Category: Life

It’s redeeming when one’s gastroenterologist comes into the room and, grave and serious though he tends to be, says “You look really skinny.” And that’s the theme of my current health situation, which is to say: optimistic. Since my dosage of prednisone has been reduced from 40mg to 5mg (and now I get to wean [...]

Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear – NYTimes.com: “” Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland, Ore., used Twitter to vent about a $183 cable bill last month. (The bill was prorated for almost two months of service.) Her comment — “very angry at Comcast” — set off Mr. [...]

You may have noticed a startling lack of blogginess in the past ten days or so here. This is due to an abnormally staggering workload and some significant not-feeing-well-ing-ness late last week. Plus calculus, which seems to take about 50% of my free waking time. Here are some recent developments: It has ironically been a [...]

Robins-egg blue a la late 1990s Ford Tauruses. And while I appreciate vintage Thunderbirds, the new ones look sickly and clashy in that pale aqua. Metallic pumpkin. Not an acceptable trend. Mint green. My mother owned a mint-green Honda Accord in the 90s. My sister was good enough to smash it into a pole at [...]

I’m having the wildest, most busy few weeks of the year thus far. My blogging, and, even more so, my reading, have suffered. I realized this weekend that I hadn’t been clothes shopping in, oh, two years, a decade, something like that. I am hopeless as fashion goes anyway, but it was getting dire, even [...]

Are there really any two families in the United States that prepare their tuna fish the same way? I would beg to assert that the composition of tuna fish salad is one of the most beautiful regional variations there is. Some people are pickle devotees. Some people swear by bare minimalism. This is how we [...]

Too busy to blog properly this week, but enjoy this well-crafted gem about the trans-continental pneumatic burrito pipeline. The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel: “By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde, floating on an invisible magnetic cushion as they plunge into the lithosphere.” (Via @peat via [...]

Is it appropriate to mourn one’s vehicle? After months of foot-dragging and avoidance I finally sold my Audi TT this morning to a nice, recently-retired couple from the center of the state. As they live a couple of hundred miles away, they had not laid eyes on the car itself, nor met us. Yet they [...]

My friend Aileen is now blogging. This is good because she is an interesting person. She recently created another human, my goddaughter, Kea.

It might come as some surprise that someone married to Mr. Pencil only owns one pencil. I own only one pencil, a stumpy sub-compact mechanical number that I use for maths. I borrowed it from Mr. Pencil about eight months back and have adopted it as my own. Keeping track of a single pencil requires [...]