Miscellaneous
During this summer of covid, 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 […]
There are well-known differences between the drugs you can get over the counter in the UK and the ones you can get in any US drugstore. Got period cramps in the UK? How about some Feminax – it’s got codeine! Cough? Codeine linctus. Aches? Pains? Co-codamol (codeine mixed with paracetamol, known to Americans as Tylenol). […]
I can tell I’m going to need a stash of new vocabulary words to get through this pandemic. “Dumpster fire” and “shitshow” are worn thin from overuse. “Stressed” and “overwhelmed” lost their meanings months ago. Luckily for me, a fresh, unfamiliar phrase recently leapt out at me from a paper I was idly perusing in the journal Aging Cell. The name […]
My latest happy distraction is the candy-stick of a male dragonfly that has taken over my backyard pond. A gorgeous blue dasher, he zips (dashes!) in circles around me, hovers remarkably close to my face like some tiny drone, then finally alights on a twig nearby, watching me—truly watching–with his cartoonishly large compound eyes. His […]
I broke a pot the other day, not just any pot but a ceramic Acoma vessel I inherited after my father died decades ago. I snatched something from the shelf, barely tapping the little seed jar, its mouth big enough for a finger, maybe two. It barely rocked one way and then the other, energy […]
This post originally appeared in February, 2020. I resurrected it because I figure we could all use a dog hug, in this pandemic time of not hugging folks outside our households. When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine […]
This is my first pandemic, and I had no idea what to expect. Which is sort of on theme, because the the overarching feeling I’ve experienced inside the COVID-19 pandemic is uncertainty. Will I get sick? Will my loved ones die? How long will this ordeal last? Will we ever have a vaccine or a […]
