My dad sent me a check today. It’s to pay for the stove I ordered and am having installed in his house – where I’m living. I’m sitting here caught between an editing project and wanting to write for myself (either a poem or this blog post). For a few days I’ve been wanting to…
Category: Life
Winter Descending, Mid-November Night
The trees have lost their color and the mountains on the drive to and from work are mostly brown. In the mornings, there’s a still and quiet beauty to them – their soft rolling tops yawn in the shadows and light of the rising sun. But tonight, as I drove home, the sky felt serious…
Some Thoughts on Communication
Last January, shortly before the MLK holiday, my boss sent around an email saying something to the effect that it’s a busy time of year in the office, and we might feel the need to come in to work during the holiday. If we did, we could take flex time some other day. It went…
Paperwork, Detours, and Things of Little Consequence
A number of years ago I was driving to work and listening to NPR when I heard a piece about the psychology behind (and stress we create for ourselves by) putting off relatively simple, but perhaps tedious, tasks. The speaker was a professor at a university. He was, by all accounts, perfectly capable of handling…
Hunker Down – I Have a Spreadsheet for That
Every once in a while, life’s various complications (finances, relationships, or how to spend the day, week, month or year) all feel like they could be answered with a calculator and a few decent formulas. First you compound the interest then run a cost-benefit analysis between taking a loan and investing in high-yield dividend stocks,…
Sights and Sounds
When I lived in Memphis and took long walks along the Mississippi, I had a lot of time to think. On a good day, I would get in two walks – one in the morning and one just around sunset. The morning ones were long and contemplative – the best of those being times when…
Sigh
Yesterday, the day after the election, I started to write a long post about the election. I couldn’t get it right. Like many Americans, I was feeling anxious, sad, resigned, and worn out. To some degree, I still am. Record numbers of people have turned out to vote, and the talking heads on TV are…
Indecision
Nobody told my cat about setting the clocks back. He usually likes to wake me up sometime between 4:30 and 5:30, which of course meant 3:30 and 4:30 today (he chose 3:30). I avoided getting up for as long as I could, but after he walked over me about a dozen times and gave me…
Cloudy with a Chance of Clouds
It’s dark right now. We’ll set the clocks back an hour this weekend (I just got sidetracked reading about daylight savings and standard time – fun fact: most of Arizona doesn’t observe it…). As the days have been getting shorter, there have been fewer hours of sunlight. Here in State College, sunlight is a term…
More News at 11….
I begin this post wanting to justify the long silences between blog posts. I feel guilty – partially to those of you who, with some regularity, read what I have to say, but mostly to myself. Life gets busy. That should be an acceptable enough excuse. But for the past year, I’ve been trying to…
Out of Practice, Out of Routine
The last two weeks have been a whirlwind, and I’m not sure where to begin. There were several times this past week I had wanted to write about what it felt like to leave a city and people I had gotten attached to. I had wanted to write about what felt like another premature ending…