"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
What’s going on in my life
Our Sacramento company hit the road Friday, Polly reclaimed the guest bedroom, and things are back to normal. Until tomorrow, that is, when Donna and I will drop the dogs off at a friend’s house on the way out of town and hit the road ourselves. We’re going to see our friends John and Melanie in San Diego, pound the streets on […]
Donna’s Cousin Denise, her husband Clarence, and two youngsters, Solomon and Rachel, are visiting from Sacramento, California. We have a full house, so Polly has temporarily relocated to a friend’s mother-in-law cottage just down the road. I’ve known Denise as long as I’ve known Donna. The three of us met in the fall of 1964, as i started […]
Spring is here. You wouldn’t know it in the Northeast, but it’s lovely in the Southwest, and with our recent rain the Sonora Desert will soon be in bloom. In most parts of the country, students are out on spring break. In Tucson they’re out for the annual rodeo. For some, spring cleaning includes scrubbing up […]
A friend sent a link to a New York Times Magazine article titled “Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?” Alas, I’ve used up my free clicks for the month and can’t read it; I include the link here in case you still have some and want to read it. If I had to guess, I’d say […]
The other night Jimmy Kimmel described Meryl Streep as an actor, and everyone carried on as if it was some kind of big whoop moment. But why should it have been? Every year I ask myself why we still call woman actors actresses, when feminine labels have vanished from other professions. When’s the last time anyone talked […]
One of Tucson’s attractions is its abundance of carnicerías, Mexican butcher shops, each with loyal customers who swear by their favorite shop’s hand-made chorizo. We buy our chorizo at Safeway, philistines that we are, but the brand they carry actually does come from a local carnicería, and that’s what we had for breakfast this morning, scrambled with eggs, flour tortillas […]
Note: the photos from the original post (April 15, 2011) succumbed to web rot. I have replaced them, and have added the post to the Air-Minded category. Thursday, as part of my Pima Air Museum volunteer training, I took a tour of the affiliated Titan Missile Museum south of Tucson. I’ve now audited each of […]
Thirty-plus years ago, Donna and I decided to drive to Key West for a three-day weekend. We left our house in Tampa in charge of our 19-year-old son, who had just started his first year at USF. While we were away, he threw a party. When things got out of control and his guests began wrecking the […]