Art and Earth Science by Grass
Grass Padrique | The Fabulous Scientist One of the most dangerous assumptions you can make while traveling is thinking you'll only come home with photographs. Sometimes you come home with a painting. That happened to me during a recent trip to La Union. After spending the morning hunting for leaf fossils in Sto. Tomas, La… Continue reading The Painting I Couldn’t Leave Behind: An Unexpected Art Purchase in La Union
I've wanted Jacques Herbin's Emerald of Chivor ever since I fell down the fountain pen rabbit hole. You know how it goes. One minute you're buying a perfectly sensible fountain pen for note-taking. The next minute you're staring at ink swatches online at 2:00 in the morning, convincing yourself that your life would be significantly… Continue reading Jacques Herbin Emerald of Chivor: The Ink That Got Away (Until It Didn’t)
Grass Padrique | The Fabulous Scientist We live in an age where you can learn almost anything from YouTube. Want to bake sourdough? There's a video for that. Want to repair a fountain pen? Someone has probably filmed a 47-minute tutorial complete with dramatic background music. Want to learn Muay Thai, play the ukulele, or… Continue reading Why Mentoring Works Better for Me Than Watching YouTube Tutorials
Grass Padrique | The Fabulous Scientist Hey, everyone! If you’ve been hanging around this blog for a while, you probably already know I’m a full-on dendrophile—a person who gets unreasonably excited about trees and plants. One of my favorite things to do during my fitness walks (whether in UP Diliman or wherever I happen to… Continue reading Discover the Rare JC’s Vine: A Hidden Gem in Philippine Flora
Grass Padrique | The Fabulous Scientist Before GPS and tablets, every strike and dip was inked by hand by geologists. It is a ritual of observation and artistry. There is a certain romance in geology that isn’t always captured by equations, satellite images, or the neat layers of a GIS map. Long before digital mapping… Continue reading Writing Like a Geologist: Field Notes, Maps, and the Fountain Pen Tradition
Grass Padrique | The Fabulous Scientist I first discovered bellydancing back in 2006, during my days as a geologist in Mindanao. I had gained weight and was searching for a fitness routine that felt less like a chore and more like something I could genuinely enjoy. That’s when I walked into a local gym and… Continue reading Finding My Way Back to Bellydancing for Fitness
Earlier this month, a fellow MS in Geology graduate who now works with the UP Resilience Institute and I discussed a bold, forward-looking idea: what if Metro Manila could reimagine itself not as a flood-prone metropolis struggling to cope with yearly inundations, but as a “sponge city", an urban landscape designed to live with water rather than fight… Continue reading How Sponge Cities Can Mitigate Metro Manila’s Flood Issues
I'm currently taking Stanford Education's Code in Place (CIP) online course, which I applied for while I was unemployed. This might surprise some people since I've used Python a lot in my Master's research in Geology. So, why am I taking a basic coding course? But here’s the thing: I’m really glad I did. CIP… Continue reading Why You Don’t Need to Understand Everything Under the Hood to Be a Good Python Coder
Hi everyone! I know I haven’t blogged here in a while—life has just been so busy these past two weeks! But I’m still here. As I’ve shared before, my kids and I have recently developed a love for nature walks, where we observe birds and try to identify different trees wherever we go. Luckily, the… Continue reading Balik Tanaw: Returning to Nature at UP Diliman
Working as a geologist in the industry has given me access to places in the Philippines that most people will never set foot in—areas classified as "red zones," off-limits to tourists, and often overlooked on maps. For nearly five years, I was stationed in Mindanao, where some of the most remote and geologically hazardous sites… Continue reading A Geologist’s Journey into the Red Zone
The Fabulous Scientist 