So Happy to Be Home

No postings for a month, and here I'm doing two in one day. I am so grateful, relieved, and dog-tired, but I am home safe and sound. Earlier this evening I had no clue what was waiting for me after I left the office. Here's what the email notice said:
(ID 55699) Disruption at Fort Totten. Trains are turning back at Brookland-CUA & Silver Spring due to a police situation outside of Fort Totten station. Shuttle bus service has been established.

Actually, the message above is from 9:30 tonight, but it's the same message that I saw at about 5:30, as I was getting ready to pack up and leave the office. I didn't know until a couple of hours later that "disruption" meant that around 5 PM one train rear-ended another one with so much force that the back train rode up over the front train, ripping out the floor. Six people are dead, about 70 injured. My normal 1-hour commute took almost 3.5 hours, and it involved two trains, a hike through the District of Columbia to try and find a bus that could squeeze in another few people, a 7-mile bus ride that took the better part of an hour, and a one-mile bus ride that took about 15 minutes (instead of the usual 5-7).

In situations like this, one's fellow commuters are somehow friendlier and chattier, even if we are all tired and stressed out. Something about all being on the lifeboat together brings out the camaraderie. I ran into my upstairs neighbor during my quest for a Metro bus, and somehow she was reminded of a bus trip to a Beatles concert in Philadelphia, which piqued the interest of a fellow bus rider we had never met before. We also picked up bits of the crash story from people who were getting cell phone updates from their friends and families. We learned that the S9 express bus starts out at 13th and I Street -- wish we had known this before, this kind of information is pure gold to those of us who rely on public transportation. But I will know this next time. I hope there isn't a next time, but I know there will be.

In any case, my neighbor Yvonne and I got home with nothing worse than a case of tired feet. I am thankful to be home. It could have been so much worse.

Citizen Journalism in Iran

This link to "Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed" was given in a blog posting from the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization:
http://iran.robinsloan.com

Here's the blog posting:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=165524

The page is set up dashboard-fashion a la Google News. It's mostly Tweets and photos from sources that the page's author (Robin Sloan of Current TV) deems reliable. It's an interesting approach to a situation where the story is huge and happening fast, but there are no professional journalists on the scene to verify observations, ask questions, or provide context.

One especially poignant 40-second video clip making the rounds shows a young woman bleeding to death on the street, as frantic bystanders try to save her. Who was she? What actually happened to her? What was she doing before she was injured? Who shot the video and what was their purpose in showing us this? No one seems to know, it's just raw emotion with few facts.

This whole citizen journalism thing is changing the political landscape -- how can a dictator lie to the world when he has thousands of cell phone cameras broadcasting live coverage? At the same time, those of us on the outside have to evaluate what we are seeing and try to make some sense of all the changing, conflicting, overlapping information that comes pouring in. I am so curious to find out how we will be getting our news 10 years from now.

Mystery Plant (continued)

Best guess so far: purple salvia, aka purple rain (see: Prince), purple sage (as in, Riders Of The). And apparently this stuff has psychoactive effects, although I don't plan to test this. More along the lines of spiritual enlightenment as opposed to acid trips. If the birds and squirrels start acting strange, maybe I can post some photos of that.

Mystery Flower

Does anyone know what the purple flowering plant is in the picture here? The blue flowers are lobelia. I got these at a plant nursery the other day, and I really like the purple flowers. The flowers are kind of bell-shaped and they go up the stem. It's hard to see that from this angle. The plant didn't have any sort of identification, and no one else seemed to know either.

Pictures from the New Mexico, Texas trip

http://picasaweb.google.com/wordchemist.photos/NewMexicoAndTexas2009?feat=directlink

My pictures from the New Mexico/Texas trip are at the link above. A few of them are embedded in earlier postings on this blog. Enjoy!

Home Again

Mission accomplished, home again safe and sound. Enjoying a quiet afternoon with the Sunday paper before going back to cubicle-land tomorrow. Linda and I spent way too much time on the road, but we saw cousins and aunts that we hadn't seen in decades and we re-acquainted ourselves with the vast arid landscape that is eastern New Mexico and western Texas. That place was home for so long, but I needed a map on several occasions before the old memory kicked in.

We spent a couple of days in Lubbock, with a half-day trip to Amarillo in the middle. So much hasn't changed but some things are very different. Much of the old student ghetto east of Texas Tech has been converted into upscale apartments, but my old place on 2nd and Ave. X is still there, with not much more renovation than a good coat of paint on the outside, and my old dorm looks exactly the same.

The trip home was one of those local-bus Southwest flights that started in Dallas, then hopped over to Lubbock where Linda and I caught the plane. A couple of parabolic hops put us into Albuquerque, then Denver, where Linda and I parted ways. She headed off to Seattle, and I stayed on the plane for the last two-hour hop to Baltimore. The plane was at least half empty, something I hadn't seen in a long time. We were 20 minutes early getting into BWI (another unfamiliar experience), and the luggage hit the belt in baggage claim in record time. Probably because there were so few of us on the flight. I was home by about half past midnight, a good hour earlier than I expected.

So I'm home today, easing myself back into the everyday world. Pictures to come.

More pix

Carlsbad NM, looking across the Pecos River from a little park
just west of Landsun Homes, where Mom lives.

Prickly pear cactus.

This aqueduct was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1939.
It spans the Pecos River and Westridge Road (foreground)
on the northern edge of Carlsbad.