Still Here

I’m still here, despite the way it has seemed the last few days. Mostly I haven’t had the fortitude to attempt to take on WordPress, which is supposed to be about pressing words but which keeps innovating its way right of out blog-friendly options. I did lose a key paragraph while trying to make my […]

V Day

Oh, WordPress bane of my existence: who knows what they did today that felt like an “improvement” to them. but I have spent the day — in between extensive naps and fatigue — trying to format what I wrote this morning. I’m not proofreading, or trying anything else. I apologize on behalf of the “innovators” […]

Little Bird

His dad called him Pablo; the rest of us just called him Paul. He was probably in the neighborhood of seven when I first met him and his family. New to town, they were frequent customers of the bookstore where I worked. Then his mom got a job at the bookstore, and in the way […]

Rescuing Daylight

As I awoke at what a mere two days ago would have been a completely unreasonable 4:20 rather than this morning’s more acceptable (but still early) 5:20, after staying up “late” because it felt “normal,” I would like to lodge yet another complaint about this nonsense of time shifting. The Washington Post tells me there […]

All We Need is Music, Music, Music

The music department at Western Not State Not College is shouldering the brunt of proposed cuts to the liberal arts curriculum, although there are efforts to make sure this doesn’t happen without a fight. Like the fight song for the college, I mean university, which last I knew still got played (in non-covid years) by […]

The Seeds of Destruction

Today it’s plants that have me depressed. Inside, mostly, but my spirits are crushed as inexorably as Lynn’s front garden, beset by pound upon pound of ice slid from the roof. At one point I fancied myself quite the green thumb, although this didn’t stem (get it?) from any great knowledge of plants. It was […]

For Whom the Booth Tolls

Once upon a time, I was young (it’s true!). I was young but I thought I was relatively grown up, being in the sixth grade and all. Being in the sixth grade, I had a reading book, and in this reading book was a selection from The Phantom Tollbooth, which I dutifully read as it […]

A Big Ol’ Heart

Friday did not go as planned, as is frequently the case, but the case rarely involves contact with three different veterinary services nearly simultaneously. You may recall, Na Ki’o was not moving very well, and I got a Thursday morning appointment at his usual clinic but with a new veterinarian — an appointment that didn’t […]

Steaming About STEM

The world is a changing place, which I’m sure is all for the better, except for the part where none of it feels better. Here locally, we have a liberal arts college, I mean university, busily abandoning the liberal arts. I was going to write about this a month ago, but I thought I would […]

Cats as Cats Can

I didn’t mean to go AWOL on everyone. In fact, I was halfway through an entry yesterday, one that will keep, when I paused to take a cat to a veterinarian in an encounter that just put me off for the rest of the day. Over a year ago, while waiting in a dermatologist’s outer […]