Pandemic Time

On March 1st, I got concerned enough to start asking a few beloved elders if they had two weeks of supplies. (They did.) The next day, I stopped touching my face. Last week, I stopped going to restaurants. Monday, when I left the office for my two regular work-from-home days, I thought I might not […]

Sunrise in the Caribbean

Wednesday night, Washington, D.C.: Because my work life is slightly on fire right now, and because I already spent 10 hours of this day either sitting in front of my computer or walking around in circles talking to people on the phone, I present to you a photograph of a sunrise in the Caribbean last […]

Update: Underwater Photography

Two weeks ago, I wrote about practicing underwater photography on the junk at the bottom of the public pool – band-aids, mostly – and my hope that I would find something better to photograph in Belize. Good news: I did. I saw a ton of lovely fish, some sea turtles, and a lot of really […]

On the Bottom of the Pool

A couple of years ago, I decided I was going to draw comics. It didn’t last long – but the ones I did before I quit are pretty fun. One is about a scuba practice session. Here you go.

Airplanes and Bees

If you were to think about it, where would you think the first eyewitness account of one of the Wright brothers’ flights would have appeared in print? I’d guess the New York Times, maybe. A local newspaper in North Carolina or Ohio. Perhaps a venerable old science magazine like Scientific American. Well, I would be […]

A Little Storm Crosses the Mountains

One day last summer I went for a late-afternoon drive with my parents into Rocky Mountain National Park. From the safety of the rental car, we drove into a hailstorm, then into a parking lot to wait out the hailstorm–which stopped, so my dad pulled back onto the road, and it immediately started again, and […]

Energetic Oak Trees

The campus of the National Institutes of Health is in Bethesda, Md. In the 1930s, the kernel of today’s NIH was part of “Tree Tops,” the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Luke I. Wilson. It has lots of lovely old brick buildings and squeezed-in bits of lawn. Lots of nice big trees, too. One day […]

A Letter to Persimmons

Dear Persimmons, Where have you been all my life? On trees, I suppose. I think you’re even on a tree in a front yard a few blocks away from here, which on the way to the gym and the grocery store–a street which, come to think of it, I’ve been using for most of my […]