Turning a Page

It was my turn to work the Saturday shift at Pat’s yesterday, and the task I set for myself was to try to bring some semblance of order to the used books in the overstuffed sausage of our storage area. We’ve been selling some books without refilling the holes on the shelves, and if I […]

No Excuse

Oxygen: can’t live without it, although one man doesn’t care if I try. Uncle Shel Silverstein has a poem, I think it’s called “Sick Note,” wherein the narrator lists all the reasons she can’t go to school that day — only to learn it’s Saturday. Miraculously, all the complaints disappear and she heads out to […]

Morning Air

I was out of the house early this morning. Let’s qualify that: it was early for me, probably standard for lots of folks, and late for Lynn, who had harbored hopes of going to work at a leisurely 8 a.m. but instead got summoned summarily to fill in for an ailing colleague at 6:30. The […]

A-pair-ently

I reached for a pair of glasses this morning, and then wondered why. Not why I was reaching for them, since my eyes seem to be worsening by the day and without them I couldn’t read the words in three recently-uncovered comic strips drawn by Charles Schulz. It scarcely mattered, in the grand scheme of […]

Syndromes

There’s a new syndrome going around, and I’m pretty sure I have it: Post-Pandemic Fatigue. Okay, there’s not, yet, such a thing, but just give social scientists some time and there will be. Its defining features will be rushing headlong back into one’s pre-covid existence without a thought to just how much your life and […]

A Matter of Perspective

In the Before Times, starting about this time of year, I would wonder about ants. This year, depending on where you live, you might be wondering about cicadas, but I ponder ants. Not really the ants themselves so much, but their place in the universe. I try hard not to step on ants as they […]

Busy Being Busy

Maybe it’s because last year seemed rather interminable and long, but these days the days are screaming by, and I feel like I’m losing total control over them. I still can’t account for my time, but whatever I’m doing with it, it’s whizzing right along. My schedule, which probably really isn’t, feels completely jam-packed. But […]

Grokking About “Grok”

This morning, for no apparent reason in particular, I started one of those trains of thought that ambles through the countryside before dropping one off at some pleasant station never heard of before and certainly not on one’s itinerary. Who even knows where I started, but then I wandered to reminiscing about the days I […]

Some Who Wander Are Lost

One of my Friday, sometimes Saturday, activities is to read, after the fact, a live chat with an advice columnist in the Washington Post. I doubt very much that she plans a “theme” to the questions she receives each week, but yesterday she found herself advising several people to get out of relationships with narcissists. […]

Wanderings

My mind has lacked the discipline necessary for blogging this week; everything and nothing seems like a viable topic, and none of it floats down in organized fashion. While we’re talking organization, we certainly would not be talking my time management. The first Grand Tour bike race of the season, the Giro d’Italia, started last […]