I am currently “between jobs.” Not unexpectedly, like last time – this time I gave a month’s notice, which despite a week’s vacation in beautiful Victoria, British Col…

My first cruise with my parents was a family affair, celebrating my oldest nibling’s birthday at the age when they were tall enough for most rides at Disney World. This was not my parents&#82…

My love of travel came from both parents. When we were young – before our first visit to Guatemala – we would take cross country road trips in our full size van, sometimes with a mattre…

Since we’ve asked people to share memories of my parents, I’ve been thinking about what I would share if asked for the same thing. Here’s a spattering of items about each of them.…

At the beginning of the month, I mentioned playing yarn chicken with multiple crochet projects, including a historical temperature blanket project. Umm… that blanket was for my mother. And wa…

Sarah (Edelson) Rodgers, age 79, passed away in Guatemala after a brief illness including anemia, fluid in the lungs, and, unshockingly (to anybody who believes in science), extensive scarring in h…

By a combination of chance and design, we have a wide assortment of yellow flowers spread across our yard this season, and that’s in addition to the bison bur flowers I mentioned recently. Pu…

If you’re unfamiliar with the game of “chicken,” there’s a Wikipedia page about it. The short version is two cars drive towards each other, and whoever swerves first –…

Back in April, I decided I was ready to transition to a sit/stand desk – sitting all day isn’t particularly healthy, but neither is standing, so I wanted a desk that would do both. I fo…

A lone buffalo bur plant surrounded by pumpkin vines and a near neighbor to an eastern redbud tree. This week has been hectic, not the least of which is because my mother is in the hospital since S…

We found ourselves in towards the city (Chicago, if you’re new to this blog) before an event and decided to visit Stay & Play Game Cafe for lunch and a quick game. Based on our time restr…

That’s weird, I thought, glancing out the kitchen window. I’m sure the mulch pile was shorter than that. I took another step towards the window and realized that we’d had new mulc…

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Charleston, South Carolina for a business meeting. Of course I flew in early so I could wander a bit, though other than some amazing restaurants, I didn&…

Near the end of May, the Field Museum’s newest rotating exhibition opened: the Pokémon Fossil Museum. (You probably figured that out from the title of the post.) Naturally, we avoided going i…

If you recall, back in April we visited three zoos – and two airports – in just over a week. The first zoo we visited had Fahlo bracelets at some of the stores, which was the first time…

Assorted plants in the keyhole bed: Brussels sprouts in the upper left, eggplant bottom left, tomato bottom right, broccoli upper left, and obscured by a rain gauge stake (without the rain gauge) t…

I was in Bemidji, Minnesota recently for a work conference. I know, I know, travelling again… at least, that’s what my cats seem to glare at me about. Look, they have an airport (with a…

I discovered both of these word games through Waffle, a letter-swapping daily game I’ve been playing on and off for a while now. I feel like I’m better at OneWordSearch than I am at Sta…

We’re not sure what happened early Monday morning. I woke up around 12:30am to the resident mallard quacking her little head off in our yard. Cassandra was already in the kitchen and had remo…

With our bathrooms sharing a wall and pipes, when the sink for one backed up, so did the other. I knew it was bad when the plumber switched from rodding the hall bathroom sink, moved to the master …

We lost Diane, our eldest cat, at the beginning of this week, so today’s post is an assortment of photos of her – not the oldest, we adopted her in 2009, I started with photos from 2011…

Day 1 – flying pigs attached to the ceiling at Talavera, the Mexican restaurant where we had lunch.Day 2 – our stateroom on the Zuiderdam, home for the next 11 nights.Day 3 – our …

A couple weeks ago, my oldest friend – who I met in elementary school – visited Chicago for a conference, and followed that with a visit out here in the suburbs. On one of the days she …

On Tuesday, I walked out to the end of the driveway to retrieve the garbage can – I knew the recycling hadn’t been picked up yet- and placed it by the garage door, slightly sheltered fr…

“May you live in interesting times” is said to be a curse. And our times have certainly had waves of interesting in the past few months. Back in December, I had mentioned our leaking ba…

As I was cruising in the Caribbean (posts about that coming soon!), playing my daily puzzles like Wordle and Zip, I noticed that LinkedIn was suggesting a new puzzle: Patches. How new? Yesterday&#8…

In the last month and a half, I have packed for four different places that weren’t my own bed (and were all sadly lacking in cats): a local convention, a brief work trip to Tennesee, a confer…

I realize, without context, there are a lot of options for the word “zip,” not the least are “zipper” or “zipline”. In this case, Zip is the name of a daily puzz…

Or did you, like me, reluctantly hobble forward in this seemingly pointless semiannual ritual where we change the clocks and hope our circadian rhythm catches up to the change quickly? I was oddly …

If you read Cassandra’s blog, you may have seen her post a few months ago about entering sweepstakes. When she finds a sweepstakes that may also be of interest to me, she shares the link. Whi…

When I had my MRI in November, other than the arthritis, the results turned up something odd about my thyroid. After a discussion with my primary doctor in December, I scheduled a thyroid ultrasoun…

2025 is done!* 2026 projects are progressing! OK, the * is because I still have the border to finish on the 360-day granny square blanket I started in mid-February 2025. The final day in that count…

Capricon 46 has come and, alas, gone, as is the way of annual conventions. I had waves of free time alternating with “why did I schedule myself like this” intervals… again, that&#…

It can be tempting for those of us in cold climates to stay indoors most of the winter, relishing the technology that heats our homes. Several locations that you would generally count as outdoor ea…

I’ve mentioned Capricon here a few times, particularly last year when I volunteered as co-chair. I have far less work for the convention this year, as a staff member, panelist, and volunteer,…

“Everything is leafless (except those guys),” I understood of winter as a child, and I believe I mistook that for “so nothing interesting is happening (except snow days).” A…

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association is quite the handful for a book name, and I’m delighted that this book by Caitlin Rozakis lived up to that handful. Our local library ty…

Back in October, I mentioned the discovery of a Temperature Blanket group on Facebook, and some related ideas, like a Temperature Tree embroidery kit. Since my embroidery skills are not at the same…

What are Side Quests, you ask? Well, I used to refer to them as Goals, but really, “Quest” is more fun as a concept, at least for us gamers. I don’t accomplish every quest I give …

As I mentioned in my previous post about Universal Yums, we purchased their Advent Calendar for this holiday season. Unlike the location-specific boxes, this was entirely sweet: candy and chocolate…

When your attention is committed and a task still needs to be done, how do you approach it? When you’re too tired for the challenging and still looking for something fun, where do you look fi…

In college, I spent a year abroad at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, which was a fabulous experience is so many ways, including my first Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) adventures. That&#821…

I don’t usually come back to topics on this blog, which is… absurd, considering how often one comes back to topics in life. And one of the topics I’ve come back to recently is sweepstak…

Almost two weeks ago now, it snowed – again – bringing our accumulated snow to a whopping 11 inches early in the season. It was warm enough that the snow was melting on the roof even as…

It’s been a very real life week, I’m very tired, and it’s very cold out, so I’m going to forego the usual enthusiasm and commentary and just say, ‘wasn’t this pr…

Over the summer, our local public library hosted a Yum Club event with treats from Taiwan. Having enjoyed that, we prioritized signing up for the next one when it was announced and were delighted t…

I was playing Metazooa recently – a taxonomy game – and excited about the different species at our bird feeder, and I figured, “There has to be a bird identification game out ther…

It feels like just yesterday that Cassandra posted about touching grass; it was actually two weeks ago, and the seasons have definitely shifted more towards the snowy side here in Chicagoland. In f…

Generally, I have the great privilege to be left to my own devices. I’m on few enough email lists that it’s rare something comes in that I don’t recognize, and apparently few enou…

Mid-November found us back in Portland, this time joined by my sister, with the primary goal of the trip to visit with my aging grandmother, scheduled in short visits on alternating days so as to n…