There's nothing quite like a cold to make me feel that autumn and its attendant aura of stately decline have finally arrived.  Not that there's anything stately about the drifts of used tissues that accumulate around me in my current state, or the way I slouch around the apartment in search of juice or soup or decongestants, more often than not ( Read more... )

I've been feeling nostalgic for Las Vegas lately, maybe because of the novel I'm editing, much of which takes place in a version of the city, maybe just because I haven't been in a few years ( Read more... )

So, it's April now, which is to say early summer in New Orleans.  It's 85 and humid here, with little prospect of significant cooling for the next five or six months, and I am once again pleased to have selected an apartment primarily on the basis of its insulation.  R and I only wish it kept out sound as well as it keeps out heat, what with our ( Read more... )

So we've been in New Orleans for about a month now, and I have to say that whoever decided to call this place The Big Easy was sadly mistaken.  It is more like The Big Inconvenient, or possibly The Big Hassle.  The whole experience of moving here and trying to get set up with an apartment and furniture and utilities and so on was much less like ( Read more... )

If anyone is still reading this, hi.  It's been a while, I know, and I offer no guarantees that this blog is not still slinking slowly into the night.  But I thought, upon the eve of another move and another road trip, I'd send a few lines bobbing off onto the interwebian sea.  Mr. B and I have spent the last few seasons in a little house in the ( Read more... )

After half a year of mixed feelings, it took all of about two days to get used to unemployment. Now it’s been a month spent moving and another month driving - the longest trip across the country I’ve made, both in terms of distance and time. Here’s the abbreviated version:

New York: so many kinds of deliciousness that I’m allergic to
New Jersey: ( Read more... )

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving my job of the last couple of years (voluntarily, yes, even given the economy). So this is one of those “about to jump into the unknown” moments, and I find myself fixating on the close-out details of my life in LA (health insurance applications and moving logistics and all that), no doubt as a way to avoid thinking too ( Read more... )

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a very pretty document, which in its sixty year history has had almost no discernable effect on either governmental policies or individual lives. In 1948 it was aspirational; today it is mostly a list of what we as a species have failed to guarantee for ourselves and one another. Nonetheless, it is ( Read more... )

Transcribed from yesterday's journal:

It's late Sunday morning in Portland, and I sit on the bed in my brother and sister-in-law's guest room, on yet another of the weekend jaunts that have become my habit of late.  Outside, the trees are clothed in blossoms, and the spring sun shines with generous warmth when it can snatch a path through the ( Read more... )

The weather report said a major snowstorm was going to hit Sequoia National Park late afternoon on the twenty-fourth.  Ok, Mom and I said to ourselves, we’ll just leave early and get to our hotel before then.  We can spend a day inside reading books and wait out the storm, and then explore our very own winter wonderland on snowshoes and skis.  It ( Read more... )