Ellen, the only Nederlander on the trip. There were more women with high-tech jobs on this trip than in the entire engineering department where Dave works, and she was one of them. Ellen is considerably more than high tech. I mentioned geocaching in the context of I don't know what, and suddenly she regaled us with the tales of all the geocaches she manages near her small town in the Netherlands. Unfortunately I have forgotten the details, such as URLs (send them to me if you come across this page), but it seemed there was a lot of numerology involved and interdependencies and other true geek design work. She is also an eclipse buff, and a true realist which of course nets you the reputation of pessimism, which is why on the dusty, hazy morning of the eclipse when everybody was grooving unconcernedly at the campsite and I was hanging out with Ellen up on a sand dune wondering if I could steal a car and outrun the dust clouds looming off of Lake Chad. I don't know why people want to be shocked by how bad things get. What kind of points do you get for a sunny attitude? But the altitude of the sun was high enough. Ellen had a bunch of good cameras to take photos. I just watched.