Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States, and, above all, I hope that if you’re reading this and you’re eligible, you’ll take the time to vote. It is, as I’m fond of saying, the very least you can do as a citizen. Voting for those who represent you in government is, after all, your […]

Still hectic and all around here, and Frankenstorm’s Monsoon hasn’t been helping matters. However, I can report with some relief that although there’s been some inconvenience, my little corner of the Mid-Atlantic coast seems to have dodged the worst of Sandy’s hopeless devotion. The power even stayed on all last night, which, given past experience, […]

This week I joined a “guitar ensemble”. It’s a short-term commitment, with a performance of a couple of instrumental pieces coming up in a couple of weeks. If this experiment is a success, there will likely be more performances down the road. It’s all very low pressure, and designed for players of all levels; it’s […]

I was saddened this morning to hear that our family’s feline elder statesman, Shamokin (seen above with his representative curmudgeonly expression) passed quietly last night, asleep on his favorite chair. He came into our family as a small kitten, whose eyes took up roughly 80 percent of his head, shortly after we adopted Calypso, and […]

As a geek and general fan of science-ey and space-ey things, I understand the significance of Neil Armstrong’s passing this weekend. The first man who walked on the Moon; the man who did that big momentous thing so seemingly effortlessly (other than managing to miss an “A” in his big moment in the spotlight, anyway); […]

A bit of a stretch to come up with a clever factoid to comemmorate thirty-eight orbits around the sun, but the internet is nothing if not bountiful: The number 38 was especially prominent in Norse mythology. The number was said to represent unnatural bravery, characteristic of the legendary heroes of Norse sagas. Most legendary sagas […]

excuse me if this gets a little personal… It was fourteen years ago today that we had one epic house party celebrating the fact that earlier that day, we got up in front of a bunch of people and said that we’d continue down the path of life together from now on. I mean, we’d […]

Today I overheard the word “wheelbarrow” as I passed a couple of people in conversation in the office hallway. For reasons unknown to us all, encountering this word stimulated a certain combination of neurons to fire in my brain, which caused me to recall the day twenty-odd years ago when I first encountered the poem […]

Rather than ride my usual NoVA trails this afternoon after work, I tried someplace new. Turns out there’s a small National Park just a short drive up the road from my office neighborhood, Great Falls Park in lovely McLean, VA. It’s situated along the Potomac River as it “builds up speed and force as it […]

I’ve always (and by “always” I mean “since I bothered to actually think about it”) been rather annoyed by the “everybody knows that” assumption that people grow more conservative as they get older. You know the words by now – sing along if you feel like it (this is allegedly Churchill’s version): Anyone who isn’t […]