In 1925, teacher Wilfred Eitzman found a cobble—a rock slightly bigger than a pebble, the weight of a small rat—in a cave in Northern Province, South Africa. It was reddish brown with an unmistakable, prominent face etched into it. Two deep and perfectly round eyes, a shallow divet for a nose, and grimacing, toothy mouth. […]
Month: August 2024
Last week I went sailing for the first time since I was a kid. It was a beautiful day, and I was out with my son and some friends, and they were learning to sail and I was watching them learn to sail and watching the harbor become a beautiful expanse of coastline as we […]
OMG this saw whet owl. But it belongs in the forest, so I will leave it there. Years have passed since I collected these cuties. I still want all of them. If you’ve trolled the Internet any time in the last decade, you know that animals and their silly antics are very happening. And no wonder. For the most […]
I continue to have nothing good to say about Baltimore in August. In fact, if anything it’s getting worse though it’s incrementally-worse from already-bad. Like, the recent run of feels-like temps from 105 to 110 and I don’t even look at the numbers after that. And then once the temps get that high, afternoon storms […]
This post first ran in 2021, but I’ve been thinking of it a lot lately — ever since a new family moved into my friend Mona’s house. Mona lived in my neighborhood and we walked our dogs together most mornings. She died of cancer in 2017, and I still think of her every time I […]
Early in the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, a neighbor was moving out in a hurry. She and her husband had been living separately for some reason – academia-related? – but suddenly she was able to work from anywhere, so she packed up the baby and left. In the process she gave away all […]
Last autumn, Microsoft made a subtle change to its Excel spreadsheets, one which flew under the radar for normal mortals. Unlike many other software tweaks, this one made it easier to stop the software automating certain tasks. Specifically, its tendency to automatically convert input into dates. One major reason for the change was the havoc […]
