Adventures of Nefertiti

Irene never really had an interest in me and so I never really worried much about her. Living coastal in the South Carolina Lowcountry, I knew early on from news reports that Irene was one storm that was going to pass me by. She was heading north, leaving me with only outer bands of rain. But there once was a storm in South Florida that I’ll never forget, her name was Wilma. I was new to South Florida in October 2005, having only moved there eight months before. And I was all alone. Although a sister of mine moved to Florida with me in February, by May, she and my two nieces were back home in Kentucky. So when Wilma came in October, it was just me, alone in an overpriced two-bedroom apartment. Oddly though, I wasn’t fazed and I wasn’t afraid. Wilma, early on, a Category 5, battered the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico first. After hammering down on the resort town of Cozumel, Mexico, Wilma headed due northeast, and crossed the Gulf of Mexico to Florida, where she made landfall near N...

My Grandfather was a nuclear physicist, and one day your child can be one too. I’ve written about my grandfather before, but I wanted to bring him up again as you prepare your children for the upcoming school year. My grandfather, my father’s father, conducted experiments for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the Plum Brook Reactor Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. My grandfather, born 1927, in Liberty, Texas, was the youngest of twenty children from a Creole family originally of Arnaudville, Louisiana. When my grandfather was 14-years-old he joined the navy to fight in WWII. After the war, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to go to college, where he met my grandmother. In 1962, he joined NASA as a nuclear engineer. In 1966, my grandfather received his reactor’s operator license from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. My grandmother tells me that he would be exhausted after coming home late from experiments in the reactor. Below is a summary of my grandfather's...