2019 Posts
A Traveller in an Antique Land
It takes five hours on a LATAM Chile Dreamliner to get to Easter Island from Santiago. It’s mostly full of Easter Islanders and their extended families, who use it like a bus into town to stock up on provisions. Judging ...
Two tickets to paradise
Our journey to the Dominican Republic, which occupies the Eastern side of Hispaniola, was uneventful. Just the usual de-icing delay and cabal of seemingly unaccompanied children kicking the back of my seat. At just over twenty-one million people, Hispaniola has ...
The Winter of Feline Discontent
A small plastic ball with a bell inside it makes an excellent alarm clock, especially if your alarm has been set for 4:35 in the morning. Kind of like buying a drum kit for a three-year-old, buying toys for cats ...
A Trip to the Gym
This morning, my walk to the gym started in fog. I mean the weather, not my brain, but actually my brain was in fact doing its best to complement the weather. It is Saturday, after all. It is just past ...
Pissed Off
I have a cat litter box at the cottage. Or actually, it’s worse than that. I have two cat litter boxes. I have two litter boxes because the best practice is one box per cat, presumably so each cat can ...
Revenge of the Carnivores
I am a serial killer. The mangled bodies are lined up on the light summer cover that lies on top of my bed, leaving drops of blood where they put up a fight. The most annoying sound in the world ...
Cottage Status Report: 20190904
Weather: good, thank goodness. For the moment. Summer, don’t fail me now! Reason weather needed to be good: Lumber’s Island Labour day weekend party. Six Mile Lake island and island wanna be’s converged from far and wide. Nobody lost an ...
My Friend Carol
The Molloys were already ensconced in the house next door to us on Newton Crescent when we first arrived in Deep River in 1960. Inexplicably, since there was no lack of land to develop, we shared a double driveway and ...
A Suburban Day
Dear Mr. Rogers; No, not you with the cardigan and the movie with Tom Hanks. I’m talking to the telco Mr. Rogers, who I believe has unfortunately left his mortal coil, but whose name is on the eponymous telco. I ...
A Font of all Knowledge
It appears I am the last person on the face of the earth to know what the ‘Comic Sans’ font is. And it’s already twenty-five years old, as of this week. In my own defense, I am not unfamiliar with ...
Suburban Status Report: 20191124
It’s pretty much business as usual around here, in the cozy bedrooms north of civilization. Which is to say, as usual, there is rampant inaccessibility, unavailability, and inedibility. Follow along with the bouncing ball, if you will. There is a ...
Vacation Status Report: 20191215
Tucson gets 52 days of rain per year. And 265 days of sunshine. Three of those elusive 52 days occurred during the Tucson portion of my vacation, which meant that for thirty percent of the time, I was not lounging ...
How I Survived Y2K
Shortly after the dinosaurs did not dodge a comet or three, there was a time when computers did not live in your pocket. We went blissfully from home, to work, to the gym, and back again without consulting our non-existent ...