I’ve died and gone to meat heaven

Tonight I ate meat. Now, this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. I am not a vegetarian or anything, although generally I don’t consume huge slabs of meat. I love fruits and veggies and many of my meals consist of some sort of pasta and veggie combination.
But it was my night to [...]

I think my classroom is poisoning me

I think my job is killing me. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical, “pity me because my job is so hard” kind of way. I’m pretty sure that the toxic fumes being pumped into my classroom through the ventilation system (from the giant vat of tar below) are actually filling my lungs with enough [...]

My life on the treadmill

Tomorrow I am going to join a gym. I don’t mean that in that sort of vague way that I have often said “tomorrow I am going to start a diet,” or “tomorrow I’m going to get some grading done.” This is not some comment on my need to lose weight. I actually have a [...]

The Wonderful Wizard of What?

I stopped by Blockbuster on the way home from work to rent a copy of The Wizard of Oz. Considering how much I loved this movie as a kid, I was actually surprised I didn’t own it. I seem to have every other movie from my past. It’s not like I’m dying to watch it; [...]

The woes of construction

My ceiling is leaking. I’m not sure how it started exactly. All I know is that it left a dirty, nasty mess on my floor. I don’t know exactly when it happened. I’d been away for quite some time and when I came back, my floor had these odd brown stains on it and there [...]

My last hurrah

So today my life of decadence and leisure comes to an end. No longer will my days be spent reading a novel in the shade of my patio while my son runs in circles around the patio table, chasing a cat, or kicking a ball or, well, just running. My tri-weekly (or frequenter) visits to [...]

The birds and the beasts were there

And so were more vendors dishing up delicious fatty foods then I could have hoped for. Actually, I guess it was really about the number of purveyors of deep fried junk that I expected. And to be completely honest, there was actually one bit of food I wasn’t able to find at this fair, or [...]

A bit of my history gone for good

My mom sent me this link today, asking if it was my great aunt’s house. Although she likes to think they were very close, she’d never visited the house, which was built back in 1983. I guess she and my grandmother were talking about my great aunt’s homes and she decided to do a search [...]

They should call it the chocolate city

This weekend my dear friend Eee and I made our annual pilgrimage to Chicago in order to spend the day shopping on Armitage Street. This trip, which lasted about 27 hours including driving, began about seven years ago when I was on a trip to London with some of my students. While we were shopping [...]