Hard at Work, or Hardly Working?

I have not really been present at work this week, telling my co-workers that I need to be home packing. If only that were true, but I think I mostly am spending my life on my phone. I took three or four calls from Dusty alone yesterday [plus one from the doctor’s office, where my […]

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 […]

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. […]

Raveling the Knitted Sleeve

Fumes. I think I’m going to be functioning on them and not much else for the foreseeable future. Waking up around 1, after falling asleep somewhere between 9 and 10, may not be my best option, but I’ve been doing that a long time. Not going back to sleep until 5 or later — that’s […]

As the French Turn

Today is the final stage of the Tour de France. If you’re announcer Bob Roll, who calls Durango (Colorado) home and was one of the first Americans to ride in the Tour, so you think he’d know better, you call it Tour “day” France, and make that “France” a tad nasally. This is a French […]

The Well-Traveled Fridge

So we have these animals. You might have heard. Three, at last count. One of them of the canine persuasion, two of them feline, and all of them with their issues, just like the rest of us. One cat, Na Ki’o, came to us with diabetes and, as we discovered not long after his arrival, […]