Charlotte's Web

Ok, ok. I'd never want to live here, but I'm slowly discovering a little bit of charm in the place. What helped a lot was spending an extra couple of hours in bed this morning, so that I'm fully recovered from this awfully stupid early clock change scandal. Somehow, in March, I don't expect to be getting up before the sun. That's a late December thing. What also helped was a visit to the Mint Museum for Crafts and Design. I know. It doesn't sound like a good bet, does it? But they had a brilliant (and huge) exhibition of the glass work of Ann Wolff whose 'snowball' design from her days of slumming at Kosta Boda is something I have in my home and have always loved. Wolff taught me a lot about bowls. Ok, yeah, bowls. I'd never been much of a ceramics or pottery guy, but somehow seeing the designs instantiated in the most amazing glass made me get it. Bowls, in all their feminine concavity, contain little worlds. They cup space in a seemingly infinite variety of different ways. Bowls can hold rooms, ideas, moments, or entire alternative universes. I get it. Funny that it took so long (but nice to know that something I've had this kind of ambivalence for for almost a half century can bowl me over ...erm, sorry... in a single moment. It makes me feel almost young enough to be asked for ID. So Wolff, an extraordinary amount of sunshine and warmth, lots of good, crowded sidewalks (do lots of people take Monday off?) conspired to make me feel happy enough about this place to last for one more day before winging home to the snow, slush, and an extraordinary backup of work.

A good day at the conference, too. Lots of interesting basic questions that nobody has answers to that make me want to go back to the lab to get going on some new experiments. I feel like Mary Tyler Moore. If I had a hat, I'd throw it up in the air.