being not doing

All of a sudden, this past week, flowers are popping up all over the place: from the ground, on trees, and all over previously skeletal shrubs. We didn’t see our neighborhood at this time last year; the major tree flowering fell in between our first visit to the house and when we moved in […]

I finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, and promptly followed it with a viewing of Delicatessen. Conclusion: I will never eat meat again (and most certainly not in a dystopian Parisian wasteland, thankyouverymuch).
Ok, so, no, it wasn’t that simple. To start, I have made that vow before: I stopped eating meat […]

The current exhibition at the East Gallery is a selection of Jasper Johns paintings, among them some of the most well-known of his works (e.g. the paintings with the names of colors painted in colors other than those which they signify). I went a few weeks ago with a friend, and will return at […]

Tonight I made a delicious dinner in my our new skillet, to celebrate…my our new skillet arriving! Also spring arriving, but mostly the new pan.
The saga of the demise of my nonstick pots has been somewhat protracted, with one of them going a couple of years ago and the others starting to […]

A couple of weeks ago, my largest jade plant took a tumble off the windowsill. It had been getting imbalanced, I just hadn’t realized quite how much. I’d rotated the pot to help it even out, but the weight on one side was great enough to bring the whole thing down. With […]

Family Tree is the only thing I’ve read by Barbara Delinksy. It caught my eye at the bookshop, and I borrowed it to have something to read on the bus. I didn’t expect much from it, and it delivered. The plot is one that has been cropping up in a lot of […]

Earlier this week, I added a bird to my lifelist: the Lesser Scaup. I saw a group of them bobbing in the Tidal Basin, looking knackered (quite frankly). There didn’t seem to be any hens; I had initially thought that the slightly dingier ones were hens, but Peterson’s clarified that they are distinctly […]

Today was the first really sunny and clear day of spring, and we took the day off to visit Annapolis. My partner had never been downtown, so we had fun walking around and reading the plaques on houses. Besides the food — of course, the best fish and chips I’ve had in years […]

The Big Year, by Mark Obasmick, is my favorite book of those I’ve read so far this year. It was wonderful. I had no idea when I picked it up that it was going to be so rich, make me laugh so much, or push all kinds of achievement-anxiety buttons. What writing! […]

In the last day, I have gained a greater appreciation for those little boxes that tell you not only which day to take your pills, but what time of day as well.
This week I finally received my January blood work from my endocrinologist’s office, and confirmed that my blood counts remained at last year’s low […]