Life goes on
I officially became a grandfather today.
On the way back from visiting our daughter, our son-in-law, and our granddaughter, I thought about what a beautiful day it is in our part of California. Before sitting down to write this, I noted the temperature on my back porch: 60 degrees F.
The hills are a lush green, with speckles of yellow flowers. The skies are a rich blue, with increasing cloudiness to reflect the life-giving rain that we may receive tonight.
When I was younger and pursuing my work in science and scientific information. I remember someone describing me as a “chemist.” “Biochemist,” I corrected. The person asked me, “What is the difference between a chemist and a biochemist?”
I told the person, “A biochemist is interested in living things; a chemist is interested in “dead” things. There is all the difference in the world!” 
Life goes on. Life finds a way. In many species of fish, if there is not enough of a particular sex to reproduce, individuals will change sex to carry on the species. I have friends who have engineered “inter-species” life forms of microorganisms. Nature abhors a vacuum. Forms of life colonize hot springs that are essentially boiling sulfuric acid. As we used to say in graduate school in microbiology, “Everything is everywhere – the environment selects.”
A lot of folks in the physical sciences attribute WAY too many of the changes in our world to abiological processes. If you look closely enough, you will find life forms out there adjusting concentrations to make the thermodynamics favorable.
And for all the emphasis that business folks place on “competition,” I believe that you will likely find even more examples of “cooperation” among living things….
I have said that spring is my favorite time of the year… and that, in California, sometimes the seasons are hard to tell apart. I said that BEFORE I spoke with first graders (another “coincidence?”) about seasonal transitions in a “regular” four-season year (you folks in DC and Virginia, under all of the snow, know what I am talking about). It seems VERY much like spring today, and I look forward to the weather getting better and better from now on.
And in the middle of the rebirth of life in Northern California, a little girl has entered the world for the first time….
Of course I took photos!
-Bill at
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