The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here’s a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June). This year saw a… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog: 2003-2004
Category: Personal
People Don’t Always Suck
Reading Ethan Zuckerman’s recap of the awful things people said to Xeni Jardin during a recent “twttier bomb” fiasco, it would be very easy to slide into “People suck” mode. Particularly since a large part of my day yesterday was spent in New York traffic. So here’s a quick antidote, also from yesterday: When I… Continue reading People Don’t Always Suck
Mildred Wedel, 1914-2012
Yesterday was the funeral for my great-aunt Mildred, known within the family as “Auntie” (first syllable “ont” not “ant”), who fell and bumped her head last Friday, and just never woke up. On the one hand, she was 97, so this shouldn’t be too surprising, but a few years ago she moved out of a… Continue reading Mildred Wedel, 1914-2012
Necessary Cuteness
We found out yesterday that one of my great-aunts, who recently moved out of a retirement community because she wanted to live by herself, fell and banged her head badly. While she apparently seemed okay at the time, a short while later she collapsed, and is vanishingly unlikely to recover. While it seems weird to… Continue reading Necessary Cuteness
Ten Years Before the Blog: 2002-2003
As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22, 2002 to June 21, 2003. When I started doing this look back, I was more… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog: 2002-2003
Jake and the Overly-Analytical Parents
SteelyKid has recently become obsessed with the Disney Junior show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, demanding to watch it all the time. Thanks to her two recent bouts with this year’s stomach bug, I’ve had to watch, or at least listen to her watching in the next room, every episode that Time Warner offers… Continue reading Jake and the Overly-Analytical Parents
Easter 2012
Today is Easter Sunday, which we celebrated in the manner of my people, by chasing soap bubbles around the backyard: OK, that’s not an actual tradition, but it was a beautiful day today, and SteelyKid got a big bottle of bubble stuff from her great-grandmother, so it seemed like the right thing to do. So… Continue reading Easter 2012
The Story of the One Little Pig, the Nice Wolf, and Materials Science
I want a story. The story about one little pig, and the wolf. I’ll need you to help me with it, OK? Yeah. OK, once upon a time, there was one little pig, and he… What did he do? He built a house out of straw. Right. He was a little bit silly, so he… Continue reading The Story of the One Little Pig, the Nice Wolf, and Materials Science
Ten Years Before the Blog: Historical Recap
June 22, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of this blog. While I would like to one day be famous enough to be able to staple together a collection of loosely related blog posts and call it a book, I’m not there yet. This particular arbitrary numerical signifier does, however, seem worth… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog: Historical Recap
The Evolution of Random Comfort Food
One of the slighter slight flaws in my character is an unaccountable fondness for bad Americanized Chinese food. When I go to Starbucks to write, I walk right past a Chinese buffet restaurant, and it’s a real effort not to run in and overdo it. I occasionally try to cook stuff in this general category… Continue reading The Evolution of Random Comfort Food