The Azolla Event

Posted on 17 December 2025 by Isabel Gibson

At this time [~60 million years ago], the Earth was a much warmer place and most of the Arctic was in fact a gigantic freshwater lake. Azolla bloomed in the Arctic mega-lake, covering an astonishing area of 1.5 million square miles (4 million sq km), which is roughly half the size of the United States. It is a truly staggering thought. If you were to visit this Azolla-filled lake 60 million years ago, you could fly in an airplane for about three hours overhead and continue to see this one species covering the top of the water like a green blanket. –
“Ferns: Lessons in survival from Earth’s most adaptable plants” (Ch 6)

That one paragraph might fill your “fern stuff” quota for today; indeed, it might be more fern stuff than you ever wanted in all your days. But I’m going to take a chance here and provide some important context: an individual Azolla-fern plant would fit on the fingernail of your little finger. Yet some Azolla plants, working together in a truly impressive collective effort, managed to cover 1.5 million square miles of lake. But hey, it wasn’t for long, right? If you’d blinked, you’d have missed it, right?

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What Do They Want Now?

Posted on 17 December 2025 by Isabel Gibson

Psst, Isabel . . .

I look up in irritation: an email is trying to get my attention. Dagnab it. What do They want now?

 . . . do you need a last-minute gift?

Aw. Embarrassment-at-being-caught-being-impatient-with-another’s-good-intention (I think German has a word for that) disarms my irritation. Embarrassment and something deeper. I can’t say that I need a last-minute gift, exactly — after all, I have a houseful of extra stuff I’m trying to get rid of — but against all reason I’d love to have a gift, last-minute or otherwise. I wonder how it knew?

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What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Posted on 06 December 2025 by Isabel Gibson

Colvin took a bottle from the cabinet on the bulkhead of his patrol cabin and poured expertly despite the Coriolis forces. He carried his glass to his chair and sank into it. A packet of mail lay on his desk, the most recent letter from his wife already ripped open so that he could be sure there was nothing wrong at home.
–  The Mote in God’s Eye, Epilogue

If you, like me, gritted your teeth through high-school physics class, your eye might have slid over “the Coriolis forces” as one of those things you don’t expect to understand. Maybe, like me, you don’t even want to understand it. Eyes front, Isabel. But unlike you, if the task is to see the anomaly in this passage, I have an advantage. I know that Colvin’s cabin is in a spaceship named Defiant.

Defiant lay nearly motionless in space at the outer fringes of the Murcheson System.

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By Any Other Name

Posted on 28 November 2025 by Isabel Gibson

We used to call them canaries.

The speaker? My mother-in-law.

The time? Oh, maybe 20 years ago.

The expression on her face as she looks out the window at a swarmed-by-yellow-birds feeder in rural Manitoba? Pained.

Now we have to call them finches.

Her tone clearly signals impatience with newfangled silliness, a point of view that I understood in theory 20 years ago, but that makes better sense to me now.

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Surprise!

Posted on 21 November 2025 by Isabel Gibson

Please silence your cellphone.

I’m sitting quietly in a hospital nook, exhibiting location-appropriate behaviour, waiting for a friend to emerge from a routine test requiring mild sedation after which they cannot drive for 24 hours. I’m scanning the walls looking for interesting bits. My results so far? Not much, truthfully, but at least this sign gives me something to do.

It’s a reasonable request — not that that matters, really. Their house, their rules, yeah? Demonstrating my technological savvy, in about a dozen quick steps I silence all things that beep or ring or buzz or chime on my cellphone. But do I stop there? I do not: I scan on. Maybe there is more required of me, as a quiet and bored waiter. A girl can dream.

This is a No-Scents Zone.
Avoid wearing or using scented products.

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Blecch. (It’s a technical term.)

Posted on 15 November 2025 by Isabel Gibson

As Martin Luther is reported to have said . . .

Here I stand,
I can do no other.

Actually, Luther spoke at the Diet of Worms (And where was the corporate-communications team when that name was being chosen?) in German and Latin, not English, so technically he said . . .

Hier stehe Ich,
Ich kann nicht anders.

Hic sto,
non possum aliter.

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Twice Blest

Posted on 09 November 2025 by Isabel Gibson

At the going down of the sun
and in the morning,
we will remember them.
– Act of Remembrance

It’s a lovely sentiment. Do we make good on it?

I know that I don’t. I can go weeks, even months, without thinking of the war dead. Why not? A few reasons maybe:

  • I have no war losses in my family history (at least as far as I know, which is sort of the point) so I have no personal driver of remembrance.
  • I never served in the military so I have no occupational or institutional driver of remembrance.
  • I was never taught, and have never encountered, any Canadian practice of daily observance so I have no traditional driver of remembrance.

Is the lack of daily remembrance a bad thing? Maybe. Is it hypocritical to make a pledge of twice-daily remembrance every year and then to ignore it? Probably. Is there something I can do about that? Absolutely.

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By the Ratios

Posted on 31 October 2025 by Isabel Gibson

4 – Hours to notice an apparently out-of-place car parked in our neighbourhood.
72 – Hours to feel confident that it truly is out of place.
2 – Hours to connect with relevant neighbours to confirm the car’s out-of-placeness.
1 – Hour for designated neighbour to report the car to the Police, to communicate their answer to other neighbours (Yeah, it was a car-of-interest in an investigation but not any longer. Call Bylaw.), and to call Bylaw.
24 – Hours for Bylaw to ticket the car, necessary before towing.
1 – Hour for second neighbour to contact Bylaw again after noticing the first ticket.
4 – Hours for someone to remove the car.

Four plus two plus two plus one plus 4 plus one plus four, carry the 1, and yes, it’s official: A car that took less than an hour to abandon took more than 100 elapsed hours to remove.

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Parking-lot Planting

Posted on 30 October 2025 by Isabel Gibson

Vellum? Onion? Succulent? Fabric? Leather?

My Texture Identifier™ whirrs inconclusively for a few minutes before figuratively shrugging. It can’t quite peg what this leaf feels like: Different, anyway. Not, in fact, like a leaf at all, especially in the fall when I expect leaves to be stiff, crinkled, dry. To crackle when stepped upon, for goodness sake, not to lie there quietly, all silent stealthiness.

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