Browsing category: Simply Personal

Want To Talk Bird About It?

I have a special interest in smart bird stories like the one recently where a small Quaker parrot warned a babysitter that her two-year-old charge was choking.

Things Could Be a Whole Lot Worse

As weeks go this one hasn’t been the greatest. On last Sunday night the weather forecast was for overnight temperatures near thirty below zero and strong winds that would make the wind chill temperatures even lower. The house was warm and cozy when we went to bed…

The Great Potato Chip Heist

We will have a rather weird memory from the holiday season this year… an incident we’re calling the Great Potato Chip Heist. It happened a couple of days after Christmas in the parking lot of a grocery store about a forty-five minute drive north of our house…

Lost On The Schoolbus

For some reason the school decided that day to change the afternoon kindergarten bus route without telling the parents first.

What Do YOU See?

As we approached our wooded area on Saturday morning during our daily walk, my eye was caught by something lying on the ground.

What Living in the Moment Means To Me

The concepts of living in the moment and appreciating the uniqueness of now can sound too weirdly complicated to be a good fit in our aggressively busy world.

That Sense of Balance

It was a most frustrating day. A really bad thunderstorm that started just after dawn and the resulting power outage got the day off to a rather unfortunate start.

Yes, We Do Know It’s There

If you’d been driving past our house at the right time last night, you could have almost reached out your car window and shaken hands… with the bear that was trampling down the tall stand of day lilies and ferns at the edge of the road.

Can You Break a Piece of Spaghetti into Only Two Pieces?

I was cooking spaghetti, and my youngest son was telling me about the French scientists who won an apparently well-deserved Ig Nobel Prize for improbable research in physics a few years back.

A Downside to Our Rural Life

It has been a frustrating morning. It rained here all night, and today our telephone connection is so crackly it almost drowns out the usual loud background hum on the line. For the last several years, we’ve been trapped in a direct cause-and-effect situation…