We met bright and early at Orchard Beach. The day was very warm. You drive through the sprawling Pelham Bay Park - with horse stables and bike paths and picnic benches - to get to the beach. Parking is $7. The field trip was led by George Harlow and we walked north along the beach towards Twin Island.
This field trip provided another view of the local NYC geology, with all its complexity. Because we were not given a field trip guide ahead of time, I looked up some information about the site and what's there. Here are the links: Bedrock Geology of New York City: More than 600 m.y. of geologic history and 6. Pelham Bay Park (USGS). Don't you love going into the field knowing what you might find? I do. Here's what I saw: the Bronx section of the Fordham Gneiss, loads of folding, partial melting (we've seen that on all stops thus far), a patch of garnet sand, tourmaline, epidote, beryl, biotite and muscovite (sometimes intergrown with each other) and kyanite blades (see below)! Sillimanite? No, I don't think so.
And a dinosar:
Bring on the Black Rock Field Trip!! That'll be all week, the week of July 27. Just like old times and field camp at CSU Hayward in the Sierra. Ha!
Today was more like a real field trip. Though we met in upper Manhattan and walked and looked at a great outcrop right in a community, we scrambled around in mostly lush Inwood Park, poison ivy and all. The field trip leader was George Harlow, Curator, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at AMNH. We ambled around, first in the city, along Cooper Street and then into Isham Park. Then we went to Inwood Park. The aerial view map below is where we went in Manhattan, but not the Bronx. As you can see in the simplified geologic map and cross-section below, the geology is quite complex. It is also almost completely covered with vegetation, which is very often poison ivy. It is nuts. I longed for a western or southwest field location where all the outcrops are exposed.
The first very cool thing we saw was a great example of boudinage. See the image below (try squinting - they're there). The boudins were in the Inwood Marble and are a result of a more resistance or rigid layer (probably proto-sandstone) within a more plastic layer (possibly proto-limestone) undergoing compression.
We saw some good-sized garnets with eye-shaped feldspar growths:
Tramping into the Inwood Park, we saw "potholes," which I have seen elsewhere but did not know that they were created from glacial meltwater, with a rock or two swirling around and down, carving out a deep hole. The opening on this one - in Manhattan Schist - is about a 2-foot diameter.
By walking north and crossing the Henry Hudson bridge, we ended up in the Bronx, looking at the Fordham Gneiss. At this outcrop, we saw more garnet, amphibole, pyrite, and ptygmatic folding in the gneiss. A very good trip, all in all, and we were finished by 2pm.
It's all starting now! My summer will be spent doing research in astronomy at the museum and going on field trips with curators and post-docs affiliated with the MAT program.
Today, I went on a "field trip" to see some of the building stones of a part of Manhattan, New York. Led by Denton Ebel, the trip went from the lower Central Park area to 5th Avenue and 45th Street. We saw an array of rock types, many of which came imported from Italy. Building stones are a great way to teach geology when you a) don't have a budget for a real field trip and b) don't have access to real geology right in the neighborhood.
Here are some shots from inside the Apple Store, where we saw the "special" rock that Apple loved so much that they purchased they whole mine so they could brand their stores. We also saw some lovely partial melting migmatites.
New York City is so...invigorating, eye-opening, contemplation-making. There is a stark contrast between the community of my life in Poughkeepsie and that community that I see here. As I make my way to the Museum, I walk through rich and poor neighborhoods, some people walk their dogs and take up lot's of space on the sidewalks, some are asking for money with a sign, some have on work uniforms as they hustle to catch the subway. There are young kids walking with huge backpacks to get to summer day camp bus pick-up, there are babies in strollers who look nothing like the women pushing the prams, and there are stinky streets everywhere.
New York, it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here.
And do people even pay their parking tickets in NY?! I find one or two each morning walking in through Central Park.
We had been planning a trip to Israel for months. First we were going just for a Bar Mitzvah of our friend's son. Then we were going to make a trip out of it and stay for three weeks. It was huge. Lot's of planning. Lot's of thought. Yesterday at 11pm we were checking into the flight online, pulled out the passports only to find out, to our horror, that the children's passports expired nine months ago! Where was the planning?! We're world travelers, for crying out loud! What went wrong?! How are we going to make this trip happen?! Eleven pm the night before the flight. It seemed impossible.
Here was our thought process...
1) We could just show up with our kids, our luggage and backpacks, maybe some snacks and their expired passports and hope for the best. Maybe plead ignorance. "What?! Oh, their passports are expired?! OMG, could you please let us in anyway?? We're very nice people. What, you say that our children look nothing like the photos on those old passports?" No way. Do Not Even Try This.
2) Google "How to get a passport in a hurry" and you'll find what might be the answer to the dilemma. There's a host of passport-expediter services ready to seemingly make your life easier. You can get your passport in 2 business days for $299 each. Add to that $50 for a FedEx package, one-way to the passport agency, and add another $50 for the return trip from the magical passport genie service, and then add the normal rush charge of $60 that the U.S. Passport Agency charges for those bad planners who need it speedy quick. Oh, and you still need to do steps i - v shown below. That's a lot of pita bread, especially because we have two kids. Gulp.
3) Call the airline and start to cry and see if they have any suggestions. One suggestion was to call the U.S. consulate for Israel in New York. Their message essentially said they were on strike and don't leave a message. A second option was to call TSA. See if they'll make an exception. Ask if they can write us a letter. Vouch for us? Anything? No dice. How about call the Department of State? We called DOS and we were told, without question, do not travel without an up-to-date passport. OK, got that cleared up. What should we do now?! We told our new contact that we tried and could not get an appointment at the NYC passport office (our closest U.S. Passport Agency office) until Aug 7. He asked how flexible we were and, of course, we said VERY. He did some tapping on a computer and said that we could have an appointment in the Portsmouth NH (near Boston) office on Tuesday at 11am and fly out of Boston or we could have an appointment in Buffalo NY on Friday at 9am and fly out of Buffalo. We could pay the expedite fee, wait 3 - 4 hours and be on our way. He said "you will have your passports in 3-4 hours. No problem."
We were on the phone with this guy at the same time as we were on another phone with the airline (United) to try to re-schedule our flight out. Because of all of our strategic planning, we had a pretty good air fare to Israel. In order to change our outgoing flight, we would probably incur a cost because the price will have gone up...we just wanted to find the combination that would give us the lowest added cost possible. Plus, don't forget, there would be a "change fee" ($300/each ticket) for changing the reservation! Now the United agent, hearing our pitiful story had a little rachmunus, a little pity, and waived the change fee (whew, we just saved $1,200 smackers! Thank you, United!) Then we just needed to explain to United that we had to fly out of either Buffalo on Friday or Boston on Tuesday and please tell us which will cost us the least. At $287 per ticket additional, it was 'hello Buffalo!' and a side trip to Niagara Falls (see rainbow above).
If you need to get a U.S. passport in a hurry, here's what you do. Find a U.S. Passport Agency that's near you or that you're willing to get to in some way (drive, fly, skateboard, hitchhike), a place where you can get a confirmed appointment. You need a confirmation number. Don't just show up. Then bring these materials (if it is your child (a minor) who needs the passport):
i) The kid's previous passport.
ii) Both parents, if the kid has two parents. If one parent can't make it, you need some sort of letter. What a hassle! Fastest way. Both parents, in the flesh, carrying their own passports (as proof of who they are).
iii) The kid's birth certificate. The one with the seal, not a copy. This will verify who the parents are.
iv) Parents: bring your driver's license. This will show evidence of your address.
v) A filled-out DS-11 form. But do not sign it yet. Sign it in front of the Passport Agency personnel.
Pay the fee (they take credit cards). Come back in 3 to 4 hours. And, behold, passports!
And happy-ish parents! It cost us way too much for this mistake, but we are on our way to Israel.
But if you do find yourself in this predicament and you happen to go to the Buffalo office (nice folks there), be sure to check out Niagara Falls during your "down time." And do not play the blame game with your significant other!
I never wrote on this blog that we needed to ship back a bunch of stuff once it was time to return to the U.S. from Barbados. I realized that small but significant oversite when I saw this short piece in today's New York Times, "Shipping Christmas to the Caribbean."
Yes, Christmas is pretty huge in Barbados but what is even more huge are the prices of things like laundry detergent, dry cereal, and clothes. Prior to moving to Barbados for the year we were advised to "send a barrel full of stuff because everything is so expensive here." I looked into this but never did happen upon any information about shipping a barrel. All I found was that I could get a portion of a shipping container but that seemed overly large for our needs. I even thought about sending one of our cars over to Barbados, filled with extra "stuff," but worried about getting slammed with a high tariff.
The airlines have made it so that in the year we were away, we could bring home even fewer bags than when we came. We could pay extra for each bag, of course, but it was going to really add up. That is when we got on the stick and found out about shipping a barrel. The only place that does this type of shipping in Barbados is Laparkan whom we bought an empty cardboard drum from (similar to the one in the photo). We took it home and filled it up with 300 pounds of books, long pants, a rip stick and beach towels. Laparkan then came to pick it up and facilitated our shipping the barrel back to New York. We were told it would take about a week. It really took two and a half weeks (not bad) and we had to go down to JFK to pick it up. By the way, our barrel was opened and inspected somewhere along the way, not in Barbados and not in the U.S. but all of our stuff was there, though we had Lego pieces flying everywhere.
If you're moving to the Caribbean, be aware that the prices of all the things you know and love (or at least the things you rely on) are going to be really high. If you're in the New York area, check out this Times article for some advice on who ships barrels to which countries.
I got back to the U.S. August 16 after living in Barbados for nearly a full year. I've needed to write this short update to express some frustrations with the U.S. Postal Service upon my return.
Oddly enough, it was easy to forward my family's mail down to Barbados but going in the reverse took months to rectify; we started receiving mail addressed to our Poughkeepsie adress on October 11. In my mind it was a simple "Turn off the Forward" that should have been easily handled at some sorting center somewhere in my county. I'm including here that the problem, in the U.S. Postal Service's eyes, stems from receiving mail from an adress abroad...note the "We don't handle from foreign addresses" written in under Other. Sheesh! How U.S.-centric can we get!
I was so frustrated with the situation of multiple phones calls and run-around and finger pointing - "It's not MY job" - that I contacted my local state representative. It's an election year, so why not? The assistant to the Senator told me she made a call and got the same crazy run-around that I got and said, ultimately, that because the U.S. Postal Service is a Federally-run entity, I should contact my U.S. Senator. Oy!
I'm not one of those "take your hands off my money" kinds of people and I agree with paying taxes for services for the public good. A functioning mail service is a public good. Our U.S. Postal Service is not, at present, a well-oiled machine.
Funny. I went to a small island nation in the Caribbean and had no problem with my mail getting to me.
I've been back in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a month. Hard to believe. There’s still stuff to unpack from our year in Barbados.
Yesterday I received an email from a friend/ colleague/ mentor and in it she said "How're things back in New York? Transitioning back to the old normal can be difficult (so we make new normals)."
This resonated with me and moved me to write as this weekend (starting Friday evening) was Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – and the start of the Jewish New Year. At the Saturday morning service I sat and listened to the rabbi’s sermon. He started by talking about the idea of resurrection, a foreign concept in Reformed Judaism, but something that was part of early Judaism and still believed by Orthodox Jews. In discussing resurrection, the rabbi said that he felt that one's dying and returning could be looked at more of a metaphor. He thought of it more to mean rebirth, or in my mind renewal, that we may or may not come back from the dead. Who knows? Who among us has seen Moses or Abraham Lincoln? (Though some have claimed to have seen Elvis.) Rabbi said that when we feel we have hit a road block or come to the end of a long road or when we feel the most lost, there will be something that turns it around, we're shown a new road, a new door opens, there's a clearing in the forest. So rather than the literal interpretation of resurrection, he gave us something akin to resurrecting a life, a new beginning a new normal.
Barbados, for me was a glorious journey that fulfilled me beyond measure. After a long spate of personal and professional trials, I was presented with Barbados where my family and I flourished. How could I go back to New York after such an amazing year abroad? They say you can never go back. But it is just not true. Sometimes, you have to go back. And who could not wish to return to the beauty that is found within the Hudson Valley in autumn? The weather is now turning cool and crisp, the leaves are just beginning to change. I love this season. My house is spacious and welcoming. I see neighbors on the street who stop and ask how my year was. They missed me. They missed my family. I am home. You can go back.
For the first time in my life, I do not have a clear plan. Since I was a teenager, I’ve known, career-wise, what I was going to do. I came back home to New York following a terrific Fulbright experience without a paying job, but I am more clear-eyed than ever. I am taking a sabbatical. I am resting. I am excited about the present moment picking my kids up from school, moving back into our house, supporting my partner as she goes back to work, and planting my feet back into my Poughkeepsie community. This is my new normal, a new beginning. What the future holds is still to be determined.
To a sweet, happy, good new year, L’shana Tova!
Photo of the Hudson Valley is from Flickr Creative Commons taken by b.reynolds.
LATITUDE LONGITUDE JFK International Airport (40.643532, -73.789168)
I left Poughkeepsie on Metro North at 6:43am to Grand Central Station. I didn’t need to leave this early. I caught the New York Airport bus at 9:10am ($15US). I arrived at Terminal 1 at JFK International Airport by about 10:15am, checked in like a breeze. I wondered aloud to the Japan Airlines staff if I really needed to be three hours early. My flight was not until 1:30pm. He said ‘no,’ and that sometimes all you need is an hour. So, live and learn. The security check-point was much longer, but still within reason in terms of amount of time it took me to get through.
I bought two bottles of water and exchanged $100US (600 yuan) once I got through the check point. I also bought a small bottle of rum at the duty free ($7US) as a sleep aid. I won’t drink the rum with the Benadryl I brought.
I’ve been advised by an airline pilot friend to start to sleep on China time. China is exactly 12 hours different than we are in New York, so it’s a little hard to think about it being 1:00am at the place that I’m getting ready to go to. Airline Pilot said to ‘drink lots of water; suck it up and buy two bottles after you get through the security check point and then drink it all flight long, even after the flight attendants go to sleep; get up and stretch, not just walk, but do knee bends, and legs stretches, especially the legs; take a sleep aid to sleep when China is sleeping (Tylenol PM or Benadryl).’ I’ll let you know how that goes.
So far, this is very exciting and going smooth, but I’m just at the beginning of the trip and have yet to get out of the country. Next stop is Narita Airport in Tokyo Japan.
On the plane (13 plus hours) I saw a lot of movies. I’ll start with the best: “Vantage Point.” I really liked this thriller; right up my alley. If you don’t know what it’s about, you can look it up, but the premise is that we see an assassination attempt from many different vantage points. This was the highlight for a geospatial technologist: the assassin used a geolocated weapon and a mobile pen-based device to 1) anonymously shoot the designated assassinated person, and 2) detonate a bomb on a suicide bomber.
Do not see: “10,000 BC.” Wow! What a dog of a movie. It was incredibly stupid and very poorly acted. Who wants to see a bunch of guys running around with very little clothing and shaking spears at each other? Don’t answer that. I wanted way more of the mastodons and maybe even some saber tooth tigers.
Ditto: “Fools Golds.” Ugho! This was another lame, poorly acted, dumb movie that was all about cutesy flirtatious talk between two fairly attractive people. They talk in that way that real life people think they talk like and don’t and it just sounds so disgusting.
I saw others but they were films I’d seen before. I played a lot of Tetris. Read an Annie Proulx short story in the New Yorker.
My flight was on Japan Airlines. I highly recommend this carrier. Accept for the fact that there was an obvious hierarchy between the poor-folks in the back of the bus and the fancy folks in First Class, I liked everything about this flight. I got up, walked around, didn’t need a sleep aid, got free alcohol. Did all the stretches that Airline Pilot suggested doing.
By the way, the free alcohol is a good thing because when I got to Narita Airport, they took my duty free rum that I bought at the JFK airport AFTER I went through the security check point. Can someone please explain how that is possible?! I kept my receipt so if I have the energy, I can try to get back my seven smackers, but is it worth it?
LATITUDE LONGITUDE at Tokyo Narita Airport (35.777463, 140.39085)
Still Day 1 – now it’s June 27: Connecting flight to Beijing left a little late so I got into Beijing at about 10:00pm. Took a cab from the airport. I had a piece of paper with the name of the hotel (Beijing International Hotel) with the address both in English and in Chinese. First thing you should do is have confidence that the driver knows where he or she is going and how much it will cost you. My driver got lost. The highways, just like the airport, are new and I think confusing to everyone. I saw a lot of cars stopping on the highway leading out of the airport and going into reverse to make an exit. Seemed pretty dangerous. I didn’t think too much of it until my own driver seemed to miss an exit. He told me at the beginning that it would be $100yuan. He got so lost though that I made me pay $200yuan (about $30US). I hope the drivers figure out how to get around before the Olympics start up!
I made it to my hotel, though, and that’s what matters! Very nice room. More later or on Tripadvisor.
Check out the Google Earth file for a blow by blow of where I’ve been to get to Beijing.
