Unfocused Friday

On Wednesday I drove down into the foothills of the Catskills for a workshop. The drive was incredible. The day was mostly sunny and the foliage down there was slightly more peak than it is up here. The funny thing is that one of the workshop leaders was a man who works for the New […]

Huh?

I saw this article on the web yesterday or the day before, I can’t remember which. If you don’t feel like reading it, here’s the long and the short of it: a variety of school districts in America have been taking advantage of a Pentagon program to stock up on surplus military equipment, though not […]

Monday Already?

I admit I’m at a bit of a loss this morning–it’s Monday–how did that happen so fast? I suspect my sense of time dislocation is at least partly due to last week’s interruption to go to the airport. My own quick update is the Magpie is alive and well and loving life so far. We […]

Band-Aid

To borrow (and twist) a phrase used a couple of times in Sergio Leone’s classic film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, there’s two kinds of people in this world: those who peel the Band-Aid slowly, and those who rip it off. The Magpie is a ripper. On Tuesday the family piled into the […]

Lead Foot

True confession time: I have a lead foot. I drive fast. Not as fast as Winston Wolfe (“It’s thirty minutes away. I’ll be there in ten.”), but consistently fast. While I’m much better about it than I used to be–I no longer find myself doing 80 on the interstate, for example, at least not on […]

Musical Monday: Someone Keeps Moving My Chair

There may be a quirkier band in all the land than They Might Be Giants–but I haven’t found them yet. The song goes back almost 25 years at this point (cry) to their 1990 album, Flood. The video was made by an 11-year-old boy several years ago. It works, in my opinion. In other news, […]

Chief Wahoo Converted

Last week, I saw a story on the web about a t-shirt that had gotten suddenly popular on several reserves of the Ontario First Nations. Here’s the shirt, a parody of Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians lettering and logo: The t-shirt came to prominence when a member of the group A Tribe Called Red wore […]

The Day After…

…the day after is a total bear. At least it is for me, in this particular instance. On Saturday we did a work event, an outdoor festival celebrating the importance of our region’s water resources (specifically, lakes). Much of last week was spent working out the final logistics of tent placement and such, packing everything […]

Tipper Stickers

Some time ago, Alec Baldwin and Kristen Wiig appeared in a Saturday Night Live sketch about two people carpooling for the first time. Their conversation starts out awkward, as can happen when people who don’t know each other find themselves in a confined space. It quickly takes a turn for the worse: Wiig: So, it […]

Monday Musing: Penultimates

Spring is supposed to be the time of  beginning, a time of newness, yet I find myself looking at lasts. Last week, for example, the Catbird performed in the high school’s spring concert, which is the last official performance for that group for the year. Both band and chorus directors acknowledged the seniors in their […]