Reading, Writing, and Passion

A week ago, I was talking to Lucy at the breakfast table and she mentioned that she had first heard of Esperanto reading a book in high school called Suds in Your Eye by Mary Lasswell (published in 1942). She went to her room and came back with a little hard-cover book with a red cover. It has illustrations by George Price and is a charming story about 'three impoverished but high-spirited and beer-loving elderly women". Set in Southern California during WWII, it has many fascinating cultural details. I carefully restricted myself to just one or two chapters a day to make it last, but have now finished it and have gotten permission to pass it along to Buzz next. I am confident he will find it as charming as I have.

As my initial prompt for my writing class, I decided to look for terrestrial gastropods. It had been dry for weeks, but just before the semester started, we got a lot of rain. I went out after the rain, during the rain, several times and found almost nothing. But then Randy mentioned that he'd seen some snails on milkweeds near the sun circle. I went there and hit pay dirt. I was able to bring back a bunch of snails for my students to look at. They're cute little guys -- maybe in the genus Novisuccinea, but I'm not sure.

I've been thinking about trying to parley the terrestrial gastropods into a theme for the semester, so I did some googling and turned up a CV of a faculty member at UMass -- a new faculty member in public health who just arrived. He's originally from Russia. He mostly does endocrine disruptor stuff, but earlier in his career he'd published articles about terrestrial gastropods, including what looks like the description of a new species of slug from the Caucasus. I sent him a cautious email mentioning my class and wondering if he had suggestions for something that the students could do with molluscs that would be fun or interesting. In just a few minutes, I got a reply from him enthusiastically saying that his passion was terrestrial molluscs and that he would love to be involved anyway he could. We're going to get together for coffee on Tuesday. It's wonderful to meet enthusiastic people!