Whitepeak Observatory, Tacoma, WA

About...

Although i had no "about me" page for the first years of this website's existence, it seems a personal website is not considered complete (even odd) without one--or so i am told. So here it is along with a picture montage of old & new for the digitally curious. My name is Mardiņa...

Obligatory background...during my youth & working life (i am "over -the-hill" nowadays --that's >50 IMO--and now a "retired" homemaker in a family of four..."semi-retired/semi-impossible" ) Anyway, I worked for some years in the field of veterinary immunology designing & producing custom vaccines called "Autogenous Bacterins" for commercial large animal operations from a private midwestern lab, which has since been bought out by Novartis. That is the extent of my "scientific" experience. Other vocational activities included some years working on commercial boats here in Puget Sound (and i lived on a sailboat for several years as well), working as a newspaper reporter and photographer (most famous person interviewed: Russell Means), I ran an ad agency with a partner, entertained & danced for a few years and also spent a few years in the Army as an MP. I have travelled a bit; i lived in Central America for a time and also in the UK and Germany and travelled quite a bit while there. I have visited most of the US and Canada as well, much of that on one motorcycle or another.

Astronomy & ...motorcycles? Yep-- one hobby to engage the mind and one to engage the adrenaline glands (along with the clutch)! I have always been a thrill seeker I guess. It is totally irrational, of course, but then-- so is life. It all comes down to "I LIKE" as Jack London once claimed.

Astronomy has been an interest of mine for many years. My introduction (and when the hook was set) came in the early 70's when i was a teeny. That's when i got my first look at Saturn through the same little "spotting" telescope you can see sitting behind me in the pic of me in my observatory in the montage (it's an old K-Mart "Focal" brand scope with a 20-60X zoom eyepiece). That was the moment when i had the revelation that something is not "really real" until you have seen it with your OWN EYES! (A fact lost on many of today's media-centric personalities...) After that I got a 4.5" reflector for Christmas from my folks, mounted it on a pier in our backyard and the game was on. During that time some of the neighbor kids & i organized our own astronomy club and we ran through the whole messier list, a bunch of NGC objects, eight of the planets, a couple of lunar eclipses and the total eclipse of sun of 1979 between us. (Yes, a total solar eclipse is worth some effort to actually witness--we travelled about 600 miles in the dead of a Dakota winter to see ours.) Our biggest scope was a 10" Cave (which belonged to the oldest boy in the club, the one with the money!). In the intervening years i have always owned one telescope or another, although only in the last few years have i had the sort of personal situation which could foster any in-depth pursuit of the hobby. I think the attraction i have for astronomy generally comes from liking the idea of studying a reality which does not include humans & their (so often petty) concerns. To me, the cosmos generally has a sort of purity or clarity, so-to-speak, that cannot be found in any other reality we can access. I find that a welcome diversion from more "earthy" concerns---but i do seem to harbor some sort of 'fatal attraction' to what the 'other humans' are up to...(i consider *that* my biggest vice...)

Let's see...other (media) interests include reading & movies (i like sci-fi, big surprise, huh?). Larry Niven is one of my favorite authors in the written genre. My favorite movies are "The Matrix" and "Blade Runner" and on (old) TV, "Babylon 5" (no faves on current TV i'm afraid); in anime it's Ghost in the Shell. Other non-media interests: I play around with geology as a sort of "sub" hobby and try and link that into an extraterrestrial (specifically lunar) context as reflected in a couple of my articles. I find the study of optics as mind-bending as light bending, IOW, an engrossing rainy day interest. What is *not* a hobby is computers. Those i consider a (rather annoying) tool with significant drawbacks. (Archive fragility of magnetic data is a biggie; another is operational fragility. IOW, if digital data storage ever *replaces* print, our specie's knowledge base will be in deep long-term peril!) Ok. Can we consider your interest in me "as a person" throughly exhausted by now? Hopefully so cause i'm done talking about myself... :) Let's get back to ASTRONOMY! --by clicking the link below!