The Carlton Complex, the largest wildfire in the history of Washington state, started on July 14, 2014 in the foothills of the North Cascades. When it was finally extinguished, almost 40 days later, it had burned more than 250 homes and disrupted thousands of lives in Okanogan County, a rural county on the northern edge of the […]
Nature
When my first daughter started getting teased for her obsession with sharks I comforted her by lying that everyone had an animal they especially loved. When pressed I randomly choose frogs (I was hung over and just wanted quiet), which started a pro-frog avalanche: Walls filled with frog paintings, desks with frog playdoh figurines, and […]
Thursday, July 16, 2015. Interior of a Brooklyn apartment. Deadlines loom. Distractions distract. Timestamps are approximate because time is a flat circle. 4:54 p.m. Go to the kitchen. Open cabinets. Close cabinets. What did you come in here for? Make tea. 4:55 p.m. As the water boils, notice ants on the wall, the one across […]
It’s summer, and I’ve been thinking of what poet Billy Collins called those, “forlorn chairs/though at one time it must have seemed/a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.” Even situated, as they usually are, to take in the view, it’s hard for those chairs to compete with the attention-grabbing distractions found […]
If there’s a landmass that has them, get off of it now. As you’ll learn in this blog post, the last thing you want to do is find yourself trapped in a confined space with sloths, and I consider a continent a confined space. For starters, the sloth is the only animal listed as one […]
I eat meat. Most kinds. Beef, pork, chicken, bison, turkey.* Dark meat, white meat, legs, breasts. I’m not big on lamb—too much flavor, or perhaps too fragrant. Same goes for goat and venison. And I say no to veal, no matter how delicious it may be. Not that other farm animals aren’t treated poorly, but those […]
Here’s a thing that reliably brings me delight: seeing a bug on a window. I don’t know how this love started. But it’s real. Here’s what happened when I was walking to the water cooler at work the other day. I saw a dark spot on the glass. A step or two more and wings […]
It’s Monday. And it’s June. And it’s gloomy. Or maybe it’s just that I’m gloomy about our recent oil spill and I can’t quite figure out how to write about it. So here’s a post that ran in June 2012 about June Glooms past. I used to think the weather was something adults talked about because they were […]
