Off and on for a couple of years, we’ve raised monarch butterflies from eggs to first flight. It’s really cool to see. There’s something satisfying and heartwarming about seeing a monarch that you raised from a tiny egg finally crawl out of its chrysalis, dry out its wings and fly away. We just got some…
A couple of Christmases back I received a little set of photo lenses that clip onto my cell phone, and while I haven’t used them a ton–a fisheye lens, while cool in its own wonky way, isn’t an everyday kind of photo accessory for me–a recent rainy day offered a great opportunity to give the…
June was no less busy for the household than previous isolation months had been, and in some ways was even more busy. On top of the usual busyness of taking care of household, shopping and cooking duties (while ensuring that my wife had the time and space needed for all her online teaching, and my…
I mentioned recently that I was entering the NYC Midnight Microfiction contest, wherein writers have to write no more than 100 words for a story the organization assigns rand0mized genres, actions, and single words for. Well, the results came in, and I was in the top 20 of my group, so advance to round 2….
There may be no genre I enjoy as much, but can be so disappointed by, as science fiction. Any genre has its good and bad, of course, but I find the best science fiction of certain stripes really strikes a chord with me–Blade Runner is my favourite movie–while the worst of it is particularly bad….
The Family Edition of Trivial Pursuit is effectively the Junior version of the original game: Here, as you roll the die to move around the spoked wheel of the board, every correct question–broken down into the same original coloured categories of Science & Nature, Entertainment, Sports & Leisure, etc.–gets you a coveted coloured pie wedge….
I’d heard the name Josh Gondelman for years off and on, but particularly recently on various comedy podcasts I started seeking out as some levity to working in a news environment where I hear close to four hours of (almost entirely negative, often demoralizing) news a day. And lately I’ve heard his name more often,…
If there’s one thing that this pandemic isolation has done, it’s made people want to bake. And I don’t mean just in a kind of idle way, but it seems people are baking their asses off. The first thing that went to the hording mobs, as we all know, was toilet paper. Don’t get me…
As I’m having some sporadic issues uploading photos–and honestly it’s probably close to as fast for me to just type this up anyway–I’m trying a new approach with this list and writing it out here instead of posting a photo of my phone’s screen shot that takes a few steps to get onto here anyway….
I’ve written previously about the importance, as I’ve been reminding myself, of finishing creative projects I start. There are times that it’s easy. (Hello, handful of haiku about some inspiring or topical experiences.) And there are times when it just isn’t going to happen, at least not in that form not now. (Hello, first novel…