Diane the Wild Wanderer
It's a small world. Live large.My own personal zombie story: TV, eh? comes back to life
I've had a couple of conversations lately about the value of blogging, which is kind of hilarious given how little of it I've done lately. I just told a recent graduate in an information interview that blogging was a great way to hone her writing, explore what she's...
We Have Liftoff: Watching the Earth Breathe from Space
T-46 seconds. We could hear the anticipation in the voices crackling over the loudspeaker broadcasting from the control room: a calm voice with its rapid-fire listing of each system, and before the last syllable ended a new eager voice would chime in with “go”. All...
My bud the SPUD
It's not that grocery shopping is so hard, it's just that you have to keep doing it. Especially when you run out of cat food. I'd generally avoid the big grocery shop which meant frequently stopping at Safeway on the way home from work, hungry for dinner, unwise...
Wanderlust and cosmic dust
"It is not so much a matter of traveling as of getting away; which of us has not some pain to dull, or some yoke to cast off?" - George Sand, Winter in Majorca That's the epigraph in the book I just started, The Vacationers by Emma Straub, the book I coincidentally...
Uncool before it was cool
I saw a woman wearing this on a t-shirt today and it made me laugh ... and reflect on my relationship with the word "cool." I'm so uncool I use cool more frequently than any grown woman should to express admiration. If you followed me for a week and wrote down...
Cold War and Peace
What might save us, me, and you Is if the Russians love their children too -- Russians by Sting, 1985 Oh shut up Sting. I know, it was a rhetorical rather than literal "what if," but even 15 year old me, fearing the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction, thought it...
All the Single (Parent) Ladies (and Gentlemen)
I know what my friends mean when they say they're a single parent while their spouse is out of town. Everyone knows what they mean. Obviously logistics and stresses are increased without the usual in-home support of the spouse, and a two-parent household is more...
Embracing my Hubble life
In my job and in some of my freelance assignments I'm often in the position of interviewing experts on subjects in which I have little to no expertise, to put it mildly. Interviewing an electrical engineer a few years ago, I hit on what's become my standard "charming"...
Health and humanism
There are a lot of labels out there on which I could hang my belief system, but let's call it humanism. Who can argue with a human being, being a humanist? Richard Dawkins has ruined atheist for some of us, skeptic feels like an anti-something rather than a...