I’m writing this to be the voice of all the people who have had this winter’s ratty cold and have not written blog posts about it. I’ve had it twice now, so aside from worrying about what that says about my fundamentals, I feel qualified to testify. I testified once before here but this time […]
Month: February 2019
I spend too much time on the computer. I’m doing it right now. Between files, tabs, and docs, I keep up Google Earth — when it doesn’t crash — catching by accident out of the corner of my cluttered desktop a bolt of a mesa or a canyon’s shadow. I click on it like taking […]
At last, it is here. February 14th: Your favorite party for beheaded Christian martyrs. And your opportunity to tell that special someone just how much you care. So what are you to do now that those gum-lacerating conversation hearts are no more? Or when the greeting cards on offer just involve too many soft kittens […]
I think I’m in the primitive garden. That’s the name of this garden, a weird fairy hollow situated near the border of the weird fairy artist ranch where I’m staying in Tucson. I am looking north. I can tell because the sun is at my back. In front of me there is a small trapezoidal […]
When you think of plagiarism, poems and books probably spring to mind more easily than, say, scientific papers. And words more easily than images. But plagiarism is not uncommon in science papers, and it often takes the form of images fiddled with and grafted from elsewhere. Whether they’re a consequence of laziness or a desire […]
Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them. Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a corner for a week, then a month. By the time I opened the bags […]
Last month I spent a week scuba diving in Bonaire. Just writing that sentence makes me embarrassed about how much disposable income I have, but look, it was a cheap trip organized by a group, ok. I borrowed most of the equipment. And I don’t have kids to put through college. I got certified to […]
During the descent of the most recent polar vortex, you probably heard that the Midwest was colder than Antarctica. And it was! But then the Midwest usually is, this time of year. The comparison “colder than Antarctica” makes sense on a visceral level. If the temperatures are below zero and the windchills are in the […]
