. Some of the petrified wood was beautiful bits of colored stone. What I usually think of when I think of petrified wood but what was far more impressive to Jeremy and I were the pieces of shattered stone that looked like modern wood chips, so much so that we felt compelled to pick them up over and over and over again just to drop them on the ground so they could hit their companions and "chink" against them in a very non wood-like sort of way.

Sometimes it looked like we had come across a freshly chopped log with wood chips all around.

Sometimes chunks of charcoal were scattered around.
But everytime my eyes were fooled and it was not wood.... at least it hadn't been wood in a very long time! And despite knowing the liklihood of these woodchips that I continually picked up would probably not be wood I still had to check and prove my eyes wrong.
How grateful I am for multiple senses to test things with and how grateful to know that sometimes my senses are fooled...

Fossils For Kids

This week I went to an elementary school to show off my fossils to a couple of groups of kids. I used fossils from my own collections and some of my friends. It made me realize that sometimes the fossils you collect for coolness are not necessarily the best for educational resources. In other words if I was to collect fossils for educational reasons I would definitely want some plant fossils, amber, tracks or coprolites and a modern longbone.
I'm sadly lacking in plant material, not counting my petrified wood. Amber is an important way things fossilize. My most obvious modern bone, other then skulls, is a moose vertebra which quite a few of the kids asked if it was a tree (which I don't really understand but there you go). Tracks or coprolites are really good trace fossils (the type of fossil no one ever thinks about). They show evidence of the animal but is not part of the animal itself.
I also realized that some of the fossils I do have that don't actually look that cool are really good learning tools. For example the petrified wood is just a big chunk but it is a good example of how the wood becomes a stone. And I have a little piece of sandstone that has imprints of tiny shells and it was the best trace fossil I had.
It was a fun activity though and maybe some of the kids will remember that not all fossils are dinosaur bones!

Learning from Journals

I recently re-read my journal from about a year and a half ago to up to 6 months ago. It was really interesting. First, I think journals are weird because time seems to go by so fast. Each entry, each day is so short that I can get through months in a single sitting. Also even though it was not very long ago I had already forgotten so much, particularly the hard and sad times in my life had been glossed over in my head. My journal seemed like the whole time was a lot more difficult then I remember, but to be fair I think sometimes journals have a tendency to emphasize the bad because it is a safe place to vent. Another thing that was fun is remembering the things I didn't include about certain events. For instance I wrote about going to an event and I went away annoyed but didn't explain why... or at least fully why I was annoyed... But I remembered. However, the thing I enjoyed most reading back through was seeing God's hand in my life. Having the perspective of even a few extra months I was able to better understand the feelings and experiences I was going through in the moment. God answers prayers and the longings of our hearts.

Puzzles and Dinosaur Puzzles

So I've been working at a new project at work lately. In the collections they have what they think is 4 individuals, of an iquanodontid species from the same quarry. My job is to try to see if I can figure out which bones go together because they were not articulated (or in place) when they were found. I have worked on and off on it for about two weeks. One thing I noticed was that especially in the first couple of days I wasn't accomplishing much because I was organizing all the data in several different ways, sometimes unnecessarily. When my professor asked me about it I told him off the cuff that it was like doing a puzzle that doesn't actually fit together. He laughed and agreed.
Then I started thinking more about it and realized that when I do puzzles with my family (3D of course) I do the same thing I organize the pieces until they are so subdivided that there is pretty much only one choice.... it makes the puzzle really easy, it just takes a long time to actually get to the point where I'm actually putting pieces together.
Anyway, it's been an interesting process, and I'm a little sad I can't tell more about which pieces go where but I think I made some good process. And it was also interesting to realize how much my problem solving strategies were the same for both puzzles and separating out individual dinosaurs.

This is a picture I took of the organized foot elements. The left feet on the left and the right feet on the right (surprisingly) with the largest individual on the bottom and the smallest at the top.