Circle of Life

Kara, I think, did this in the right order: she went first to the funeral for her across-the-street neighbor who died suddenly and unexpectedly while in his early 60s, and then she went to the baby shower. I am doing this in reverse order: baby shower first, and today is the service for my across-the-street […]

An Era of ERA

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. –proposed Constitutional Amendment The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a some month if not august body politic with a 401-year history, has made a lot of history already this […]

Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem

A variety show with Muppets, at the moment when variety shows were going out of vogue, was perhaps a more daring idea than I’d previously considered, but that’s what Jim Henson and ABC put out for public consumption in the mid-1970s. For those of us who only knew the Muppets through the wholesomeness of Sesame […]

A Box of Chocolates

Well, here is news I wasn’t expecting to hear this morning: chocolate may soon be more difficult to source on Colorado’s Western Slope. I frankly never expect to hear much Colorado news in the half-hour I have the Denver news on the TV. As near as I can tell, the entire purpose of these morning […]

Any Day Is

A calendar is an artificial construct, I know that. But I still wanted it to work better than it currently is. Time in days and years is set by the solar system, our planet’s rotations, both as it spins and as it makes its way around the sun. These should be non-negotiables, although humankind has […]

Snowed Up

One of the young adult books I still have, which I got from the Weekly Reader Book Club, is called Snowed Up, by Rosalie K. Fry (I think; I’m going off memory here, even though it could be just a couple of rooms away). A family of three children have been left at a bus […]

Power Us Interruptus

Our electricity went out last night. Again. I know; you’re tired of hearing about this. You were over it months ago. It is time to find something new to talk about it. Trust me; I know. In the grand scheme of electricity, it should have been a non-event. But for a couple of clocks, it […]

A Tail of New Neighbors

\ Another day, another visit to the vet. That’s why you missed me yesterday, or I missed you, or however that works: Marrakesh and I were taking advantage of an open “urgent care” appointment with his veterinarian. The lump I’d been feeling on his tail, when he’d let me touch it, was seeming more and […]

Fun With Words: OO

In the movie Educating Rita, Julie Walters tells Michael Caine that assonance means “getting the rhyme wrong.” The example he gives her to provoke this response is the poet Yeats, who pronounced his name all wrong [Yates — same letters, better organization], who rhymes “swan” with “stone.” I thought about this after last night’s episode […]

A History of TL, in Bikes (Part I)

When I was 7, possibly 8, Kent Baril and I were riding our bikes down the College Hill when we both wiped out at the same time on separate bikes in two separate spaces. There must have been a bunch of gravel on the road; I still don’t know what caused it. All I know […]