The subject line, which I typed into this window two days ago, is from Raymond Carver's "Looking for Work." It incurred a sudden jones for pan-fried fish, which I hadn't planned on cooking, and the canned tuna in the pantry wasn't going to address that, nor the tofu-fish cakes in the freezer, and moaning about bar-crowding putzes wasn't going to ( Read more... )

Today's subject line comes from this weekend's Live from Here broadcast, in a reading by Lulu Miller, I think around 1 hour and 40 minutes in.

Today's photo is of a jar full of stars -- a birthday gift recently delivered to me:

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[Today's subject line quotes Stanislaw Jerzy Lee. I forget where I first encountered it.]

A morsel of lagniappe: working at home all day means I get to see these tiny starry flowers when they are open. They close up as night falls, which means I'd previously seen them only as buds.


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Sometimes the urge to keep going wins out. Sowing green beans was on this week's list, and there was a pot's worth of outdoor mix left in the bag, so. Before that, I'd cleaned up and around the rose bushes, added topsoil to the mint patch, accidentally harvested some wild chives, and transplanted more of the Prairie Fire seedlings ( Read more... )

I rarely enlist the BYM on my projects, in part because of hereditary pigheadedness on both sides and in part because I want my asks to carry sufficient weight (like updating our wills and directives *sigh*), but could I resist the #MuseumFromHome excuse to re-create Giovanni Bologna's River God? Of course not -- especially since after (very ( Read more... )

Today was an ideal day for yardwork: the ground still damp from recent rain, but sunny much of the afternoon, with a few stray drops of rain. The temperature was above 80 F when I went out. The bees and wasps were busy among my two surviving rosebushes, but I still managed to cut away as much of the dead and diseased bits as I could. The neighbor ( Read more... )

Today's subject line is from Rick Bragg's essay about Atlanta traffic in the May 2018 issue of Southern Living, which also talks about blood pressure as a metric for measuring gridlock: "I think this city has sent more truck drivers to the cardiologist than Little Debbie ( Read more... )

It's rarely a good sign when I'm quoting Wordsworth, since I do not care for him or his verse, and that's all I'm going to say here about world affairs ( Read more... )

Hello to y'all and to 2020. Today's subject line refers to the Great Sardine and Maple Leaf Drop, a fine collaboration between Canada and the United States mentioned in a public radio roundup of Things Dropped yesterday ( Read more... )

What greeted me when I got home today:


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