It’s the last day of summer for us, so I’m taking my summer feet to the beach. This post ran in August 2019. This year, school will look a little different, because we’ll all be barefoot. At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the […]
Miscellaneous
I doubt I need to elaborate to make you love these itty bitty frogs that, on a dark and steamy night some weeks ago, emerged from our pond and pipped away (my term; they just weren’t big enough to properly “hop”) into the unknown. They didn’t even mind me with my flashlight, sitting on the […]
This first ran May 17, 2017, and Chris still finding stuff. He’s also gone on to serious work at the local historical society. His retirement looks to be going splendidly. So do his pandemic plans, as all he needs is a stockpile of postcards, the internet, and the ability to merge the lost past into […]
I set down my pen next to a slug the other day, not your garden variety, but a beast of a banana slug near the central California coast under misty morning redwoods. The slug wasn’t so much lumbering as gliding at a hardly perceptible speed over dried leaves, under twigs. Setting the pen down, I […]
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 […]
