I’m leaving today for 2 weeks of field work in Arizona and New Mexico.

I’m doing some field recon­nais­sance in sup­port of my weird thesis research on self-​​organizing plant pat­terns in the semi-​​desert. That mostly means I’ll be dri­ving around in rental cars, looking to see what the places I’ve been peering at from above actu­ally look like in person. Also camping out in the high desert at night, looking to see what pat­terns the stars have. I’ll be in the Tucson/​Sierra Vista region, then north of Flagstaff and up to the rim of the Canyon, then training into Santa Fe/​Los Alamos area. I’m taking the Southwest Chief back to Chicago and Ann Arbor on the 23^rd.

Do you see a pat­tern? I don’t see a pattern.