A catalog of the stuff in my apartment
Around this time last year, I followed the 6-week self-improvement program laid out in a book called The Listening Path by Julia Cameron. The goal was to become a better listener. A key part of the regimen involved writing three stream-of-consciousness pages in longhand immediately upon waking each morning. And I mean immediately. You were […]
I went to the beach only a couple times this summer. During my most recent day out on the sand, there was no umbrella for me to cower under, so to protect my pasty skin from harmful UV rays, I slathered on extra sunscreen, kept my shirt on, and used my towel as a blanket […]
At a Pride party I attended last month, somebody I had just met asked me if I was gay. “Can’t you tell?” I said. “Sometimes with nerds it’s hard to tell,” he said. I live for that kind of remark because I can’t wait to repeat it. My idea of the perfect material for a […]
I’ve devised a new three-part daily wellness program to stay reasonably active and reasonably fit. I’ve named the three parts as follows: the Morning Louie, the Midday Meander, and the Evening Constitutional. The last two are just walks. I take a 20-minute stroll around lunchtime and a 40-minute amble in the evening, for a daily […]
Over the last decade, a bunch of states, including three of the four where I have been a resident—my home state of Arkansas as well as Illinois and Massachusetts—have enacted laws requiring public schools to teach students cursive. (The fourth Zac-affiliated state is New York, which has no such requirement.) In the case of Arkansas, […]
My husband, Frank, has a bulky blue cooler he keeps around in case we go on any outings that require cold beverages. Beach days, picnics, that sort of thing. When we lived in New York City I was a strong advocate for getting rid of the cooler because it took up precious closet space that […]
The front of the holiday card my husband, Frank, and I sent out this year features a photo of us in front of some evergreens. The location where the image was captured is just outside of our apartment building. Full disclosure: The boughs over my head were digitally enhanced to appear fuller than they did […]
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. Massachusetts driver’s license: Makes known my full name, date of birth, address, height (5’10”), eye color (brown), need for corrective lenses, and intention to donate my organs after death. Photo […]
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 […]
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 […]
