It’s that time of year…

When ill-behaved kids (and sometimes parents) knock on your door and demand candy for themselves and whatever brother or sister of doubtful existence they have at home who can’t come trick-or-treating, so could you also put some candy in this pillowcase? Seriously, pillowcases. Not that they get filled completely, but we’re talking a [...]

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"Leibniz doesn’t have a chance!"

Monty Python – International Philosophy
I nearly deflated a lung the first time I saw this. God bless you, YouTube.

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This story ends with "Ass in the Tub."

I received two tantalizing gifts in the mail today, courtesy of Mom who, for the last few years, has spent a week or so every October lounging in the Florida Keys soaking up sun, fresh seafood, and books we can’t convince her that we really probably wouldn’t like. We are, after all, incredible snobs [...]

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Yep.

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Don’t these look purty?

These are amaretti con pignoli. Alternatively, they’re pine-nut cookies made with a base of almond paste. I love tasty foods that have less than five ingredients. Here, the ingredients are 1 pound canned almond paste (see your baking aisle), 1 1/2 c. sugar, 3 egg whites, rolled in 1 1/2 c. pine [...]

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I am soooo full of myself right now it’s ridiculous

I’m an avid NPR listener, and an avid Diane Rehm listener. Fridays are my favorite day of the week (not counting football weekends during the season) mostly because it’s Diane’s Friday News Roundup. Today I sort of tuned that out, but my ears pricked up at the announcement that Barack Obama was [...]

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TGIF! And not snowing!

I never got around to sweeping off the car, but I did do the shelf thing and brought in my rosemary plants. I learned a few things in the process.1. 1″ pine boards are about the softest and most infuriating thing to deal with.2. Operating a circular saw is a little [...]

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Resisting torpor

Rather than loll around all day reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, like I really want to do, I’m working on fellowship applications. Woo hoo. This is my last year of guaranteed funding from the University–the fourth year of that four-year deal with which they lured me here. So I’ve lined up [...]

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Words in praise of PBS

Eyes on the Prize is amazing. How is it that I’ve never seen any of it before? More to the point, how is it that in my 28 years of living on this planet as an American, and an American from the South, no less, I don’t automatically know half of what’s in [...]

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Wedding weekend

We left around 8am Friday morning, drove through damn near all of Indiana, a corner of Ohio, straight across Kentucky from Covington to whatever teensy little towns line the I-75 corridor from Lexington to Tennessee, then zigged over to Knoxville, and zagged east toward Asheville. Eleven hours in all. And then we did [...]

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