Volcano Field Trip, Without Leaving Your House
I don’t know about you, but I feel like I could sleep until 2021. Our rainy weather isn’t helping. Believe me, I’m grateful (as is our catchment tank) that after what has felt like a dry year, we’re having a winter-ish wet spell. Note, it feels like a dry year, but I have a pile of about three years of rain gauge data I haven’t bothered to enter yet, so at this point a feeling is all it is! The upside of the overcast is I’m not ready to pass out from the heat in our house, or from the Read more…
During the Dark Days, a Bittersweet Smile Will Do
It’s rough out there, folks. At least, I think it is. With the exception of snatched “retail window” moments (post office, library window, grocery checkout), I rarely interact with any non-spouse humans. But I see it in my Inbox and on social media and podcasts—many of us are just hanging on to the non-committed side of the mental health line by the skin of our skinless teeth. [Random digression: I did not know skin of my teeth is a phrase of Biblical origin. Random Digression P.S.: how many of you thought I was going to rant about about pathetic mental Read more…
Emergency Preparedness, Gastropod Style
As I confessed to folks in my Newsletter—which was sent a day late—this has been one of those sluggish weeks for me. (Gastropod folks, please forgive the conflation of snail pics and slug metaphors.) I am far too lethargic to saddle my words with extraneous letters (colour? really?), but the Brits have many other quirks of verbal expression worth adopting. The word treacle comes to mind. This has been a week of wading through treacle to get anything done. (Doesn’t that sound so much nastier than warm and fuzzy molasses? Except—for the record—molasses will mold, i.e. get gray and fuzzy, Read more…
Evidence that The Outside World Still Exists
Anyone else out there struggling with days of the week? I’ll be honest—since I work from home at a vocation that doesn’t much respect the idea of a “weekend,” it’s a crapshoot for me most mornings until I open the calendar on my computer. That red circle highlighting the date seems to mock me (this is TODAY, puny human incapable of accurately measuring the passage of time). It turns out, Today is Friday. (She says, racing to write a blog post!) Shortly after giving my calendar the finger this morning (let’s see you do that, fancy zeroes and ones), I Read more…
Writer’s Little Dino Helper, or When “The Outside” Comes to You
Happy Good Friday, Christian folks! And happy end-of-another-week-you-survived to everyone else! I know many of you haven’t left the house in a VERY. LONG. TIME. I feel you. Quarantine sucks. But it beats the alternative. As I mentioned to my newsletter folks, I’ve been fighting a little something for a while. (Something flu-like, not grizzly-like.) That’s means, in an abundance of caution, the only time I’ve seen paved road in weeks is when we took our poor dog Travis for The Final Vet Visit. (He passed in the car on the way, so I barely set foot in the parking Read more…
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