This is another year I'm glad to see behind me ( Read more... )

Jimmy Carter was the first President who really made an impression on me.

Yes, my first political memories were the Watergate hearings, but mostly because they kept me from watching Captain Kangaroo. I had very little understanding of what was going on, and decades later I read a number of histories of the Watergate scandal in order to get a sense ( Read more... )

There's a new vignette challenge at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is from the Grissom timeline, as Elaine Woods reflects upon her childhood

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge over at her Dreamwidth blog. My effort looks superficially mundane, but I think it's actually from the Chaffee Artilect 'verse, given the reference to virtual reality gamingThere's ( Read more... )

Today we got our first snow of the season. I woke up to a back yard covered in fluffy whiteness, and more coming down ( Read more... )

It's that book you read as a kid and loved, but you're vague on the title and the author's name went right by you. You remember it had a red cover, and exactly where it was in the school library of an elementary school that has been closed for a couple of decades, and a good bit of the plot. And no, you're pretty sure it wasn't the well-known book ( Read more... )

Endings are always sad, even when you know they're coming ( Read more... )

I was in high school when the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut happened. I still remember the shock, the horror- and the frustration that there was no one to punish for this, just shadowy terrorist organizations that disappeared into the population after striking, as if daring us to make mass reprisals ( Read more... )

Twenty-two years ago today, terrorists hijacked four airliners and used them as cruise missiles, flying one each into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. The destination of the fourth is unknown, since a group of brave passengers fought back, albeit at the cost of their lives, taking the plane down in an ( Read more... )

Yesterday we went to the family reunion on my dad's side. This year it was so small that we didn't even have the business meeting afterward, or the door prize drawings that we used to have. Other than two grandchildren one of the older cousins was babysitting, my brothers and I were probably the youngest people in attendance (and even my brothers ( Read more... )

Yesterday I got my fall peas planted. Today I picked beans, and was noticing almost no blossoms anywhere ( Read more... )