Last Friday, actor Leonard Nimoy died. The New York Times reported, “the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut ‘Star Trek,’ died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.” As Anna drove around town that morning, … Continue reading RIP Leonard Nimoy
DOUG’S OVERVIEW (PART 1) Warning—this post uses a bit of profanity. It’s so commonplace in the adult world that most of us take in for granted. That said, Lofty Ambitions has some younger readers. In fact, Anna and I have received email from some parents indicating that they read our blog with their children. We love that part of our audience, and it’s garnered some … Continue reading Writing Residencies: Five Weeks on the Side of a Mountain
On Saturday, Anna was featured on The Academic Minute, an NPR show out of WAMC that airs on stations nationwide, mostly in university towns. Her subject was the intersection of science and poetry. What’s great is that her segment–both audio and transcript–are now in the archives at The Academic Minute, and the page also includes tidbits about some of Anna’s poems that incorporate scientific terminology … Continue reading The Academic Minute: Science Meets Poetry
Last week, we were back at the University of Maryland. We lived in College Park, Maryland, in the early 1990s while Anna was earning her MFA and working at the Entomological Society of America and Doug was working for NASA at the Center for AeroSpace Information as an abstractor and indexer. The University of Maryland and the surrounding communities have changed in twenty years, with … Continue reading On Traveling: NASM & Other Serendipity
We spent eleven days in Santa Fe on our self-designed writing retreat. Take a look at PART 1 and PART 2. Shortly after we arrived in Santa Fe, Anna leafed through a free tabloid and discovered that the visual artist Judy Chicago was giving a gallery talk at the opening of her new show at the David Richard Gallery. Anna had first come across Chicago’s … Continue reading Santa Fe Retreat: Judy Chicago
Recently, we spent eleven days in Santa Fe on our very own self-made writing retreat. Writing was our goal, but we also recommend Santa Fe as a great getaway even if getting away from your routine is your only goal. You can read about lodging, food, and shopping in our first Santa Fe Retreat post. But wait, there’s more! MUSEUMS & GALLERIES Santa Fe is a hub … Continue reading Santa Fe Retreat (2)
This past weekend, we visited Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, near where we each vacationed as children, long before we knew each other. This University of Chicago observatory was funded by Charles Tyson Yerkes, but the 40-inch refracting telescope and the building that houses it are the result of George Ellery Hale’s first grand vision to build the largest telescope in the world. If … Continue reading Yerkes Observatory (Photos!)
NOTE: Anna also has a recent piece at The Huffington Post about writers’ schedules. Read that by clicking HERE. We’ve participated in a blog hop before, and we were happy to be tagged for a new one—twice. Because we’ve been tagged by two different writers, we’re doing two different posts as part of My Writing Process, one today and the other, next Wednesday. While we write together a lot, … Continue reading Writing Process Blog Hop (Anna)
On Monday evening, we stayed up a little late to catch the lunar eclipse. We popped outside, watched for a few minutes as it began. We went outside again twenty or thirty minutes later to watch it again. And then again, and so on. Anna looked up the word umbra, which comes from a Latin word that means shadow or to be in the shade. … Continue reading The Lunar Eclipse, Apollo 11, & Apollo 16
While the word probe is used conversationally to mean to examine physically or refers to an instrument designed for that sort of physical examination, the word probe comes from a Latin word meaning to test or the result of such a test, proof. Today, we celebrate both senses of this word and the spacecraft that embody both meanings, that carry out our examination and testing … Continue reading Space Probes
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