Category Personal

Marcia and I went on a hike and I remembered how much I love manzanita trees. From far away, manzanitas are all scraggly and ancient and gnarled looking. They look like they belong in a Van Gogh painting. Up close,…

I’ve decided to make updating this blog more of a priority, for now at least. Old-fashioned-bullet-update-go! * We took a four-day, much-needed vacation in a cabin on the coast. Pictures soon. * Kyle is writing a book. I am writing…

This year, for some reason, I took to reading long novels. Among the big books I read were Infinite Jest—which I wrote about on here before—IQ84 by Haruki Murakami (900+ pages), Red Moon by Benjamin Percy (530 pages), The Goldfinch…

What a relief it is to see rain again after this weird year of drought in California. This leaf was sitting in my garden and it was as pretty to me as if it were covered in diamonds.

If you’ve been to my house, you know how much I hate the 1970s wallpaper on the dining room wall. Well, now it’s gone. We have painted over it. Free at last, free at last.

July was jammed packed. It was the kind of month where at the end of the day you’ll remember something that happened and think, wait, that was this morning? because it feels like it was two days ago. Here are…

It’s unsettling that California has decided to skip winter. The governor declared a major drought emergency. Accuweather says no rain until February 23. (And apparently there will be “abundant sunshine” on February 14th.) It’s scary, but the sunshine is also…

Happy Halloween, two-thousand-thirteen! This is Gideon’s second Halloween. He’s going as a pirate. We’re going to listen to the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast tonight, which should be spooky-but-baby-friendly celebration. I never understood why people thought Orson Welles’s hoax…

Last week I went to Michigan for work. We left the day after Gideon’s first birthday. The day before his birthday, he took his first step. The day after, he went in an airplane for the first time. Go-getter! Gideon…

Every year at this time, I get obsessed with gardening. I have a wonderful God-like moment in early spring where I feel like my yard is under control and I know what I’m doing, but experience had taught me that…

In the 1980s, Bruce Willis put out a couple of albums, which included this cover of Respect Yourself by the Staple Singers. Perhaps it was inspiration for Madonna’s “Express Yourself” two years later? Anyway, here’s the video of Bruce Willis…

I went mushroom hunting. It was fancy mushroom hunting at a winery on top of a hill, and afterwards a chef made us a 3-course meal featuring local mushrooms. It has been a hot, dry spring, so there weren’t many…