I'm having my morning coffee from a mug reading "I love the smell of rocket fuel in the morning."

Yesterday was the annual open house at my local branch of NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in beautiful Pasadena (okay, La Canada Flintridge, but close enough).

I love space. There. I said it. You know what else I love? Other people who love space.

For two hours, I got to wander the grounds with hundreds of other civilians, watching Mars rovers roll over the backs of small children and collecting astronomer trading cards. There was a young woman with a sleeve of full color rocket tatoos explaining that they didn't need fans to blow dust of the Mars lander solar array because the wind at the poles is strong enough to do the job for free. Swoon.

And kudos to the young scientist trying to explain thermoelectric generators to me in the Cutting Edge Technology tent. I think I almost got it.

One of my favorite things is how clear it was to me that these were people who shared a library of childhood books and television with me. The names for things referenced sci-fi from Bradbury to Star Trek and it just made me happy. My cheeks hurt, I was smiling so much.

Also very cool, I just got done reading a biography of Jack Parsons, a disciple of Aleister Crowley who invented the solid-fuel rocket (like what gets the space shuttle off the ground). His work built the foundation for JPL, and they had a picture and plaque, commemorating the first successful test. It was a nice synchronicity.

Also in the JPL museum was a photograph of the women who worked as "computers" in the '40s and 50s. These were mathematicians and physicists who did the calculations, and guess who was in the middle? Evelyn Boyd Granville. She was the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in math from an elite US university, and had such a cool life, including a stint calculating rocket trajectories at JPL. At one of my other publishing jobs, I pitched a middle-grade biography of her. It was great to see those women, and Dr. Granville in particualr, weren't forgotten.

In 2020, there's a planned mission to search for terrestrial planets specifically. Is it too early for me to start a countdown clock?

A note to the interested

So, yeah. The songwriter and I went to Europe. Where, as Eddie Izzard says, the history comes from.

This is the first day we've been semi-over the jetlag. More detailed blogs, with pictures (edited for time, space and an eye toward keeping our friends; we took 1300+) to follow.

Suffice to say we are home, we are well, and my French, as ever, is awful.

Word of the Day: Anhedonia

Substitute "manufacturing" for "mining," and this, sadly, sounds a lot like the town I came from.

a depressed former mining community with a dark and depressing aesthetic, that no one leaves, fostering "the boredom, demoralization, and anhedonia of being inextricably stuck in some backwater place. As one Bridgend girl told the Telegraph, 'Suicide is just what people do here because there is nothing else to do.'"

Run away, children. It sure beats death.

Indistinguishable From Magic

The songwriter and I were having one of those five-hour rambling conversations that require cited sources, and the subject of portable music came up yet again. What can I say, after 15 years, some topics remain evergreen.

For both of us, the advent of the Sony Walkman was one of those watershed events. It was music you could take with you. Everywhere. And no one could hear it but you, so there was no need for common agreement. The choice was yours and yours alone.

Heady stuff for people moving from the console stereo and a single TV that were typically controlled by adult fiat with little to no concern for what the young people were "into". I realize that these concepts (singular communal technology and the unconflicted exercise of parental authority) might seem like dystopian fiction to anyone born after 1985, but I assure you, it was so.

Anyway, after some chronological fumbling and the inevitable recourse to Wikipedia, we divined that in just 20 years, two decades, our culture had moved from the Walkman to the iPod. Not just one tape, or as many as you could fit in your purse (one of the only times being a girl in the 80s conferred any real advantage), but all of your music, with you everywhere and always. For those of us whose lives were defined by our record collections, it smacked of Arthur C. Clarke-ness.

20 years. Amazing.

And in a related vein, British author Charles Stross (who was kind enough to visit Glendale and sign my copy of Saturn's Children) has put together a personal technology timeline, demarcating the moment when crucial and disruptive advances entered his personal sphere. Despite my being younger, American and a child of deep poverty, he and I have a few points in common, including "Wristwatch: age 9" and "New Car: never."

It makes an interesting window on the pace and penetration of change.

Austin sans Bats

Sadly, it was not bat season in Austin. But I did get to see some amazing people in the thriving southern Ohio expat community. Most of them used to work with me in the same music club, or worked there after I had quit (the one that was inspired by The Troubadour).

When I told people we were coming to California, most of them asked, "But have you been to Austin?" as though only an idiot would prefer this plasticene city. Note also that question was always asked by people who hadn't been to L.A., but I digress.

I admit that I was nervous; what if I really fell in love with Austin? What if, after the last year of upheaval, I felt that deperate tug to move again? I don't think the cats could take it. But I need't have worried. Austin was a lot like the place I came from, only with higher real estate prices. The drinks were cheap, the creativity abundant, the employment marginal and the edges bleak.

The songwriter and I will probably visit in the near-ish future, but I was relieved to find I couldn't live there.

So far, only L.A. has been right for both of us. And it feels good to be home.

Come again?

I'm sorry, but Eric Chinski, of the venerable publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, thinks blogs are one of the biggest problems facing publishing? On a par with returns?

There's a lot of good stuff in this Poets & Writers editor's roundtable, some of it even from Chinski, but . . . blogs?!?

All I can think is that the access of editors to hard drugs must be better in New York than it is in L.A.

Mind you, he also thinks jackets are the toughest decision and bemoans the loss of cultural authority, so make of that what you will.

Also included are Richard Nash, from Soft Skull Press, Lee Boudreaux of Ecco, and Alexis Gargagliano from Scribner.

(Thanks to Pub Lunch for the link)

Good Things About Going to Austin

1) I get to see Sarah the Carney and all the other Ohio folks who have wisely moved to a town with more than just the one music bar.

2) Quiet time on the plane and in the hotel will give me some uninterrupted writing time.

3) Bats!