Mika McKinnon

You don’t need to lick rocks; it’s just faster and easier.

I don’t lick every wild rock I meet and licking lab samples is just gross. But if you’re out doing field rock identification, you already know enough to keep your tongue away from arsenopyrite and don’t waste your time nibbling granite.

Not all geoscientists lick rocks. I’m a geophysicist—95% of my rock identification is recreational, and I can easily go a year since I last licked a rock. But it’s not an inherently ridiculous concept worthy of mockery.

The smallest member of my household is a dragon leveling up as a bard, thus mandates that I continuously sing for the duration of all tooth-brushing ventures.

I specialize in rocks & doom, not teeth. I need more science to write more lyrics. Teach me about teeth?

Our tooth brushing song (every verse immediately repeated):

Hello! Hello!

I’d like to say hello to all the teeeeethies!

Hello to the molars, hello to the canines, hello to the in-ci-sors.

The molars are for crushing,

The canines are for tearing,

The incisors are for cutting up your fooooood.

Hello! Hello!

My last journey in the Before Times was to a huge science conference in Seattle. I snuck away to Pike Place Market between sessions to buy a hank of beautiful silk/alpaca yarn in a delicious spring green to match my boots, and a new pair of beautiful wooden needles to work it.

I knit around and around in circles the next few days, adding rows while livetweeting research talks, awkwardly networking with science writers I’d known for years but never met, and burying my unease about reports of novel coronavirus cases popping up in North America.

Strikes were blocking the rail lines home and I started to worry I’d be trapped on the wrong side of the border as a pandemic blossomed.

So I knit.

And I knit, and I knit.

And I kept knitting to keep my hands busy and my mind keeping up a steady background of counting so I wouldn’t have space to fret about all the things I couldn’t change, and I tweeted and I talked and I knit some more.

The strikes lifted just in time for my train back north. Three weeks after I got home and unpacked my bags, the Canadian border closed for two years.

I haven’t touched my knitting since I got off the train.

A lot has changed since then. Vaccines, elections, a whole new human in my family, a whole future I couldn’t have imagined that’s now my past. I would’ve sworn I was making a hat, but from loop size it’s looking more like an infinity scarf and I don’t know if that’s a flaw in my memories or in the distracted counting of me in the last days before the world changed.

I picked it up tonight.

Step 2. Slowly assemble a lexicon of rock tasting notes.

Step 3. ???