Yesterday I went down to the river with my sister – the only rational activity in this godawful heat wave – and we waded in up to our waists, squinting into the late afternoon sun. We swam until our blood cooled, then perched on a rock midstream, watching the green water spiral away in eddies […]
Miscellaneous
Awwwww yeah, it is peach season again! I am so happy! And I am so peach-silly that I can only think about peaches, so I am returning to this post from 2019 while I recover. One update: I have not made a peach pie since. Last week I made one from apples instead. Save the […]
This post originally ran in September of 2014 and I’ve not been back to this wild desert party since. I’ve just returned from Burning Man, a Mad Max bacchanalia in the desert of western Nevada. I went to see what my civilization was up to, what fiery pinnacle we’ve invented. I also wanted to see […]
This first ran in August, 2016, and then it ran again a year or so later, because the recipe for mint lemonade had an important update. It’s had no updates since because Helen and I have not gotten together because, you know. And I’m re-upping it now because it’s hot out and I don’t know […]
In the early mornings now, instead of scrolling the news or mulling over a Wordle, I check the wind speed and direction. If it’s from the East, I multiply by two. I run along the Rideau Canal, watched by the same worryingly-tame heron every day, and by the time I get to the lockmaster’s house […]
Every morning, I wake up, make myself a cup of coffee, and open the Spelling Bee. For the uninitiated, Spelling Bee is a word game published daily by the New York Times, and the concept is delightfully simple: you are given seven letters arranged in the shape of a honeycomb, and you try to find […]
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 […]
My mom used to work for the Environmental Protection Agency. She rode the bus downtown every workday from where she lived in the mountains outside of Denver. A golden-hearted woman, she believes in the EPA’s mission, which is protection. She saw her agency’s job as preventing the water we drink and the air we breathe […]