Stream of Consciousness Saturday – Crackle

With spring approaching there is a bit less crackle, snaps and pops comeing form the wood stove. We are nearing the end of the heating season. Soon the semi-circle of chairs around the stove will break up, chairs will return to their regular locations, and evenings will focus on the dining room, or outside near …

Stream of Consciousness Saturday – Envy

“Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.”

Mouse Hunts

Quiet as a mouse doesn't work around here.

Streakers?

As an anthropologist, I spent a lot of time creating programs and exhibits. Any program or exhibit is a balancing act between general information and detail. General information is a good introduction, but the details are needed to develop a more complex appreciation of the subject. Luckily, fairly early in my career, I had some …

Stream of Consciousness Saturday – Shock Jock

We all edit our lives. Some chapters become suspiciously short; others bulk out with sensuous feelings, tragedy, comedy, and love. Some of us do such a good job of editing that entire chapters are elided with surgical precision. Not long ago, I read the obituary of a formerly close friend. His biography was complete, except …

GRANDMA’S BAKING SCHOOL

A friend was a professional chef who always said that cooking was about taste, but baking was about measurement. I always smiled and deferred to my friend's informed opinion. However, I also continued to be somewhat loose in my measurements of the Christmas fruitcakes and the Easter poppyseed bread. I felt guilty whenever he swallowed …

Lines

There is a lot to hate about lines. You stand in line for tickets, food, and to get into events. Sometimes, you stand in line, and it goes around the block. Line jumpers can get more than dirty looks. At one school I attended in New York City, a kid who habitually cut in lines …

To the Garden – Early

Written for Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Normally, my year starts with the seed and plant catalogs. They begin arriving in December, but I firmly put them aside without glancing at the contents until a week or so after the New Year. Why? Winter, that's why. A lengthy, slow peruse of brightly lit pages full of …

Heterodoxy

It started as a Christmas-time gag, and then it became a runningChristmas joke. For a couple of years I used photos of it on most of the Christmas letters I sent out…but not all. My wife told me just before I mailed them that the ones going to her very religious relatives had to have …

Stream of Consciousness Saturday – Poppy Seed

I bake at this time of year. It was my "don't eat and drive" fruitcake earlier this month. But just before Christmas, it's Grandma's Poppy seed bread. Every Christmas and Easter, she'd make a large batch of the long loves filled with poppyseed filling; especially at Christmas, it wasn't the holiday without her specialty.More than …