Sour Grass

You’ve probably heard that California is in the middle of a gorgeous super bloom. News stories have been reporting both on the flowers and the flower-lovers who’ve flocked to them–causing traffic jams and, in some cases, stomping on the very blooms they came to see. (Some people even landed a helicopter in an Antelope Valley […]

Looking at Giants

Whales are great. You can get a bunch of people who you thought were grumpy and walking by themselves along the sidewalk, and suddenly there’s a whale and you are all shouting and grinning at each other and most of the people have even hung up their phones or stopped texting or tweeting about how […]

A Lick and a Prayer

            I have been trying to write more letters, the kind that have an envelope and a stamp and go into that white box with the little flag at the end of our driveway. It’s a work in progress, I’m still at a ratio of about 579 emails and texts to one letter. So this […]

Good to Go

Christie’s new book about recovery is out today! It’s called Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. If you are an athlete, you will love it. If you are a wannabe athlete or a science writer or a person, you will still love it […]

Orchid Care for the Uncertain

I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly once I look at my phone. There are a series of misunderstood texts, frail disjointed things that have good intentions but poor phrasing, or lack the perfect emoji. My phone is sitting right next to an orchid. It’s a new type of […]

Redux: Naturalist Without a Notebook

Once again, I was thinking that this year would be my year to keep a journal. Or a calendar. I spent a lot of time looking at various new options online, thinking that perhaps some clean fresh pages in a new format would help. Then I remembered this post, which first appeared in 2014. One […]

Little Lights

It is the time of year for little lights. There are tiny points of light along the eaves of our neighbors’ houses. There are lights along the city streets, too. Some are arranged in a pattern so they look like dolphins. Some are shaped like shooting stars. On Sunday, some houses began to light the […]