The other day, I walked past a garden alongside a building. There was a beautiful, single yellow iris blooming against the wall, but barely visible because there was a giant bush in front of it. This seemed tragic to me. Here, this gorgeous flower is baring itself to the world, but hardly anyone will see […]
The other day, our dog Maude was walking around with a rawhide clenched in her teeth. She walked over to her water bowl, and clearly wanted a drink, but was unwilling to drop the rawhide to get the drink. She was holding on to it out of fear of losing it; a fear that comes […]
I recently switched my composting to a tumbler, from an open pile. The old open pile is mostly decayed, and pretty tall. In the fall, we couldn’t keep up with the volume of potatoes we’d gotten from our farm share, so some of them got tossed and left for dead. Or so we thought. Recently, […]
Near my neighborhood, I often used to see a man pushing an ice cream cart with the word “Zacatecas” painted on the side. I just assumed that “Zacatecas” is Spanish for “ice cream.” One day, I was having ice cream with a friend and his father. His father only speaks Spanish, so I excitedly pointed […]
When I was in high school, all the bad-ass boys drove Mustangs. My brother called them “bellybutton cars” because, like bellybuttons, everyone seemed to have one. Of course, looking back, only certain heavy metal fans with mullets really had them at the time, but that’s not the point. My real point is to describe a […]
When I was in college, I loved jogging. I was like Forrest Gump; running and running and running. It got to where people recognized me, and asked if they could run with me, and most of the time, I said yes. Now, I was not a fast runner, but I could run very long distances. […]
Spring has a way of sneaking up on me every year. Months go by without any green, and then all of a sudden, little plants are shooting up everywhere I look. The earliest flowers have already been blooming for weeks: forsythia, daffodils, crocuses. It is almost past time to get the early vegetable seeds in […]
Most people have had this happen: you wake up from a deep sleep and you can’t feel your arm. You might not even be able to find it at first- maybe it is tucked behind your head, or under your back. So, you take the sleeping arm into your waking hand, and put it where […]
If mice have been ensconced in your home for a while, they will become very resistant to the idea of any sort of change, especially if they have had unlimited access to food, such as that left out for your pet. As you remove food sources and set traps, the mouse population goes down. The […]
Mice easily enter a house that has openings, warmth, and easy access to food. Basically, they will come in as far as you let them, and take whatever you leave out for them, whether it is nesting material or food. To keep them out, you have to seal the cracks to the outside, and keep […]