Zuckerberg, what have you done? I am almost exclusively Facebook now. I miss those long, rambling posts and the people who actually read them. Going through a rough patch right now and wish I had some devoted readers. But I haven't kept up my end of the bargain. Sorry to lose you, LJ. I'll try to do better.

For years, I laughed at the senior citizens who stormed the grocery stores before a snowstorm. "Good grief," I thought, "the snow plows will be out and we'll all be driving in a day or two. How much milk could you possibly need ( Read more... )

On the twelfth day of Christmas, ( Read more... )

Natty is proving to be just what the doctor ordered. I worried that getting a cat who looked so much like Iggy might be upsetting, but it has turned out to be the opposite. He has his own personality, and though he shares some of Iggy's mischievous and tender qualities, he is carving his own special place in the household. It's taking Stewart and ( Read more... )

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The animal shelter where I volunteer euthanized two cats this week whom they diagnosed "shelter depressed." These were physically healthy cats who were deemed "unadoptable" because they had been at the shelter for some time without any adoption interest, were shy with people, and presented some difficulty to the staff when it came to administering ( Read more... )

School starts today without me. This is only the second time since 1957 that I haven't been in a classroom full-time in September. The other time was in 1974, right after I graduated college and did not yet have a full-time teaching job. Can you spell ( Read more... )

"A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove . . . . but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child ( Read more... )

Tonight I went to an adjunct faculty meeting at the college where I will still be teaching in the fall. It was strange (part good, part bad) to feel that I am still employed somewhere. Sometime in the next few weeks, I will be responsible for making a new syllabus that reflects the new text that I have yet to read. And in September, I will be ( Read more... )

Yesterday in the 93 degree heat, I started building a wall around one of my flower beds. When I had my pavers installed last summer, Chris built a little garden wall around the back beds, then deposited the rest of the bricks from the old sidewalk behind my shed. I used some of them to make this wall. I think I need to extend it a bit, but it was ( Read more... )