For university students to indulge the knee-jerk reaction, “This concept or idea offends me, I don’t like this, so take it away,” is not progressive or adventurous. It’s weak, solipsistic. It’s treating a vital endeavor as equal to the ‘Like’ button on Facebook. In all disciplines students should grow to understand what they don’t like … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Blog
Moments of Truth
Books. How can you have too many books? So many minds and ideas, stories told, wonder shared. Someone asked me the other day how I wanted to write, so I said, “…like Max Brand mixed with Dickens, Jane Austen with Robert Parker, T.E. Lawrence and some Gerald Durrell.” In other words the only way I … Continue reading →
Posted in: Blog
The Suitcases
They sent her overseas to save her life. A small-boned young woman just beginning her twenties, hair fashionably short in the American style swinging against her strong jaw, her black eyes proud and watchful, ranging over the seething common crowd of Chinese at the dock. She moved, flanked by the black and white of two … Continue reading →
Posted in: Blog, family history, history
What the choices are…
Warning– this is a post that includes cleaning, garbage, purity, diapers and a rant. It’s not about our trip to Ramsey Canyon in Arizona and what we saw there… I will get to that after the clean up. We hosted our Earth Sciences Department party yesterday and about seventy people attended. We prepared and cooked … Continue reading →
The Sequel to All for Pie
Time has passed and we are harvesting the concord grapes. My little rat proofs have worked. If you try it, I have a couple of observations. One, simply having these strange objects in the vines will decrease rat activity. It won’t stop the little brats, but there will be less damage. Two, a trick I learned … Continue reading →
Rats!
I am done with these rats. Traps do not suffice, poison feels unethical and gives a horrible death, the tricks of radios and deterrents are fantasies. Plus, I refuse to have an outdoors cat because of traffic, coyotes, parasites, and the mass slaughter of birds and my delightful lizards. But these rats are eating … Continue reading →
Portrait
I’m posting this one because I came across it in the pursuit of something quite different in my files. However, it illustrates what I think portraits should do– depict body language more than features, and give a sense of context. Here are three people I know well, exploring the land and the plants they love. … Continue reading →
after a long pause
I have much to catch up on. This summer has seen changes for us, and the one that affected my creativity most, was the death of my cat– black, furry Blot, as he was called in one of my stories. Unexpectedly it turned out he possessed the genes for a polycystic liver growth that had been … Continue reading →
