My family spent this spring break in Costa Rica. We went, of course, for the wildlife. Unfortunately, so did everyone else. Manuel Antonio National Park, on the Pacific coast, is one of the prime spots for seeing biodiversity. I had been there before nearly two decades ago, but friends warned me that it had changed. […]
Cassandra
Last fall I visited the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, where I stumbled across two fishbowls brimming with gallstones. They were donated, according to the placard, by a pathologist named Dr. S. Robert Freedman. Why, I wondered in an earlier post, would Dr. Freedman keep so very many stones? I couldn’t ask him — […]
The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago holds many delights — an iron lung, a collection of old forceps, an X-ray shoe fitter. But none of them stuck with me quite like the glass case that held two fishbowls brimming with stones removed from people’s bodies. gallstones, kidney stones, and bladder stones. According to […]
My daughter’s obsession with capybaras began about six months ago. One day she was drawing mushrooms with cat ears, the next she was drawing capybaras and only capybaras. She watches videos of capybaras. She sings the capybara song. She purchased a capybara stuffie that is also, improbably, a burger. She taped a piece of notebook […]
Summer walks have me thinking about worm sex. I witnessed it in Brooklyn, but never in Wisconsin, where I now reside. Enjoy this post from 2012. It’s timeless because, well, worm sex is timeless. My husband and I often take nighttime walks. On one such walk, I noticed something strange on the ground. It looked […]
In 2018, I wrote the post below about bedtime procrastination. The term was new to me, the concept was not. I was a bedtime procrastinator. And, spoiler alert, I still am a bedtime procrastinator. Zero improvement. There’s a new term now, an even more delicious one: Revenge bedtime procrastination. Here’s how a Web MD article […]
When I pull into the boat ramp parking lot, it’s just after midnight. It should be deserted. Nobody goes night boating. But my headlights illuminate a red sedan parked hood to the woods. I can’t tell if it’s occupied. The windows are dark. My brain tries to make it make sense. You can’t pull a […]
At first blush, the request from my son’s preschool seemed reasonable. “As spring time approaches we want to encourage families to consider packing ‘waste free’ snacks and lunches, which should help boost your child’s nutritional intake, reduce waste going into landfills, and save money over time.” Sure, we’re drowning in plastic. Let’s produce less waste. It’s […]
