The back garden’s at a really nice place right now, with a modest hollyhock show underway and the first early sunflowers blooming. Last night, Lissa and I were sitting out at dusk enjoying it, and were treated to a visit by a pair of lesser goldfinches. They’re little birds, able to sit on the sunflower …
I want one of those really big-ass barbecues. The kind that’s all shiny metal, with a giant tank of propane or something, so I can cook lots of meat – sizzling raw flesh of dead animals. And a place to hold a keg of beer for me and my man friends. But it’s got to …
I timed an ant this evening, walking (if you can call it that – “drunkenly stumbling”?) across our front yard with an elm seed as big as she was. The ants have been with us forever, a big colony living under our driveway about midway between the house and the street. I’m pretty sure they …
Mom sends along this note in response to my post last week about my favorite bird of paradise from our house in California: I didn’t know that you remembered it so fondly. Did you know that that plant was Grandpa’s gift to me on the Mother’s Day just after you were born–the grandson who carried …
The house I grew up in had a beautiful bird of paradise in the front yard. I took it, like much that surrounds us as children, for granted (water to the fish), but in retrospect I recognize it as the most beautiful plant I’ve known. Last Monday, at Albuquerque High School’s graduation, each student was …
I was sitting in the parklike setting that is Journal center today, having lunch, when a gust of wind sent a swirl of cottonwood cotton hither and yon. It was lovely, and is properly a thing to make one happy.
There is almost certainly some special place in purgatory reserved for me, but I was rooting in the 8th inning last night for Jason Bergman, the New Orleans Zephyrs relief pitcher, to hit our Mike Colangelo. You can see from my scorecard that Zephyr starting pitcher Andrew Good was having a bit of trouble with …
The reason I’ve been tinkering with the Salton Sea story is its (potential?) centrality to the story of climate variability and the allocation of the Colorado River’s water. (I say I’m writing a book about “drought,” but I’m really trying to deal with questions of how people here in the West have responded over the …
I can’t even begin to put words to the complexity of my feelings about Nora turning 18, and even if I could I’m not sure I’d share them here. So I’ll leave you with this. Last night at birthday sushi dinner, we purchased a round of Ramune, a Japanese soda with a strange marble contraption …
Lissa and I had planned to go to Santa Fe yesterday to see art, but we didn’t really want to drive in snow, so we stuck around town and went to Explora instead. The museum’s a hoot in a couple of ways. First of all, they’ve got a lot of sciency exhibits that allow you …