I've been the only person walking a dog in our hilltop Seattle neighborhood. I'm using Snow Trax on my boots, stretchy rubber straps laced with steel wedges that help you keep your feet on ice and snow. The packaging copy claims that they give you "hundreds of steel wedges that bite into the ice," but that figure would only be true if they had ( Read more... )

Lisa was a Park Service Ranger in the Florida Everglades, taking visitors on interpretive hikes, tram rides, and bicycle trips. She loved the job.

On April 1st, her co-workers in the headquarters office gave her a phone message, saying that the Bill Cosby Show had called, and wanted Lisa to call them back about appearing on the show. Lisa said ( Read more... )

My wife Lisa and I are both working freelance and writing books. Lisa's book is a kid-friendly natural science piece on the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The book I'm finishing is full of stories like the anecdotes I put in this blog, but they're the stories that merit being in a book instead of whizzing out into the Internet ( Read more... )

This was early in the 90’s. Lisa and I were camping out at her ranger station at Toleak on the Olympic Coast. The camp was near a former Native American village, nothing left but midden heaps overgrown with bushes, thickly populated by rabbits.

As we left along the beach in the morning, a middle-aged woman came up exclaiming about how much she ( Read more... )

I’ve been spending my free time working on game design. Blogging suffers.

Let’s break the pattern with the first of a few stories about human misunderstandings of nature, a trope I’m fond of.

Lisa’s former life as a backcountry ranger supplied many vignettes. One infinitely repeated scene came from the Everglades. The people involved were ( Read more... )

Let’s call him Baggins. It’s not his real name but it captures his true name’s spirit. Lisa used to work with Baggins when she was a backcountry ranger in the National Park Service. At the time he worked in the front country. I didn’t know him well, only met him briefly a couple of times. I doubt he knows my name

I’m not sure that Baggins was a ( Read more... )

I

My life is literally full of games and books and miniatures. So when the WotC Gargantuan Red Dragon entered my life, I didn’t really have space for it, not even at work on either of my two desks (at the time I’d never quite moved away from my old tabletop-archeology desk when I’d moved to my new office-carnage desk in the design cube) or at home ( Read more... )