Applying for a Passing Grade

The “testing” phase of our house construction has begun, and we are one-quarter of the way there. Yes, I don’t know about flying colors (we have lots of colors, though), but we passed our electrical inspection late yesterday. (Very late; it was around 7 when the voluble inspector and the electrician left.) Now all we […]

Dog Days of August

I saw this the other day, but I don’t remember if it was a poster, bumper sticker or t-shirt: “I don’t always talk about my dogs. Sometimes I’m asleep.” And Phoebe, one of the tellers at my bank (who used to be Little Phoebe who lived down the street from me), has a poster at […]

How Very Unexpected

Imagine my surprise when I carted a box up our new cedar step in our new garage, came around the corner and saw counters installed in the kitchen. Now imagine Lynn’s surprise — you have to imagine 10 times my surprise to get close. We thought these might — might, mind you — get put […]

Places Like This

Warning: politics ahead. If we are not collectively going to say “unacceptable” and mean it, which doesn’t seem likely, what we need to stop saying is, “Things like this don’t happen in places like this.” Because if we’ve learned anything from mass shootings — and so far we don’t seem to have learned much — […]

Social Climber

I found some of my climbing books yesterday while packing, which of course made me think of . . . weddings. (You’ll see. It turns out there’s a direct correlation.) I don’t know that I love weddings a lot, although they can be fun. (However, I’ve been to several where we spend altogether too much […]

Empty Shelves and Empty Closets

I had a horrible day Thursday, after getting the news about Mr. Baril’s death. I did not expect that, because there was nothing surprising about that news, but boy did it throw me off my game. Maybe because I thought I could just go about business as usual, and it turns out you just can’t […]

Let There Be Light

Today (in theory) is Inspection Day for electricity and the mechanisms that convey it at the Some Day Ranch. Our electrician, Shawn, has been putting in long days to get here, while Dusty keeps warning that we could fail the inspection. Lynn wanted to know if that was likely, because Shawn seems to know what […]

A Day for Faulkner

In the wee hours of Nov. 22, 1980, my sisters and I were awakened and told our dad had died. He was at St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver; we were in Aurora. Sherry Simchuk had recently moved from Gunnison with her two sons to a three-bedroom condo in Aurora, and it seemed as though half […]

Sartorial Splendor

Once again, a mere 446 days before the general election, we are in the midst of candidate debates for every Democrat on the planet, and once again I am not really paying attention. Except that Trevor Noah once again broadcast live after the debate, as he did the first time, and he couldn’t help but […]

What About Bob?

Seventeen years ago, in an airless, windowless waiting room of the old University of Colorado medical center on Colorado Boulevard in Denver, I was standing next to my friend Bob’s mom when she picked up one of the weekly news magazines (Time or Newsweek), glanced scornfully at the cover and flung it down in disgust. […]