Here’s one for a good laugh. Today my son pulled down from the garage rafters the ten or so leaf bags full of rock tour t-shirts Dale had stashed over the past forty or so years. The bags were crumbling into big plastic flakes, but the shirts inside were all in pretty good shape. Except …
Originally published February 2020 Today we brought home a new couch from Ikea. It’s one of those pert little foldout day bed types, ridiculously easy to set up and not too heavy for a couple of geezers to haul up the stairs. This blog is about a slippery slope, of the kind where one action …
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, a popular weekly magazine published in London between 1822 and 1847, ran the following short piece in its November 26, 1825 issue which got me giggling–I hope it will do the same to you! The Journal of an Indolent Lady “I know a young lady who has very …
Hello. My name is Julianne, and I’m a packrat. Okay, maybe a hoarder. A border hoarder. I’m able to throw things away, but it takes focused resolve and a commitment to not pull things from the Goodwill pile before they can make it out the door. And I do get rid of things. Junk. But …
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates Just around the corner from us is asuburban home that has actually appeared on Google Maps as “The Quantified House”. It is inhabited (inevitably: this is Silicon Valley, after all) by techbros, and they use All The Apps There Are to measure everything that is measurable: …
Let me be clear, I am a truly rotten gardener. It’s not just plants; whole trees have died under my care. To be fair to myself, I’m a Brit transposed to California, in the middle of the worst drought on record. It’s seriously hard to do well here and save water at the same time; …
The Plant Rejects the Gardener (and it can be just the same with writing, too) Read More »
One of the joys of leafing through the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is running across slang expressions and figures of speech still in use today that you would never guess were particularly old…but as it turns out, are. Here’s a list of the ones I’ve run across, along with their definitions as listed …
When I was in my early forties I took my first trip to Scotland. It was a whirlwind of new experiences. I discovered you could drink carbonated soda at room temperature, that ale isn’t like beer at all, and that black pudding is really very good, so long as you eat it with eggs that …
In 2017 I heard a great deal about the new movie, Wonder Woman, based on the old DC comic. All over Facebook, everywhere I looked, people were kvelling over it, so I figured I’d better go see it before I heard so much there was no longer any point in buying a ticket. Particularly since …
Flying suddenly to Rio but you’re leaving behind hungry loved ones who don’t cook?
Originally published Winter, 2018 and revived because I missed the Christmas Bird Count again. . . .drat. For the past 3 years, I have spent a cold day in winter counting birds. Amateur bird-watcher that I am—not a “birder” in that I don’t devote hours of my life learning bird song even though I wish …
Yes I did. Early December of last year. (Happy New Year!). Weather, 60’s—felt warmer in the sun who slid away from us early in the afternoon behind the San Jacinto mountains, leaving us shivering in the pool. Thus we spent the majority of wet time in the spa, with a plastic pitcher of white …
I don’t know how it happened. One never does, in the world beyond the veil. Perhaps underworld dwellers are angry, or bored. They must be shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at us humans; I doubt any of them would be happy to see us tonight as the veil thins and we may cross. …
