A calendar is an artificial construct, I know that. But I still wanted it to work better than it currently is. Time in days and years is set by the solar system, our planet’s rotations, both as it spins and as it makes its way around the sun. These should be non-negotiables, although humankind has […]

One of the young adult books I still have, which I got from the Weekly Reader Book Club, is called Snowed Up, by Rosalie K. Fry (I think; I’m going off memory here, even though it could be just a couple of rooms away). A family of three children have been left at a bus […]

Our electricity went out last night. Again. I know; you’re tired of hearing about this. You were over it months ago. It is time to find something new to talk about it. Trust me; I know. In the grand scheme of electricity, it should have been a non-event. But for a couple of clocks, it […]

In the movie Educating Rita, Julie Walters tells Michael Caine that assonance means “getting the rhyme wrong.” The example he gives her to provoke this response is the poet Yeats, who pronounced his name all wrong [Yates — same letters, better organization], who rhymes “swan” with “stone.” I thought about this after last night’s episode […]

When I was 7, possibly 8, Kent Baril and I were riding our bikes down the College Hill when we both wiped out at the same time on separate bikes in two separate spaces. There must have been a bunch of gravel on the road; I still don’t know what caused it. All I know […]

This is what I told the owner of my bike shop a couple months back: I’m no longer a bicyclist who sometimes drives a car; I’m now a motorist who sometimes rides a bike. Hands-down, the hardest part of moving to this house for me has been the alteration of my modes of transportation. Most […]

So I’m on electricity again. Still. It’s a constant. (And right as I type this, two men from GCEA have arrived to put a “quality monitor” on our line.) Today’s wonderment comes after all I wanted to do was see how much electricity my new Level 2 charger (really Electric Vehicle Service Equipment) was pulling. […]

Often on Saturdays, I don’t feel like I get much done, no matter how much I move around and knock tasks off my list. But yesterday felt extremely productive, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I made something with my own two hands. In addition to the usual laundry and the purchasing of milk and […]

I have been wasting money in our health care system, and I am not happy about it. For the privilege of having health insurance, I get to pay more than I would had I been a “private pay” patient. Our hospital, which is a rather amoeba-like construction vacuuming up all the health care options in […]