I got my primary tip on writing postcards from Garrison Keillor, an essay of his I read at least a decade and a half ago: Don’t try to write a letter. (This was in an era when many people, including me, still wrote letters.) Write a little scene. Paint a word picture for the recipient. […]
Miscellaneous
I have been trying to write more letters, the kind that have an envelope and a stamp and go into that white box with the little flag at the end of our driveway. It’s a work in progress, I’m still at a ratio of about 579 emails and texts to one letter. So this […]
On Monday I found myself unexpectedly caring for a pre-schooler all day. It seems there is a holiday in America known as President’s Day. We didn’t have it in Mexico and the last time I remember noticing it was as kid when it was attached to something called “ski week.” Yay, no school! What is […]
IF ONLY. But no, my prep drink didn’t make me feel like this. Back in September 2014 I wrote about my colonoscopy. Guess what, folks? I’m deep in the “prep” once again! (People with IBD have to do these things more often than most, unfortunately.) And that means I’m not feeling up for writing much, […]
I spend too much time on the computer. I’m doing it right now. Between files, tabs, and docs, I keep up Google Earth — when it doesn’t crash — catching by accident out of the corner of my cluttered desktop a bolt of a mesa or a canyon’s shadow. I click on it like taking […]
At last, it is here. February 14th: Your favorite party for beheaded Christian martyrs. And your opportunity to tell that special someone just how much you care. So what are you to do now that those gum-lacerating conversation hearts are no more? Or when the greeting cards on offer just involve too many soft kittens […]
When you think of plagiarism, poems and books probably spring to mind more easily than, say, scientific papers. And words more easily than images. But plagiarism is not uncommon in science papers, and it often takes the form of images fiddled with and grafted from elsewhere. Whether they’re a consequence of laziness or a desire […]
Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them. Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a corner for a week, then a month. By the time I opened the bags […]
