I'm sitting in my home office, listening to Almost Alice (music from Alice in Wonderland), and loading high-resolution USGS seismic reflection data. This is acoustic data that is low frequency enough that it penetrates the sea floor and, in this case, returns reflections from a couple of hundred meters. These data come right into the many channels of Los Angeles harbor.

Saturday morning I flew out of Los Angeles (LAX) on my way back to the heartland. I have no active funding so used frequent flier miles, and there was no availability, so I used double the miles and flew back first class. We flew right over Palos Verdes Peninsula and I looked right down into LA harbor, the same channels where I am loading data today.

By the way, that flight on a large plane with a real first class and good wine and good conversation was extremely pleasant. Now I will have to go back to steerage next time. The woman next to me was in the entertainment industry (sort of), the stewardess was religious and thought God would take care of her: she was on the previous leg of a flight a couple of decades that crashed (Chicago?) and killed everyone on board. Her Stepdaughter rejects all that and is into Mother Earth. I'm an atheist and scientist. I'm interested in Mother earth/Gaia. Gaia was a hypothesis that was popular a couple of decades ago, that earth was self regulating. I work on past climates, and climate research is full of the opposite of Gaia: runaway effects, tipping points, etc.

Anyway, I thought that it would be cool for the stewardess, her stepdaughter, and I to have a (filmed) "my dinner with Andre". Good food, good wine, and good conversation.

Sigh, I guess HW and I will have to invite the right couple of people over to dinner. Any of you want to come? Maybe wait until I become Island Chris?

Chris