We attended our first childbirth preparation course last week, Pete and I. It was 2.5 hours long, on Zoom, and would have made an excellent drinking game (drink every time you hear the word blood! Or mucus!) had I been drinking. Instead, we just watched it in bed on my laptop, passing a block of […]
This post first appeared in March 2021. My longing for more spontaneous museum visits continues. A little over a year ago I made an unplanned trip to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I had driven to the city to run errands but then decided to go look at art instead, a moment of pre-pandemic […]
This week we had our 22-week ultrasound, the detailed scan for all the things no one wants to think about: cysts in the brain, malformed heart chambers, exposed vertebrae. Will (we’ve started calling him Will) is moving a lot now, rotating and arching his back, kicking his legs and arms. In my mind he’s like a […]
Pete and I just got back from a winter trip to Colorado. It was a real vacation — we drove around the mountains and mesas, hiked up side canyons, went to bed early, slept in, ate our hosts’ homemade biscuits and gravy for breakfast. (We also saw Christie, who made us such good pizza, and […]
For reasons I didn’t fully understand myself (marriage? the cat? surely someone or something else was to blame), I was feeling more than usually lazy, or maybe just unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of writing. It felt like a dangerous malaise, and the only remedy I could think of was to try to soak up some […]
This post first ran in December 2020. Since then, I’ve carefully monitored our community listserv for any bull-related news. This year I was rewarded with the following: “We have a nice heifer bull prospect almost done mowing in the front yard. Straight Back, Small Head, Big even balls – nice confirmation… Gentle fellow trained to […]
My garden has a guardian, an enormous black-and-yellow orb spider. I look for her every morning when I enter the enclosure we built last spring, to keep the deer out and create a protected spot for Calliope to bask in the sun and chase lizards. She’s mostly blind, this spider. But she can sense me […]
Cameron’s new children’s book, National Monuments of the USA, hadn’t gone to print when she and I met up for tea at the annual science writers conference in Memphis last October. She was still fact-checking and finalizing, and having a (tiny!)(Cameron: big!) freakout about how the book would be received. To teach history to children […]