A couple of weeks ago, I climbed Mount Adams with my friend Carson. Our plan had been to climb Mount Hood, but schedules being what they were we could only get away from Friday to Saturday. Weekends on Hood can be pretty crowded, so Mount Adams was something of a fallback. A consolation prize. Mount […]
Miscellaneous
Ben no longer writes for us but he left us this post to remember him by. This time last year Elise and I were bellied up to a bar (remember those?) in Montana, talking about what childless dog-owning couples generally talk about: our pet. We’d owned Kit — or had she owned us? — for […]
This winter and late spring, when we all had mono and a variety of flus and colds and for a while thought Pete might have cancer, we spent a lot of time on the couch watching Pete’s favorite comfort shows. I was scared and trying not to be dramatic about it, but I couldn’t stop […]
Don’t read too much into this, but I have become an obsessive bird spy. I blame LaWONian Ben Goldfarb. He wrote a post about his birdcam (and the board game Wingspan, which I still intend to try), and it made me think that a birdcam would be a great Mother’s Day gift. I consulted with […]
What’s the best thing on my phone? The Merlin Bird ID app. It listens and tells you (with reasonable accuracy) what birds are around you. Recently I heard someone singing who I didn’t immediately recognize, but I thought sounded fluty and musical, like a thrush. Merlin agreed: Swainson’s thrush, a new bird for me. In […]
I was sipping my second cup of coffee the other morning when I got this call: “Hi Jenny, this is Dr. Menon’s office. You need to go to the ER immediately. You have a pulmonary embolism.” Pulmonary embolism? Isn’t that the thing where the old guy down the street gets shepherded away in an ambulance […]
This coming Monday is the new moon, which means by tonight we are in the soup. There’s nothing to block the stars but clouds…and us. Every month has its dark nadir and we’re pretty much there, stars as bright and numerous as they’ll ever be. That’s the thing about a full night sky, it’s as […]
I need your help. I’m trying to find a phrase to describe an important phenomenon and maybe help people recognize it more easily. The phenomenon is this: When we fix a problem, we forget it. I don’t mean you and me in “we” — we, of course, remember. But pop culture forgets, and the mass […]