I was having lunch with a vegetarian friend recently, when I caught myself wanting to tell her the story. When you’re a vegetarian, a lot of people — friends, distant relatives, complete strangers — barrage you with the story. It starts like this: “Yeah, I tried going vegetarian once.” During my 13 years as a […]
Nature
This week, a great white shark named Lydia may be the first white shark seen crossing into the eastern Atlantic. Scientists tagged her a year ago in Florida; since then, she’s swum 19,000 miles and as of yesterday morning, she was about 1000 miles from the Irish coast. White shark populations, along with those of […]
The latest snowstorm was only somewhere around 5 inches, depending where in the yard I stuck my ruler, and as usual the Capital Weather Gang had nailed it. I’d written them asking if I could interview them for this post, but at the time they didn’t answer, so intent they were on predicting the upcoming […]
If you were a kid in the eighties in California, you might have done things like this: Save the bathwater and flush the toilets with it. Turn off the shower when you soaped up. Let it mellow. You might have even had a Rube Goldberg-like contraption like the one my dad made to use water […]
This week, it seems like all I am seeing in the news is sports. Athletes, trained to the very pinnacle of human possibility, competing for money, fame, and above all, glory. For Americans, the centerpiece is the Super Bowl, which will scoop up more than four times more viewers than an average Winter Olympics day. […]
One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to write in a journal everyday. I’m terrible at it, even though I wished I loved to scribble daily. I can’t even keep up with my Planner Pad. (In fact, I’ve already lost my 2014 edition). That’s not to say that I haven’t occasionally kept a notebook. […]
On a Saturday afternoon visit to an ice cream parlour, I saw a flavour that looked absolutely disgusting: mushroom. Feeling unadventurous, I ordered chocolate instead. But my husband went for the mushroom, and it was delicious. “It tastes like waffles,” the server told us. The ice cream was pale yellow, with a flavour more complex […]
Tonight, if we can remember the words, we might be singing about auld acquaintance. And we have many: several People of LWON–Heather Pringle, Erika Check Hayden and Thomas Hayden–moved on in 2013 (and Virginia Hughes just before that). We miss them all. So I thought I’d try to bring at least one of these fine […]
