Last week, someone I love dearly left this world in body. So I am grieving. As it happens, this person was so central in my life that most of the people I know are grieving also. We are a community of loss right now. Not much is happening beyond that loss and its immediate effects.… Continue reading The Daily: 8 August 2023
Category: Polemics & Rants
The Daily: 30 July 2023
In many northern communities, July is a hungry month. The spring flush of greens and quick-growing roots like radishes and beets may still be trickling out of the garden, but most have bolted and run to seed. However, even those that remain are long on fiber and short on calories, and little of the spring… Continue reading The Daily: 30 July 2023
The Daily: 24 July 2023
I took large chunks of the weekend — in which I could not do much vigorous work outside for all the Canadian smoke and could not write much for all the bugs in this machine — to clean up my house. (I think it's actually not this machine but something iCloud-derived because it's affecting my… Continue reading The Daily: 24 July 2023
The Daily: 21 July 2023
The Daily: 20 July 2023
This is a short, but irate, outburst. Apologies for the language... For a very long time I have been irritated at the word sacrifice used to describe what we have to stop doing in order to survive. It is an utterly appalling misuse of language and ideas. What is a sacrifice? What does that mean?… Continue reading The Daily: 20 July 2023
The Daily: 19 July 2023
Tuesday morning there was brown fog. Is is still smog when the smoke is from wildfires that are burning hundreds of miles away? Do we need a new term for foreign smoke and local fog blanketing a largely rural region? I looked out over the valley and couldn't see more than a couple blocks. It… Continue reading The Daily: 19 July 2023
The Daily: 14 July 2023
Having water destroy much of the state you live in —taking not the biblical 40 days to wreak havoc, but something like 8 hours — makes one rather conscious of adaptions that might be made to one's living arrangements. It's not good enough to clean up the mess and put it all back how it… Continue reading The Daily: 14 July 2023
The Daily: 13 July 2023
Central Vermont is in disaster rehabilitation mode after things decidedly fell apart on Monday. There are tubes snaking out of buildings, draining basements of water. Belongings are being corralled and cleaned. Trash and irreparably broken things are filling up bins. Front loaders are scooping up tons of mud and gravel from the roads, and trucks… Continue reading The Daily: 13 July 2023
The Daily: 12 July 2023
Today is Julius Caesar's birthday and the reason we call this month July. Then August? His heir... I prefer the Moon of the Flowers and the Nutting Moon and the Cold Moon. And of course the Wolf Moon. I think names matter. I think words matter. These are the ways we see the world and,… Continue reading The Daily: 12 July 2023
The Daily: 11 July 2023
The Weather Well, today is a fun example of the new normal... Vermont is under flash flood warnings for the next 24 hours. Yes, that is all of Vermont. Many towns are being evacuated. Yes, whole towns. My garage had 3 inches of standing water this morning. It got up to about 5 inches before… Continue reading The Daily: 11 July 2023
