Star Island, Days Three and Four

[edenfalling]

Yesterday (Saturday) Mom and Dad went to the mainland and drove west to Grand Forks to visit Mom's cousin Anita and her husband Albert, who spend their summers teaching linguistics to fundamentalist Christian missionary types, so they can record and create writing systems for various tiny languages as prep work for translating the Bible and spreading the Gospels and suchlike. Since unlike Vicky, I am not professionally trained in linguistics, and since I have only met Anita and Albert twice in my entire life, it was decided I would stay on the island and take care of the dog.

Dottie mopes when her humans abandon her. I am only a subsidiary member of "her humans" so I don't really count, but I can provide at least a little comfort via physical contact. Also I can give her snacks and take her out for walks. She came and curled up on my bed for about half an hour right after Mom and Dad left, and spent much of the rest of the day lying on the back of the porch sofa, watching the lake in case the boat suddenly reappeared.

On their way home from Grand Forks, my parents detoured through the town of Climax, Minnesota, which is where Ardis was born. It was not a hugely illuminating trip, since apparently the town has changed so much since then that even Ardis, on a visit several years ago, was unable to say for certain which house she had grown up in. Everything has been remodeled or rebuilt beyond the point of identification.

Today (Sunday) we had pancakes for breakfast, after which we set out for the west shore via the south shore. The south shore is the most resort-like part of Star Island -- back in the day, it was the site of the Star Island Lodge, and just FYI, Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet's junior partner in Berkshire Hathaway) has, IIRC, three family cabins on the south shore. The south shore is closest to the mainland marina, and also has a beach, you see; therefore it was mostly settled by businesspeople. The east and west shores are up on high bluffs, which is much less appealing from an ease and comfort standpoint. The east shore was traditionally populated by academic types from the University of Minnesota. All these distinctions are historical and not really valid anymore, btw.

Anyway, we reached the west shore and then returned home via the south shore of Lake Windigo -- the lake within Star Island (which makes it a lake-within-a-lake, pretty neat!) -- and collectively collapsed for a bit. Later we did a bunch of chores. Mom did some raking and general cabin cleaning, while Dad and I undermined the shore station by digging sand out from under its feet and thereby shifted it a couple inches toward the dock and a couple inches away from the shore, since it was misaligned when it was installed this spring. We also attached the styrofoam bumpers to the springy bits.

I have been plowing my way through Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb and have reached the testimonial accounts of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. It is sobering. The book as a whole is extremely well written, managing to get across science, engineering, personality conflicts, politics, war, and all sorts of complicated material in a clear and coherent narrative. I bogged down in the middle, but that is because the middle is largely about bureaucratic bog-down, and that sort of thing can affect my reading speed. I inherited this copy from Grandma Doris, who had helpfully gone through and bookmarked every time my Grandpa is mentioned. This is kind of funny -- my mother's mother bookmarking mentions of my father's father -- but is very much the sort of thing she tended to do. ...I still miss her. :-(

Anyway.

Now we are going to have steak for dinner. Mmmm, steak.

Comments

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a great book, full of historical context, military, political and scientific people colliding and bouncing off each other, and the sheer technical scale of the thing. And of course, it's not afraid to call a spade a spade, like some people in the business of nuclear weapons are. I know a guy who used to target bombs and now writes bad novels, and he refuses to call them anything but 'devices'. By the way, who in the book is your relative if I might ask?

Though of course, the saddest part of the book is towards the end when the politicians seem unable to come to grips with the reality of the Bomb and it's consequences. The actual destruction caused by it in Hiroshima was after all, not even as terrible as LeMay's firebombing of Tokyo

[edenfalling]

Alfred Nier -- the one who separated the first tiny samples of U235 and U238 for testing and built leak detectors for the K25 plant at Oak Ridge, among other things. He got into physics by way of electrical engineering, became interested in mass spectrometry, and continued finding new ways to use mass spectrometers for the rest of his life -- which detoured him through things like the Viking space probes to analyze the atmosphere on Mars, so I guess by the time he died he was acting more as a meteoriticist than a physicist, strictly speaking. He was a wonderful grandfather, too. :-)