October 15, 2022

Asteroids

A few weeks ago we watched NASA crash a spacecraft into a small asteroid named Dimorphos that is orbiting a larger asteroid. The best part was that it was on purpose. The project, appropriately named Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART, is an attempt to secure knowledge and data should a “killer” asteroid ever be headed straight toward Earth. The idea is to change the trajectory of an asteroid, but to not hurt it in any way except for maybe leaving a weensy crater where the projectile—in this case a vending-maching sized craft—crashes. Sorry for the scar, Dimorphos.

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August 20, 2022

My Major Award

My husband and I are competitive with each other, to say the least. We trash talk and we swagger when we win. I won’t play him in pool, ping pong, or pickleball, mainly because he has perfected the art of “putting a little English on it” and I have yet to crack the code on how to defend against that. He refuses to play Wii Fencing with me, intimidated by my “shock and awe” tactics which consist entirely of becoming the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes cartoon lore. We’ve raced cars, go-carts, and remote-control vehicles. He out-runs me and I out-yoga him. He usually beats me on the mini-golf greens, but I’ve improved my game in the past few years and have won a few times. (Turns out that when I’ve had a few glasses before and during putt-putt, I stop caring, relax, and turn into Tiger Freakin’ Woods. Ironic, no?) Competition is an ongoing thing in our house. Our child has been drawn in, competing regularly with her father in rock-paper-scissors with the defeated having to hear “You went down in a blaze of glory” upon their loss. Because RPS, as we all know, is absolutely filled with glory.

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August 16, 2022

Happy Birthday to Me

This is the first day of the last year of my 40s and one of my birthday gifts is being given time to write. Which is great because that doesn’t always happen but which I also suspect was given with ulterior motives: Zoe has homework and M wanted to leisurely peruse eBay in search of vintage beer lights for the bar. Well, no gift is selfless, so I shall take this in the spirit with which it was intended.

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February 4, 2022

Snow Storm Shopping

The forecast was looking super nasty on Tuesday and we thought there was a decent chance we’d be snowed in Wednesday and Thursday, and possibly even Friday. Still at work, I realized that although we had plenty of food from my shopping trip the weekend before (my type-A meal planning routine was paying off), we didn’t have enough bread for sandwiches. This might be a problem since now all three of us were going to be lunching at home. Zoe and I had also attacked the bagels pretty hard and our sleeve of six was already down to two. Okay, bread and bagels. The bread might be a little hard to come by on a last-minute trip to the grocery store with a snow storm looming, but I was confident I could score some bagels. I drove straight from work to the grocery store, along with the rest of St. Louis.

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January 18, 2022

Blunt Book Review: Into Thin Air

I’m trying a new thing here: book reviews. Yeah, I know you can read all kinds of actual book reviews by actual book reviewers and critics in the New York Times and on Goodreads, but, get this: I’m not necessarily reviewing new books. No, no, friends. I’ll review whatever I happen to be reading, which could mean something newer or a work published decades ago. Could be fiction or non-fiction or short-story or science fiction. Whatever. It’s all fair game. I’m an eclectic reader and this is how I roll. 

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January 1, 2022

2022 Comes With…Teepees?

Happy New Year, friends! Kicking off 2022 with lots of good intentions for this next trip around the sun. My morning meditation told me I have to be open to new possibilities and to new people but my default position is to sit on my couch and not move so we’ll see how that goes. I did step way out of my comfort zone and sign up for a spring writers retreat in Cabo where I’ll stay in a teepee. Granted, it’s billed as a “luxury teepee” and comes with a king-size bed and a bathroom, so it’s closer to a conical hotel room than an actual teepee. It looks like a teepee on the outside, though, so let’s just stick with that.

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