So, on Monday I went away to get some writing done. I was at a cheap AirBnB 10 minutes from my house. It’s the first week in January, and although I’m one of those people who doesn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, I wanted some time at the beginning of the year to see where […]
Miscellaneous
Every fall thousands of kokanee salmon spawn in the rocky shallows of Idaho’s Lake Coeur d’Alene, and every fall hundreds of bald eagles descend to devour them. One frigid, blustery day in early January, Elise and I drove out to catch the tail end of the months-long feast. The eagle flock had been smaller this […]
I’ve already written for LWON once about the power outages that swept California this fall. Soon after I posted that piece, however, I heard from a family that lost power in the midst of a medical crisis, and wanted to share their story. I met this family in 2018, while reporting a story for the […]
That’s a somewhat newer mission patch from the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite outfit which is clearly still at the top of its game. The amateur NRO watchers are still watching. I follow some of them on Twitter. Lately they’ve also been watching: the Starlink satellites, the launch of international asteroid probes, pretty pictures […]
Happy New Year, for what a year is worth given the light of Betelgeuse fading from the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Thanks to Ann for pointing that out last week, and that it may have gone supernova hundreds of years ago and no longer exists. Beginning of January, heart of winter, is a good […]
Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up […]
If you stand around an airport bathroom a little longer than necessary, you may witness a few steps toward the fall of human civilization. Because nobody, and I mean nobody, washes their hands well enough to kill off the funk we humans pick up and carry around. I did this experiment on a recent trip. […]
It has been brought to my attention that I know very little about tornadoes. There are only two things that I know about them, in fact. They are a corkscrew of wind, and they helped Dorothy get to Oz. But do they start from the bottom or from the top? Can they travel over a […]