This summer it’s happened three times so far. Once, I got an urgent email from the backyard pool where they have baby swim lessons. Another time, my older son’s swim teacher pulled the class out of the high school pool and taught the kids “safety skills” on the deck. And when we were at camp, […]
Right now, the butterfly might be coming out. Or it might not. On Thursday, my son’s preschool teacher said that Friday would be the day. On Friday, she said she hoped it would wait until Monday. She and the kids have been marking off the days since the monarch caterpillar stopped munching milkweed and spun […]
It’s after Memorial Day, so I should be wearing white instead of thinking about the white stuff. (Although if I were in the Arctic Circle or even in Vermont and New York, where a late-May storm dropped a foot or more in some spots, I might be thinking about snow quite a bit). Even when […]
I did a big run on Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon, I stuffed my face, had a welcome beer after a training dry spell, and felt glorious. Sunday morning I spent in bed, reading the New York Times in a puddle of pure contentment. Sunday night, I went to an epic dinner and felt the […]
Guest poster Mary Caperton Morton wrote a lovely post about poison oak a few years back, but I just had this itch… I saw an old friend—or foe, I guess—on a run last weekend. Leafless during winter, the poison oak in a nearby park has started to push out shiny green triads along the trail […]
Most of the people I follow on Facebook are friends from high school and college, so I usually see photos of kids, drinking establishments, and scenic shots of the West. But recently I caught on to what 710,000 twitter followers and 219,354 Facebook friends (as of Tuesday) already knew–and started following Col. Chris Hadfield, a […]
An important decision faces Oregon’s lawmakers this week. It concerns a $2.4 billion industry, an organism that’s important in genetics and other research, and a ritual that boosts the happiness of the multitudes, starting around 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I know, I know. I could have just said that Oregon is considering making brewer’s […]
Let me start with the squid “penis” and get to the mysterious grooves on the seafloor later. Last April an ROV called Little Hercules, cruising around the seafloor in the northern Gulf of Mexico, spotted a distant, possibly cephalopod-like shape. As Little Hercules got closer, NOAA researcher Mike Vecchione reports in the mission log, “the […]