"I want a cheeseburger from your mooooom."

How is it that the end of a temporary tax cut is now equated with a new tax (re: "taxing the rich")? I charge you $5 for a sandwich. I say, hey, you're capable of buying a lot of sandwiches, I'm only going to charge you $4 to motivate you to come to my deli more often. You don't come to my deli more often, you just pocket the extra $1 because you ( Read more... )

I finally put my finger on what's been bugging me about living in Shipshewana, a city so rural that it should be brimming with ways to experience nature. It's all closed off! There are no parks or trails here, just fields and small forests belonging to land owners. I can ride along the roads and look, but I can't hike anywhere.

I've been a lot more visible in classrooms this school year because I no longer have the luxury of waiting for a teacher to finish speaking or for the class to leave before entering. There's just too much work to do. A funny side-effect is that kids are recognizing me everywhere. In the Walmart parking lot in Sturgis (about 30 miles from where I ( Read more... )

Reading Murakami always leaves me with a slowly-receding sense of melancholy. He often brings up the point that we go through life under the assumption that it will continue as it always has, even though the future is highly uncertain. His characters undergo catastrophic, transformative changes in some ways and yet remain unchanged in others. I ( Read more... )

Rainer Maria Rilke - Autumn Day
(a combination of three translations and mine)Lord: it is time. The summer was immense ( Read more... )

I ride my bike so often that sooner or later it's inevitable that I'll be chased by a dog. People around here are bad about leashing their dogs if they're outside with them. The other day I was riding my bike down a side street and a small white dog broke away from its nightgowned and slippered owner to chase me ( Read more... )

As of today, I've been officially working with the same employer for two years. Longevity!

These days, most of my words are written in letters to other people. A lot of the things I write to them I'd normally be writing here, or they're thoughts that flicker through my mind on a fairly regular basis but that are too fleeting (or too common) to warrant sitting down and transcribing them just for my own benefit. Sometimes my views only ( Read more... )

Fridays are half-days at work this summer, so I used the second half of my day to visit places in Shipshewana that are only open Monday through Friday during the daytime. I went to the post office to ship a package and to pick one up, to the Bread Box Bakery for a Bread Box Club sandwich, an apple, and a pickle, and then to the Garden Cafe across ( Read more... )