This is a long time coming: Started July 2021 when I realized I wanted some very specific items to keep students at their desks (covid protocols will be in place for the foreseeable future due to the age of my students). It is now November 2022. I did NONE of these tasks. Some of them […]
Category: health
Accessibility and Invisible Conditions: Musings on Making Life Work
[Started 22 June 2022, Finished 6 November 2022] It has been something like 40 years since I woke in the middle of the night as a teenager, in tears from the pain in my legs. Back then, the pain seemed localized to the knees, but when doctors looked there was no damage. “Growing pains” they […]
Summer finally begins for me
I was still recovering from the allergic reaction into the middle of the first week of July. Not fun. But had energy to have a nice dinner for my parents on Sunday the third, which of course wiped me out for the next couple of days. Then, on July 7 I had a chance to […]
Allergies
Most of the time as a child my allergies manifested as upper respiratory — sneezing and runny nose. As I grew older, I realized the recurring intestinal discomfort was also an allergic reaction. More recently, I began to get hives on my face and upper body (mostly, though I also get them sometimes on my […]
Dodging figurative bullets
Today for the first time I went to urgent care while experiencing the reaction to cow products. Eating out (my end-of-week treat) I didn’t notice that one of the types of sushi I ordered was made with cream cheese. Fortunately, I know the symptoms and get pretty weirded out by the “precursor” bits. So I […]
A month later… Photos of the garden
In the fullness of autumn, we wandered around the yard, putting things more or less in order, getting ready for the long, cool winter. These are pictures from November, when the rains paused long enough to get a bit more done. Pruning the medlar and the biggest fig tree. Running around the yard with a […]
Autumn Begins: The Garden Matures
As Autumn begins in the Pacific Northwest there are certain things that we expect such as smoke from scattered wildfires and a gradual shift from the dark greens of the surrounding forest to a golden hue as willows and indian plum trees at the margins respond to the fading light. There are some things that, […]
The long slide into autumn
Last Sunday, it rained. The day was gray, humid to a point, and the overcast made everything seem bluer than normal. I worked on refinishing some picnic furniture, getting a coat of polyurethane on to help it make it through a few more years. As the day wore on, the clouds lowered, settling in near […]
Garden: A week of progress
Almost every day this week we made significant progress somewhere in the garden. Yesterday, it was finishing the flowerbed that defines the parking space in front of the house. It holds a variegated St. John’s Wort, a Japanese Maple (which appears to be dwarf), and a Witchhazel, along with a few flowers (glads and a […]
Garden Talk
I have a garden, a yard, an orchard, flower beds, lawns and woods. There is a marshy area down by the road that I call a “seasonal water feature.” Some years it’s soggy later than others. There is a “sacred grove” of cedars and maples that I protected from clearing when we bought the place, […]