Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

I'd made my plan a few months ago, to give myself something to look forward to through the long weeks of audit preparation and online class creation. Catalina Island offers a number of deals to people who go there on their birthdays, including two-for-one on the boat fare out there. I'd gone to the island just after my birthday last year and loved it, and I already knew I wanted to take Emma back there, so she was an easy choice as my "plus one." There's just one problem with celebrating a birthday in public. It's that you're celebrating your birthday in public. At the Catalina Express ticket window, they give you a big, festive button and invite you to put your name on it. Eventually, I did pin it onto my hat, but as you can see, I remained the anonymous birthday boy. Others were more into the birthday spirit, including this one lady and her gal pals who sat next to us on the boat. Pretty much everything that happened during the ride was compl...

I turned five years old in September 1969. It was just two months after the Apollo 11 moon landing and I was space-crazy, and my mom came up with the perfect birthday party game for me. She got a bunch of leftover boxes from our local grocery store, cut holes in the bottoms for us kids to stick our legs through, and decorated them to look like spaceships. Then she decorated the back yard with signs for the moon and the planets. At the party, we all ran around in our spaceships, going from one planet to another. It was great. The California Channel Islands are kind of like that, a set of eight little worlds just off the coast, waiting for you to go out and visit them. Only one, Santa Catalina, has any permanent civilian communities on it. Two of them, San Nicolas and San Clemente, are military bases, although scientific and archeological research teams go there as well. (The real story behind the book, Island of the Blue Dolphins , took place on San Nicolas.) The other five -...

Last summer, I fell in love - with the California Channel Islands. They've been sitting out there, just off the coast, for all the time I've lived here, but it wasn't until I took Emma to Carpinteria last June that I really took an interest, like the proverbial special someone who's been standing next to you all along but you never noticed. Now I'm hooked. I want to visit as many of them as I can, and I've got the beginnings of ideas for stories about them (my "literary 401K," I call them, since I could be retirement age by the time I get around to writing them). There's just one little, itty-bitty problem. Boats. Unless you're wealthy enough to afford an airplane, the only way to reach the Channel Islands is by boat. Well, they are islands, after all. I made my first voyage onto the open seas back in 2012 , sailing out to Anacapa Island and back with my boss and some other people from day-job land. I did okay going out because th...