Is this weird? The other day I was walking in my driveway at my little cabin in central Virginia and came across a pile of animal scat I didn’t immediately recognize, so I poked it with a stick to get more information. The outside of each piece was cylindrical and very dark black, the inside […]
Miscellaneous
Introduction I hate flossing. My mouth is small, my teeth crowded, the spaces between them difficult to reach. Twice a year, my dental hygienist entreats me to floss more frequently. Sometimes I assent, and mean it, and actually manage to make it work for a few months until I invariably get sick or injured or […]
Lately I’ve been lingering in Bortle 1 zones, rare dark places untroubled by human lights. On the scale, 1 is where your eyes discern the faintest satellites and the fuzzballs of nearby galaxies. When you wake hours before dawn, the atmosphere lacks the flashing planes, and sometimes satellites seem to have fallen asleep. The stars […]
This post first ran in December 2020. Since then, I’ve carefully monitored our community listserv for any bull-related news. This year I was rewarded with the following: “We have a nice heifer bull prospect almost done mowing in the front yard. Straight Back, Small Head, Big even balls – nice confirmation… Gentle fellow trained to […]
I wrote this post when I had young kids who were scared of Halloween decorations. This year, the frights have been different–the decorations have lost most of their power, but we’ve been haunted by a gang of preteen bullies who have been causing trouble and new evening anxieties. I feel lucky to have such good […]
This ran July 10, 2020. Over the intervening few years, the kids have tapered off and finally stopped doing this, though they’re still uncontrollably attracted to those little red winterberries that they call birdberries. But on the whole, they’ve moved on to other things and currently it’s perfecting cartwheels (the older one is finally doing […]
It’s another year of constant “ping ping ping” as the acorns leave the trees in wildly large numbers! I last noticed this happening back in 2017, and I wrote about it then. Might as well revisit that post now! These early fall days have been especially musical here, in my house under the trees. The […]
I’ve rerun this post before, I think the last time was 2019 and the time before was 2014. I rerun it again now because 1) my Hungarian neighbor/physicist/co-obsessive and I have just shared our nearly decade-old Google doc of orange-peel data with another neighbor/chemist/neutral party because 2) in spite of my fearlessness below, my last […]