This is my personal blog, not a topical blog, but I find myself unable to say anything terribly original or interesting about the election per se. Like many Californians, I am thrilled by Obama’s election, and terribly disappointed that it looks like Prop 8 may pass. However! They have not counted my ballot yet (vote-by-mail […]
Category Archives: Personal
Wet ride
It was raining like crazy all day yesterday. I had agreed to go to a party in the evening, so I decided, in the spirit of adventure, to find out whether my bike raingear was up to the task of keeping me relatively dry and comfortable on a 9.6 mile ride in moderate to heavy […]
Tony Hillerman
I learned just now that Tony Hillerman, New Mexico mystery author and a former neighbor of my family, died on Sunday at 83. (We moved — I think the Hillerman family still lives in the house that we used to live next door to.) My parents really like his books. I never read them (not […]
Test post from my phone.
Test post from my phone. My phone also plays my music now. I feel so 21st century. Added later: Regrettably, it looks like it’s much harder to add pictures to the blog directly from the phone. One needs a plugin, and I have had very little success adding plugins to my WP installation. Really it’s […]
Back on bike: Crystal Springs-Cañada-Portola
Today was my first recreational ride since Waves to Wine. It ended up well, but I had a really hard time finding my legs for the first 10-12 miles. I finally found them somewhere on Cañada, when I noticed I was chatting and pedaling on auto-pilot, and felt better than I had. By the time […]
Rocket!
According to Michael Pollan, rocket is also the “proper American name” for arugula: It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”) Arugula is the Italian name for it, so I’m […]
Arugula!
After my first year of employment (I think first full year, but it doesn’t really matter to this story) I had saved more money than I expected. I was telling my mom this and that I really wasn’t sure how I’d done it, since I didn’t keep a good budget (I still don’t; it is […]
Strawberry frustration
I love strawberries. The best ones are fragrant and sweet with a hint of tartness. I want to describe them as a “flavor burst in the mouth” but that sounds unfortunatey like a commercial. I buy them almost every week in the summer when they’re available. I freeze them to keep for over the winter […]
magnitude of the Central Valley
I hear people all the time talking about the Central Valley, and I thought I had a pretty clear idea of where and what it is — inland of here, a big area where there are a lot of farms plus some of the major inland cities, the nation’s major supplier of various fruit and […]
A cooler title
I really enjoy being a bona fide professional linguist, with said title on my business card, but I have found a title that is, I think, even cooler, belonging to Jesse Sheidlower (whose surname I would dearly love to know how to pronounce). Jesse is, according to his byline on this Slate article about Sarah […]