This post originally ran October 30, 2017 Sand blowing and grains hurdling over each other, landing and knocking the next, is called saltation. This is how dunes move, not sheering chaos, but each grain effecting the other, billiard balls knocking each other down the line. Kids found that if they stood on a dune crest, […]
Parenting
My teenage kid is driving, and six feet tall. His feet are bigger than mine. On the way to school we come down a frozen dirt road, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat when a rear tire blows. It flops like a seal and he pulls over. The road is a […]
Last week, on a day off from school for teacher planning, or something, I took my daughter to a daytime performance of Mary Poppins. It was the Broadway version and it was the highlight of her fall so far. And mine, let’s just be honest here. I love Mary Poppins. I love her ridiculous hat […]
There were many times when it wasn’t lice. It wasn’t lice that time a neighbor’s kids had lice, and all of our heads started feeling itchy. It wasn’t lice when the preschool had a lice outbreak. It wasn’t lice when our good friends had lice three times in a row. It wasn’t lice when we […]
As many of you know, I’m a pretty big deal journalist. I mean, not the kind of big deal whose name or stories you might recognize. Or who even writes for outlets you might recognize. But still, a pretty big deal. And like any big deal journalist, I have confidential sources. Super secret ones. Like, […]
Finding a decent bedtime story to read to your kid is harder than you might think. Most childrens books are either pointless (Superman likes red! Superman likes blue!), overproduced (A book with buttons and recorded dinosaur sounds! Wait, who made these recordings?), boring (Pokey the Bear showed Susie she had the strength the whole time!), […]
At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home […]
I recently bought a camera that prints pictures immediately upon exposing them. Remember those? It’s pretty fun, and it’s nice if, like me, you take a lot of pictures and then save them in your iCloud and forget to look at them. Or at least forget until your phone sends you an automated “memory,” and […]