By Susie Kilgard

"Contact Susie with a Glance at yourself at SKilgard@aol.com or 954-0326!"

hat does December have in store for us (besides us in the stores, I mean)? Holidays, homecomings, and hearty meals, probably. Also a few more Glances at our membership....

If some nagging question about gravitational theory is pulling your spirits down, give Frank Flynt a call (974-0486)--he’s working on a book about it, as well as a paper on solar orbits and related effects on the weather. Frank lives in the northwest valley, and is involved in a group of Sun City Mensans who are trying to get together on a regular basis a little closer to home than many Mensa events. He moved to Sun City about 10 years ago from New York, where he worked as an aerospace engineer for G.E. His engineering career has encompassed many interesting projects--the minuteman missile, for instance. Hobbies of this great grandfather of five include photography (he used to run a portrait studio with his late wife), a local fellowship group, and playing the electric piano.

Lots of Phoenix natives have noticed the changes in traffic that our city’s growth has spawned, but perhaps none of us understand it as well as Ethan Rauch, a transportation planner who conducts transit and traffic studies for a consulting firm. And perhaps getting stuck in traffic isn’t so bad if you have a passion for classical music as Ethan does; he loves to listen to it and learn about composers, calling it both more intellectually and emotionally satisfying than many other kinds of music. He is also exploring chamber music, playing racquetball, and satisfying his interests in military history and science, as well as enjoying his membership in the Arizona Secular Humanists organization. For pure relaxation he reads fiction than tends to be "subliminally scary", recommending H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau as a fast-paced read which is especially relevant today with genetic engineering and cloning issues confronting us. If you’d like to contact Ethan, you can call him at 285-9429.

A life involving three different businesses means a lot of time at work--all the time, in fact, when one of them means you must be on call 24 hours a day. One of Kirk Schaible’s businesses is a mortuary removal service--these are the people who transport the bodies of the deceased to mortuaries, and there are only a handful (about five or six) of these local companies to serve what is rapidly becoming a huge geographic area. (The mortuaries use these independent companies in place of staff members who would have to be on call at all times.) In this role, Kirk’s job is to respond in a timely fashion, deal sensitively with family members, and discretely remove the deceased. (By the way, the hearse has given way to the minivan, which draws much less attention from curious neighbors, Kirk said.) The number of calls he makes varies by season--during "snowbird" season the numbers increase, while calls are less frequent in the summer months. So far this year Kirk’s business alone has averaged about 37 calls a month, but those numbers rise as high as 60 in the winter months. Curious to learn more? Feel free to call Kirk at 978-9768.

Teaching has been an integral part of Judy Walker’s life for a long time. A degree in elementary education from the U of A has led to teaching in public schools, teaching homebound terminally ill children (one of the most rewarding things she has ever done--especially since she could teach to their interests and was not bound to a certain curriculum), teaching macrame and needlepoint, and tutoring math at home. She tutors everything from high school math to calculus and then spends her free time doing.......you guessed it, teaching. She teaches Sunday School at the West Valley Unitarian Universalist Church; right now her fourth, fifth, and sixth graders are exploring a particularly weighty topic: why bad things happen. Judy also reads a great deal and has these recommendations for Mensans: One True Thing by Anna Quindlen (now a movie), The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler (about the development of feminism and the old religions), and Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. Right now she is reading Six Not So Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman (about relativity, symmetry, and space time). If you’d like to know how that one turns out, you can call Judy at 937-4493.

And speaking of relativity, if you need some "alone time" from the holiday family gatherings, one really fun thing to do is call or e-mail me with a Glance into your life. Make it your New Year’s resolution today!