Awestruck

I’m officially in the ‘squeezing out’ part of summer.

Yesterday, to see whales, the fam traveled from the Southernmost part of Puget Sound to the Northernmost. Off the coast of San Juan Island, our tour operator found two young adult humpbacks. The sight and sound of their exhalations every few minutes were mesmerizing. Off and on we were party to a smallish portion of their backs and small dorsal fins with an occasional flashing of their giant, gray and white splotted flukes.

Then, out of nowhere, one breached, getting about 90% out of the water. Immediately afterwards, their partner did their best to match them. Even having seen whales breach in photographs and video, it was among the most unique/surreal experiences of my life. The boat’s naturalist said they see whales breach about six times a year.

There’s nothing like winning nature’s lottery.

‘The Heat Was Hot And The Ground Was Dry’

In The Atlantic today, a journalist asks “When will the Southwest become unlivable?” Yesterday, I perused temperatures in the heat dome over the southernmost part of the (dis)United States. Phoenix, Arizona stood out. The LOW yesterday was 92 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) at 6a.m. The expected high Saturday is 117 Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsisus).

Note to the author, the Southwest is already unlivable, at least in July.

Siddhartha Mukherjee Writes In Bed

I sang his praises here. He won a well-deserved Pulitzer for general nonfiction for Empire of All Maladies. And he deserves a Nobel Prize for science writing for helping a knucklehead like me (mostly) understand cellular biology.

I’m just settling in with The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.

Here’s the backstory to the book and his writing process.