Hazy Shade of Summer

We have one airless, mask-free corner at Pat’s Screen Printing. It’s the corner where the printer (since we’re generally down to one person printing at an given time) has to work. Our building is wrapped by another so we have no back door and thus very poor airflow, and the press sits in the most […]

Motherly Advice

This is an easy sentence to toss out there: “In 1920, women won the right to vote.” But to get there took nine — nine! — decades of activism. And one letter from a mom to her son. When we think of prominent suffragists — [When I conduct coin flips at middle school volleyball matches, […]

Working the Angles

Back in the day, that day being when I was writing fiction, I was always wandering around with a story going on in the back of my mind, even when it wasn’t at the forefront. I was always writing, mentally, even if a lot of it never made it to the page. Blogging has brought […]

Going Postal

Yesterday afternoon I had so many blog topics that I wondered how I would fit them all in. This morning, after another 4 a.m. awakening (thanks for the sleep tips, everyone — I haven’t tried any of them yet, mistakenly thinking that mentioning sleep problems out loud would make them go away), absolutely nothing sounded […]

Sleeping With the TV On

Don’t ask me why, but for the third night in a row I woke up in the wee hours and had trouble going back to sleep. Don’t lecture me, but my solution for returning to sleep is to watch TV. I know; you’re supposed to get out of bed and read a book. What happened […]

Slacking

This is mostly to let you know I am still here, just less organized than usual, if you can believe such a thing. No matter my intentions, I am not likely to find time to fit a post in today. I know I missed Saturday, and yesterday, and really only made it halfway through a […]

Wide World of Sports

I played hooky yesterday, although it really didn’t feel like it. We’ve decided to try opening Pat’s again on Saturdays, and I used my shift to shift books around. We may get our used bookstore open by the time Pandemia finally abates. Once upon a time I was a sportswriter. I wrote about sports for […]

Unmagical Numbers

You know me and math, so maybe it will not surprise you that I can’t make sense of unemployment these days. But I’m guessing I’m not alone. Yesterday the report for new unemployment filings came out, and another one million Americans filed, the 20th week in a row that at least that many people have […]

Voting Matters

Let’s talk about voting. There are three million reasons the sitting “president” should not be seated in the White House, but he was duly anointed by the Electoral College and so there he perches, as it grows more obvious by the day that he realizes how slippery this seat is. He spent about two years […]

Time Warp

One of my friends heard this line somewhere, and it quickly became her favorite saying: “Is this Friday, or is it June?” She certainly didn’t have to explain the humor to me, but when you’re living it, it’s maybe not as funny as I ought to find it. I find myself doing that multiple times, […]