It’s Raining Baby Oak Trees

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 […]

The Iniquity of Candied Orange Peel

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 […]

Evening with a Geyser

I was hoping for an extra few hours somewhere in the race between hither and yon to write something of substance, but it didn’t come. I do want you to know that instead of writing, I camped near Crystal Geyser in Utah and listened to it gurgle and throb all night long. I dreamt to […]

10 Years, 10 Questions

This year marked my tenth year participating in 10Q. It’s a service provided by Reboot, a non-profit whose aim is to reimagine and reinforce Jewish thought and traditions. Somewhere in the back end of their website now are 100 paragraphs I’ve written over the past decade, each reflecting on an aspect of the year just […]

Orb Weaver

My garden has a guardian, an enormous black-and-yellow orb spider. I look for her every morning when I enter the enclosure we built last spring, to keep the deer out and create a protected spot for Calliope to bask in the sun and chase lizards. She’s mostly blind, this spider. But she can sense me […]

Cameron wrote a book!

Cameron’s new children’s book, National Monuments of the USA, hadn’t gone to print when she and I met up for tea at the annual science writers conference in Memphis last October. She was still fact-checking and finalizing, and having a (tiny!)(Cameron: big!) freakout about how the book would be received. To teach history to children […]

Outright Gifts

This first ran Sept. 22, 2010 — the same time of year as now. It’s not clear that the auction is still going on, and maybe it’s been replaced by a 5K race, and maybe by a bunch of other auctions in different places. The clinic is building a new home and has a lot […]