I forget this every year—in October, there are places where it is no longer safe to walk. If we want to go to our friend Peter’s house, we can’t go up the street and around the corner as we usually do. If we need to get to daycare, we have to turn and walk in […]
Miscellaneous
The big red van will soon be stuffed to the gills. Sometimes you just need new views, fresh air, and worries as basic as “do we have enough water”? So, we’re heading to West Virginia. Country roads and all that jazz. Full disclosure: It’s not quite the way I used to do it. For example, […]
This post originally ran winter of 2014 and circumstances have not changed. Careful out there! There’s been a lot of road kill on my drive to work and back in Western Colorado, mostly prairie dogs and rabbits, and young magpies trying to learn how fast they have to fly to get out of the way. […]
Less than a week after my eight-month-old started daycare, he spiked a fever. No big deal, I told myself. Maybe he was teething. Maybe he had picked up a cold. I tried not to spin out thinking about the third possibility. Babies get fevers all the time. COVID seemed like the least likely explanation.
I have some new neighbors who many people would consider a nuisance. They show up at random times. They occasionally kick the rocks that line my driveway, and once they knocked off my downspout. They also eat garbage and leave a real mess. These neighbors are mostly loners. They watch me, unblinking, and do not […]
When I was in college my department offered a course in comparative anatomy. The idea was that you could learn a lot by comparing and contrasting different species. I was reminded of that course while reading Emily Willingham’s new book, Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis, which is published tomorrow. The book offers a […]
I went up to a rock art panel in southeast Utah the other day, one known as the Desecration Panel. The sandstone wall is long and repeatedly marked by petroglyphs of animals and human-like characters about 1,500 years old, what is called Basketmaker tradition. Several are terribly defaced, the damage relatively recent. One figure, which […]
