It is November 26th, which means, in my experience, steel-grey skies and a damp cold. Winter clamps down on Pittsburgh in November and won’t loosen its grip until mid-March at the earliest. The closets of my childhood home have, I am sure, already undergone the necessary exchange: all signs of summer and short-sleeves are replaced […]
Read moreI just spent the last half hour or so catching up on my blog-reading. It feels as though it’s been a long time since I spent time reading blogs. It seems a long time since I spent time reading anything at all—anything that wasn’t my students’ essays or my students’ journals or my students’ vocabulary […]
Read moreThis bumper sticker on a friend’s car: Lottery: a tax on people who aren’t very good at math.
Read moreAn English professor in college once commented that it seems there is always a day, every autumn, when the leaves just fall. It’s not that none fall before that day and none after, but it does seem that, on one day, many and many and many of them fall, so that the world looks Very […]
Read moreBill was in the grocery store with Emma Grace and a family friend. And although it is Only November, there he was, the Christmas elf: Santa Claus himself. Said our friend to Emma Grace: And Emma, what do you think of Santa Claus? To which Emma Grace replied, without hesitation: Oh, he’s dead. He died […]
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They decided—when was it?—that they wanted to be characters from Redwall, a delightful series of adventure novels by Brian Jacques, books that are peopled by a cross between Tolkein’s Middle Earth warriors and Lewis’s talking animals. Yes, it was sometime in late summer, perhaps, that William and Everett and their friends Andrew and Peter decided […]
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when you shave your head regularly, anyway. So here’s Bill and his office-mate. They are Blue Men, of which there are usually three. But you can’t get just anyone to cover his Entire Head in blue make-up (yes, they make that) and go to work like that. Not everyone will do that. But I really […]
Read moreIt’s not that I watch a lot of television (Who Has Time?), but Bill and I are definitely into Studio 60, a new show that is only about four episodes old and is, apparently, at risk of being cut. Just our luck. But when we are watching that, we often see ads for ER, a […]
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Here it is: my first school picture in a thousand years. Okay, no. My first school picture since my senior year of college, a photo I only vaguely remember having taken and which I never saw again except for maybe in the pages of the yearbook I didn’t buy. I don’t know why I didn’t […]
Read moreSo Bill thinks Q-tips are dangerous. You know: Q-tips. Or cotton swabs. Or whatever they call them. Yes, he believes them to be dangerous. He doesn’t like me to use them in the children’s ears. “They can cause real damage,” he says. “You shouldn’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear,” he says. […]
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