A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
What do the contents of a person’s wallet reveal about its owner? Let’s take a look inside my own billfold and see what we find. I don’t have any photos or other sentimental keepsakes in my wallet. As far as I recall, I have never felt the need to hold such items on my person […]
This summer I had an issue with my gums. They felt irritated in this one spot in the upper left quadrant of my mouth. I suspected a red chili flake had somehow gotten lodged up there. I went to my dentist about the matter, and he gave me a prescription for a terrible-tasting mouthwash. I […]
I’ve had my current cell phone ever since I had to replace the previous one because I dropped it into the ocean while trying to take a picture of a bear. This happened in British Columbia. I’m going to go ahead and assume bear encounters top the list of reasons cell phones get lost or […]
This blog turned 4 years old on August 6. Tradition dictates that I devote the annual anniversary post to the Virgilian lottery, a form of soothsaying where you open Virgil’s works at random and whatever passage you land on tells your fortune. I consulted the lottery, using my copy of Robert Fagles’s 2006 translation of […]
Turns out I was incorrect a month ago when I wrote that my dog, Lucy, hadn’t yet reached the final stages of her heart disease. She died on Wednesday, July 5, around 8:30am. It so happened that she was scheduled to get her annual leptospirosis vaccination later that day. But in the morning she began […]
¡Hola! ¿Qué tal? Este es mi libro de español. Estoy aprendiendo español en el Centro de Educación de Adultos de Cambridge. Quiero aprender español porque mi esposo es puertorriqueño, y cuando él está enojado conmigo, yo quiero comprender lo que está diciendo. (“Por favor, profesora, ¿qué significa ‘pendejo sucio’?”) Me gusta mucho mi clase de […]
My dog, Lucy, who turned 13 last month, takes two daily medications now—one for her skin allergy, the other for heart disease. The heart one is new. She had an echocardiogram a few weeks ago and the vet determined that the dog’s cardiac condition has worsened since the last check. I don’t think we’ve reached […]
When Nordstrom killed off Trunk Club last year, they sent me a gift basket to thank me for being a loyal customer and, presumably, to nudge me toward shifting my business to whatever personal-shopping service the company had devised as a replacement. I had been a member of Trunk Club since 2015, which meant that […]
One of my sisters is big on tinctures and such. Mention so much as a tickle in your throat and before you know it she’s ordering you to open your mouth so she can squirt some nasty drops of who-knows-what in there. That happened to me last year when I was home for a visit […]
When I was a kid, my parents put up a big bulletin board on one of the walls in my bedroom. It was probably 5 feet wide and 3 feet tall. Or maybe 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall? The thing was huge. I don’t know what prompted this design choice, but I went […]
Indirect Objects 