Life’s Decades - The Fourth 10 Years

Today I am focused on the fourth decade of life. For me - it was mostly in the 1980s and included moving half way across the country from my family for careers (mine and my husband’s) and having a child.

Moving away was wrenching but I was kept so busy - both by work and long commutes - that I didn’t have time to worry about it. Many in the family came for visits. There was a lot to see and our guest room was comfortable. The immediate family was computer savvy enough that we started exchanging email rather than snail mail before the decade was out. Telephone calls were still expensive.

I finally had time to read for pleasure and set a goal to read a book a week (and quickly discovered discount books stores and used book sales at the local library). Now most of my reading is ‘free’ and electronic either through internet resources or the public library. The majority of physical books I read are via paperbackswap…and then I donate the books to the used book sale.

The ten years of education (and ten years of work experience) set the stage for a very productive fourth decade. It included the most technical years of my career and then the step into management of people and projects. The semantic changed from management to leadership sometime during the decade but the core of the job didn’t. The career never was a “9 to 5, leave work at work” endeavor but the increasing responsibility and advances in technology meant that work was not as tied to a location. It happened at home too. The ‘always on call’ happened to me earlier because I was in a technical field. Now the technology is so pervasive that just about every professional feels the integration (sometimes forced) of all parts of life. I remember being incredibly grateful to my husband for buying  a laser printer for me rather than a bouquet of flowers as he had been doing during a particularly rough project. As a woman in a technical, very competitive field - I benefited from supportive family relationships.

When I had my daughter midway through my fourth decade, I took a year off before I returned to work full time and though that would slow down my career trajectory. It didn’t as much as I thought it would since I was promoted about 6 months after returning to work.

Looking back - having the same day care person for 3 years and then Montessori school for my daughter was better and less traumatic than many of my peers. It helped that my daughter was a happy child. We shorten her day away from us by using flex hours (they were new at the time); my husband would flex a bit later in the day to take her in the morning and I would flex earlier to pick her up in the afternoon. We managed to combine some business trips (either mine or my husband’s) with vacations. My daughter actually was puzzled that other children in her Montessori school did not go to Colorado like she did!

One serendipity event that occurred near the end of my fourth decade was on my daughter’s fourth birthday. I came home early to get ready and discovered a water pipe had broken! We got it turned off before too much damage occurred but the muddy path in the front yard that resulted from the repair was so much fun that my daughter often says it was her most memorable birthday ever.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 10, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Birding in the National Parks: Return of the Snowy Owls - It looks like this winter will be another one for seeing Snowy Owls in the northern states of the US! There were some sightings in Maryland last winter so I am hoping…

Did Venus Once Have Oceans of Liquid Carbon Dioxide? - Maybe the geological features on Venus (rift valleys, river-like beds, and plains) were may be liquid carbon dioxide rather than water like they are on Earth.

From the Feature Well - This is the summary of 2014 special issues from The Scientist. Looking back at them provides a good review of Biology issues and progress for the year.

The "Rule of 50" Helps You Know When to Give Up on a Book - How do you know when to quit reading a book? Usually I decide via scanning before I every start reading rather than determining ahead of time a number of pages I’ll read before deciding. I can’t remember the last time my scanning failed.

Monarch Butterflies May Soon Be an Endangered Species - The population has declined by 90% since the 1990s. It’s very sad. The agricultural changes in the mid-90s killed the milkweed (food plant for the caterpillars) at the edges of fields. Now there needs to be a concerted effort to increase the availability of milkweed.

The Most Amazing Meteorological and Space Observatories Ever Built - Beautiful and functional architecture from around the world.

Top Planning Trends – 2014 - A look at traffic data on Planetizen…popular tags overall and popular posts for each state. The most popular post for Maryland was about high-rise, mixed-use suburban developments.

Significant link between daily physical activity, vascular health - These type of studies come out frequently…with some nuance defined a little better than before. Hopefully no one is waiting for another study to transition some sedentary to active time every day. Now that I think about it - do these studies prompt people to become more active?

A Look Back at Our Most Popular Photos of 2014 - From the National Wildlife Federation. The very first one (a snowy owl) caught my attention.

National Park Service Launches Website Honoring 22 World Heritage Sites in the United States - Did you know that there are 22 World Heritage Sites (a UN designation) are in the US?  Most of them are National Parks…but now all. The list can be found here.

Life’s Decades - The Third 10 Years

Today I am focused on the third decade of life - typically the decade to finish a college degree and get started on a career. For me - it was mostly in the 1970s.

In my case it was done concurrently. I worked full time and went to school part time while my husband continued in school full time. It took me most of the decade to get an undergraduate degree in Biology and then a masters in Mathematics. I don’t remember reading for pleasure or watching very much television; there wasn’t any extra time. For a few years, my husband and I would meet for dinner so that we’d see each other during the week before late night!

The big pivot point in the decade was deciding to not continue in Biology for graduate school but to switch to Mathematics (Computer Science) which was the field I was working in for the whole decade. My employer paid most of the cost of the masters. Within a few months of my decision make a career in the computer field, we bought our first house.

We were on quite a budget the whole time. I made almost all my clothes and a good portion of my husband’s shirts; in those days it was a good way to save money. The flood of discount clothes from third world countries had not started yet. Sewing was no longer a money-saving endeavor by the next decade and is not a strategy to economize now.

Most of our vacations were between semesters or long weekends. We went camping in national (Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, and Grand Canyon) and state parks - cooking our own food over campfires. When we first started we simply took blankets and pillows and slept in the car! Sometime we had to share the space with a telescope. Foods were simple (hot dogs, cans of pork’n’beans, cookies) but later we got fancier (steak, corn on the cob, baked apples)….and all along there were s’mores. Later in the decade we acquired a tent, better sleeping bags, a Coleman stove and lantern. And we enjoyed canoeing on the Brazos and Guadalupe Rivers. Camping is still a viable way to vacation frugally and I’m sure there are people in the third decade of life that enjoy it still - but I realize that it has not kept up with population growth. Why is that?

Both of my grandfathers died while I was in my 20s while the grandmothers continued on. The grandfathers had both lived into their mid-70s. Demographic statistics tell us that people are living longer now but many people have their children later like I did. My daughter is in her 20s now and still has one grandfather (who is in his mid-80s); her husband only has one grandmother left and she is 90. What a boon of modernity in the developed world to have a high probability of grandparents living to see grandchildren reach to adulthood!

When I sum up my 3rd decade I think: 10 years for me to get a masters and, concurrently, start my career…and my husband to get a PhD. 

Life’s Decades - The Second 10 Years

Today I am focusing on the second decade of life. I think of it as the growing up decade. For me it spans the end of elementary school to the first years of college mostly in the 1960s; it also includes getting married near the end of the decade.

In the US the whole K-12 structure is still in place. The public schools I attended did not have air conditioning until my senior year. I assume that all schools in the hotter part of the country are air conditioned at this point. There are also more options in the classroom. The tools and resources available to teachers are dizzying to an outsider.

But even when I was in school there were experiments. I participated in an Up with People high school that traveled across the US during my junior year of high school. There were written evaluations rather than grades…and a musical show to perform several times a week. It was my first time away from home and probably the most perspective broadening year of life.

My senior year I was back home and in another experimental school - this time a public high school that was just opening that offered clusters of focused instruction. I spent three hours focused on biology and three hours learning to program (Fortran and Cobol) in the afternoon. I took an English course in-between the two.

There was also some self-paced learning although it was mostly in reading/comprehension and all paper based. Now computers make it easier to provide enriched and self-paced lessons on a wide variety of topics.

Is there a shifting of emphasis that has occurred over the years? The technology may push students toward faster pacing and shorter duration tasks. But maybe that is what is needed for their future work environments. I hope critical thinking is still underlying the other content.

I don’t remember a lot of teen age angst.

Part of it was my mother going back to college when I was in my teens and sharing her experiences with the family. That sharing resonated with me. It became a natural introduction to college life years before I went myself. A similar thing happened with my own daughter and myself when she was in her teens but focused on women in technical fields (like I was).

Being away from home during my junior year was another factor. Whatever chafing might have developed during that year had I been at home, didn’t have a chance. By the time I came back, I was mature enough to get along with both my parents.

But then came an unexpected pivot point. As soon as I started thinking about college in my middle teens I assumed I would wait to get married until after I finished. But I met the right person for me about mid-way through my senior year and we married a year later.

I used my computer skills to start a career to support us. He worked one semester and then became a full time student. I worked full time and went to school part time…but that story is better told in the next installment about the third decade.

Life’s Decades - The First 10 Years

Now that my life has spanned more than 6 decades - I’m thinking more about my own history (what was typical…what wasn’t) and how growing up has changes over the years. Today I am focused on the first decade of life which, for me, was mostly in the 1950s.

My earliest memory is of a shadow made by a Venetian blind on the wall of my bedroom. I don’t remember being frightened (although I’ve read that something frightening is usual for a first memory)…only the image. My mother thinks it was the first night in a new house when I was about 2 although she didn’t realize I was frightened. With the advent of baby monitors - do parents detect the frightening first memories of their children more often?

We did not have air conditioning at home until I was 4 or 5…and the schools were not air conditioned at all. It was very hot during the Texas summers! Strangely enough - I don’t remember melted crayons. When my daughter was growing up we had a couple of instances of melted crayons. Is air conditioning so pervasive that the crayons have a lower melting point now than they did 50 years ago?

There were lots of children in the neighborhood before I started school. There were swing sets and shady porches…popsicle trucks on hot afternoons (although Mom had made our own in the freezer most of the time) ....getting wet with sprinklers or in small pools. In the neighborhood where I live now, the density of children has always been less during the 20 years I’ve lived here and many are in day care during the day before they start school.

Kindergarten was in a local church basement - across from the public elementary school. Both were within walking distance. Dresses were the mainstay of my school wardrobe. I had enough clothes to last between laundry days…not extra. Jeans were not the norm although I don’t know whether it was a rule or just tradition. I don’t think I had a pair of jeans at all during my first decade. Now the clothes for elementary school children usually includes jeans…and lots of other fashions that was ‘too causal’ for school in the 1960s!

Probably everyone remembers some trauma they remember vividly from their first decade even though it might not have been all that import to their parents. For me it was falling down on the boundary between vinyl flooring and carpeting when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. The carpet nails did a multi-streaked scrape across my shin. It was not deep or gaping. It did not get infected. But - I picked off the scabs several times and still have the scars.

In fact - maybe a lot of ‘scars’ we carry along with us for the rest of our lives have an origin in the first decade of life. I must have been frightened by a dog very early - I don’t remember it - but I do remember having to learn to remain calm around them and I still don’t want a dog as a pet.

Coursera - January 2015

The beginning of January is the lull period for Coursera courses just as it is winter break/between semesters for the universities that provide the content. I did two on-demand courses during the lull. I’ve finished all the videos for Introduction to Sustainable Development from Columbia University and am enjoying the first modules of the Astrobiology course from the University of Edinburgh.

The Sustainable Development course more about ‘why’ we need to do it rather than ‘how.’ It meshed well with the course from National Geographic about Water and the US Food System course from Johns Hopkins earlier this year. It is almost overwhelming how the big issues of our time are so interrelated.

The Astrobiology course also links well with other courses: The cosmology section of Philosophy and the Sciences (also from University of Edinburgh), Origins (from University of Copenhagen) and the Exoplanets course (from University of Geneva) that I finished last summer.  Having some of the same evidence discussed from a slightly different perspective deepens my overall understanding.

I struggle a little with the accented English of the lecturers in the Recovering the Humankind’s Past and Saving the Universal Heritage from Sapienza University of Rome…but I am still filling in some gaps in my knowledge.  It too links to some other courses from earlier this year - particularly The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Nubia from Emory University and Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets from Brown University.

Two new courses will start in January. Both are quite different that the courses I have taken recently….and are from universities new to my Coursera experience.