I try to be diligent about keeping potential recycling materials out of the trash. We compost non-meat or -dairy food wastes and use it for our gardens, and our town provides bins for recycling as part of our routine trash collection. Among my weekly chores is taking out the trash, recycling and compost. I do […]
Category Archives: germs
It’s usually between 3 and 4 am, when my various aches, pains and the need to pee make me uncomfortable. I wake up and some rinky-tink music slithers into my brain … “Now that I’m old, Don’t wear underwear, Don’t go to church, And don’t cut my hair…” I know I’ll have trouble getting back […]
“So, what’s it like working in a uranium mine?” I asked my neighbor. The neighborhood block party thirty-five years ago was in full swing, square dance music blaring, and the beer from the local craft brewery keeping things lubricated. “Well,” he replied, It’s kinda spooky sometimes. There are some areas where you can feel the […]
I remember sack lunches from my school days. PB&J or tuna salad sandwiches wrapped up in wax paper (or those wax paper bags that came out later), or sometimes bologna with a slice of processed cheese. Always on plain white Wonder Bread — the “American way.” Potato chips or Fritos (when they came out, after […]
“When one is considering the universe,” Ella Frances Sanders observed in her lovely illustrated celebration of wonder, “it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.” “Our life has become so mechanized and electronified,” said the Hungarian journalist and László Feleki “that one needs some kind of an […]
In junior high and high school, I became interested in stories about World War Two and read dozens of books about the war. I got to know Europe and the Pacific in ways that I never learned in my classes. Of course, I had read National Geographic, Kipling, London, Burroughs and Haggard, so I was […]
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.” ― Albert Camus, The Plague Given the plague of zombies we’re seeing this Halloween, I thought I’d remind everyone that zombies are brought back […]
Vaccine hesitancy, a reluctance or refusal to vaccinate or have one’s children vaccinated, has been identified by the World Health Organization as one of the top ten global health threats of 2019 … Hesitancy and debates have occurred since the invention of vaccination, and indeed pre-date the coining of the terms vaccine and vaccination by […]
As part of my pre-Thanksgiving dinner preparations, I made a big salad for lunch instead of the sandwich or hot dog I usually have. The romaine was still fresh, sweet onion, some left-over cooked beets, a little celery and a carrot from the garden. Some smashed up tortilla chips for croutons and probably a little […]
Humans evolved in caves and fields — not in sanitized homes, cars and schools. And our immune systems developed to find and suppress foreign invaders, growing stronger with each battle won. ~ Christine Peterson It’s not there now, but I look forward to a time when we can essentially garden our homes — fill them […]
Writes of Nature 