Category: blog
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Meditation
It wasn’t a resolution so much as a coincidence, but early in 2022 I decided that since I’d spent three years now putting sustained energy into improving my physical health with some good results that it was time to attempt the same for my mental and emotional well-being. I’d avoided it partly because it was…
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The Solar Saga
We thought our solar journey had begun and ended about twelve years ago, when REC Solar – who has since left the consumer market to focus solely on commercial customers – casually mentioned that as part of the installation process we would have to remove two mature oaks and a twenty foot tall redwood. Our…
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The State of the State
The year in politics, for me at least, has been largely a year of breathlessness and angst. I cancelled my subscription to the Atlantic because I couldn’t read One More Article about Donald Trump. At some point the endless drumbeat of the damage that he’s causing to the environment, to civil rights, to our international standing (with…
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Falling into Fall
Unlike San Luis Obispo, which is sometimes jokingly described as having two seasons: “day” and “night,” Atascadero – over the Cuesta Grade and out of reach of coastal temperance – can boast of at least three and a half. Every decade or so it is even graced with a peek at four, when an extreme…
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The Inevitables
When I was younger (how did I get old enough to use that phrase?) virtually nothing felt inevitable. Not bad things like doctor’s appointments or my parents getting into yet another shouting match, and not good things like the beginning of summer vacation and Christmas. Reality might twist into some hitherto unknown shape and accommodate my will…
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Back in Big Sur
On Friday the 13th, Big Sur rejoined the world. After a winter that saw the region drenched with over 100 inches of rain, massive slides along the always precarious Highway 1 blocked the road to the south just past Ragged Point and so severely destabilized the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge to the north that it had…
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Charlottesville
About this time last year I was wrestling with, in the words I used at the time, “why the message of tolerance still isn’t getting through to some people who might be receptive of it, and what those of us who believe in it can do to proselytize better.” What a difference a year makes.…
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What I Hate
This is a thing that has been making the rounds on Facebook among some people that I know: The Democrat [sic] Party is the world’s most successful hate group. It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people, feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate the internal…
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Egon
The first time I met Egon a tree had fallen across the dirt road leading to our house. My then-coworker-and-eventual-husband and I had taken the financially daring plunge of renting a place on a couple of acres in semi-rural Atascadero – me because I was tired of neighbors, him because he wanted a dog. The…
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How Phyllis Schlafly Made Me a Feminist
During my very brief stint just out of high school as an evangelical Christian, I tried with the committed desperation of the newly converted to coax my parents to church so they too could receive the Good News Of Jesus Christ. My father was immovable. My mother, who for years had attended seven a.m. Mass…
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