Curiosities
Last week: kind of a weird one. It was windy, which always makes more than the air feel unsettled. One afternoon a neighbor knocked on the door to say a skunk was stumbling around in the front yard in broad daylight. An hour earlier, one of my kids ran into a pole and went to […]
In spring 2021, I wrote about my pandemic obsession with my echium plant. I realized how happy this plant made me, so now I’ve got several all over the yard, in different stages of their spiky lives. A few days ago, I noticed that one of them was starting to make that skyward move that […]
We had a doozy of a snowfall last week in southwest Colorado, the high desert blanketed a foot and a half deep, the mountains getting a good four feet. Knock on wood, I don’t like to tempt the fates of nature and climate change, and I’m not meaning to brag, I just want to celebrate […]
Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got […]
This post originally published in May of 2015, which, considering the age of the Bering Land Bridge, wasn’t that long ago. During the Cold War, a U.S. Air Force telecommunications network was erected in Western Alaska, a series of gray metal radio-towers like obelisks on a hilltop over the town of Nome. Each points a […]
At some point last year, a friend told me about The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. Starting on one birthday and continuing to the next, Gay kept an (almost) daily catalog of things that delighted him. It seemed like an inspired idea, so I put the book on hold at my local library. Shortly […]
Up here in Seattle we have reached the Dark Wet season, which always leaves me grasping for any glimmer of hope or joy. I have always liked the idea of keeping a gratitude journal, but the few times I’ve tried it, I end up fixating on the same lovely things in my life, like friends […]
