Y’all know about spotted lanternflies, right? I don’t have to explain them? (invaders, hordes over-running the landscape, even government officials say to just kill ’em?) Last summer I had a lot of them and I killed every one I was able to kill, given that they’re fast and cunning. This summer, the tree guy inspected […]
Month: July 2024
This post first ran on January 26, 2012. Since then, we’ve continued to set records for the hottest year on record. My question began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote: At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?” Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like […]
The last year has been foundation-shaking for me. I went from two parents to zero in less than seven months and I’m trying to figure out exactly how life works now. Soon after the second parent died, my region was plunged into a miserable heat wave that lasted more than a week and made it […]
An American: You guys have something called Flying Ant Day. Is this some kind of national holiday? A British person who is tired of ants: I can see how you’d get there, given the past 14 years of British politics. Quite the opposite, though: it’s the summer day we all dread because unlike other commemorative […]
Based on real adventures in aging. Of which I hope to have more. (Feel free to add your own.) ———————————————————- Getting older is hilarious. Or, at least, that’s the best way to think about it. Here are more signs that time is a damn freight train and your foot it stuck in the tracks. You […]
It’s hard to know what to say, every twist and turn becoming a knot. Forces are crashing, glass flying. I’m up in the mountains where ancient volcanoes choked themselves to death, then eroded for 30 million years into the throaty remnants of a Colorado hotspot. Forests have grown on the rubble and I’ve been walking […]
This week came with heartening news in the frog world. An Australian study showed that if you offer frogs a sauna in a greenhouse, it allows them to recover from the fungal disease that has played a role in 90 species extinctions so far. The greatest loss of biodiversity ever attributed to a single disease, […]
