River: One Year Ago

Colleen died one year ago today. By an odd but wellcome coincidence, my grief support group meets the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month, so there's that. (It runs from 10:00 to 11:30; I will probably post this sometime in the afternoon. I started writing this post two days ago, so please ignore any temporal confusion or calendrical parallax.)

My life seems to have been torn in half -- in part literally, shuttling back and forth between the houses in Freeland and Seattle. But also metaphorically, because so much of it revolved around Colleen. That includes nearly all of my social life.

I haven't gotten anything done in the last year. I've been reading, as usual, taking refuge in group theory and other rabbit-holes, but I'm just now getting back into singing regularly, and as for sorting and packing,... Actually, I've never sold anything on Craig's List or anywhere else online, and things that I could easily get wrong worry me. My daughter, E, is coming up to the house week after next to help with the sorting.

I've had plenty of support, mostly low-key, which I think is what I needed. Need. I haven't been left alone for more than a day or so, which is probably what I've needed even though it's not what I would have asked for. And I have the cats, who are also taking care of me in their own way. And a grief support group that meets via zoom on the second and fourth Thursday of eacy month, so they/we met this morning. There's also a Facebook group.

I don't actually know much about support, either asking for it, getting it, or giving it. Which makes being in a peer support group kind of problematic? Basicaly I'm faking it.

It's like object-oriented programming -- if a simulation is good enough, you can use it in place of the thing you're simulating. Or as Alan Kay famously said about Smalltalk, "If it quacks like a duck and it waddles like a duck, you can't tell that it isn't a duck." I just have to hope I'm waddling well enough.

Aside: the next post will be a signal boost for the James Webb Space Telescope's first images, released earlier this morning. A day that starts with that much beauty and wonder can't be all bad. And after that a boost for this morning's GoingSideways post.

Signal Boost: James Webb Space Telescope first images

I don't think I've ever used "awestruck" in my Mood field before. But the James Webb Space Telescope's first images are worth it.

Here's the (recorded) livestream where they released the first images and spectra.

Additional links: Webb Telescope: First Science Images Packet | Science Mission Directorate and Webb's First Images & Data | Flickr

Finally, a personal note: this was an unexpectedly intense emotional experience for me. My father was one of the pioneers of infra-red spectroscopy, and Mom worked on the Hubble (they both worked at Perkin-Elmer, where the Hubble's mirror was made). The software that finds the spectral lines is (most likely) based on the Savitzky–Golay filter. When they put up the spectrum of WASP-96B I was close to tears.

GoingSideways: Fettered to the Foam

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Fettered to the Foam. Naomi and her son j arrive in Rome at the start of their Italy trip.