- Circumstantial soup

I wasn’t intending to buy baby bok choy.  In fact, I had never bought the leafy green before.
But it caught my eye as I strolled the produce display, looking for a red pepper, in my recently re-arranged supermarket. I saw it and my brain leaped to the idea of “Soup!”
When I got home and unloaded [...]

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- Cheap shoes

To readers who have some cheap, black shoes in their house in need of sprucing up for the Thanksgiving concert at school, I recommend black nail polish (bought for Halloween) as the perfect fix.

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- Daily wonders

Some of Tuesday’s unconnected moments:
A woman, riding her bicycle and standing up on the pedals, was smiling and crying, too.
Only one wing, still attached to the body, of a monarch butterfly rested on the sidewalk.  Uncrushed, it seemed fresh and recently alive.  Where was the other wing?
There were figure skates on the floor in someone’s [...]

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- Hesitation

I went out to do errands. I brought Jimmy’s Nikon (very sharp, with a telephoto lens), because there’s a store sign I pass all the time that’s awkward in a provocative way. I meant to take a picture of the words; I forgot.
I did, however, see something else amazing: a blue VW bug [...]

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- (Mis)reading

Glancing at the CNN headlines this morning, I saw one — “Clinton Crushes Obama” — and experienced this instant, non-processed thought: Oh, what a turn of events! Hillary is falling for Barack’s charm, too.
Perhaps I have been spending too much time in the company of teens and pre-teens, and reading their magazines and FB wall [...]

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- Desperate measures

This week Eli was sick with a cold. On Thursday, one of my tutors apologized for bringing her sickness to work. On Friday, one of my colleagues brought along her obviously sick child to a staff meeting.
Such occurrences don’t bother me. I figure that my persistent exposure to germs are an occupational [...]

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- Fire starters

When my sister Sally and I were children, we lit the woods behind our house on fire. This is a true story, one I have said out loud many times yet never written down.
I was about 10 years old then, and my friend Doreen and I had been lighting little fires in the woods for [...]

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- Cabin fever

Restlessness — a lot of energy packed into a small container (you, your house) — requires an outlet. There are negative ones: complaining, watching reruns of American’s Most Smartest Model, picking at and eating dried-out candy off the gingerbread house. (Yeah, been there.) There are positive outlets, too: cleaning closets, walking around the [...]

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- Say “yes”

This was not my idea. When Grace set it up yesterday, and then asked, I almost said, “No” or “That’s for Halloween.” Fortunately, that switch clicked off before I fully activated the negative response.
I said, “Yes.”

We all did.
In 2008, let’s all keep protesting the war, interrogating the candidates’ messages, and resisting sloth.
Don’t forget, though, to [...]

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- Frustration flowers

After frustrating telephone encounters with three people — spouse, friend, and contractor — I had a lot of energy looking for an outlet.
“I need some plants.” No premeditating, that’s what it came to.
So I went to our local nursery, Allandale Farm. Without much of a strategy, I grabbed several lantana, because I know [...]

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