Where have I been? Austin!
Best “club” show: Duo Melis at the Northwest Hills United Methodist Church.
Best food this time: migas outside at Juanita’s (formerly a red caboose) at 1120 W. Fifth.
Best exercise: Urban Dare Austin (we came in 51st of 150-some). Close second: Frisbee challenge in Wii Sports Resort.
Best stroll: Along Lady Bird Lake/river, [...]
Twenty students from 14 schools across Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia braved the snow and ice to participate in the DC Regional Brain Bee on Wednesday. Before the competition, Bee judge Dr. Ben Walker of Georgetown University asked how many participants are contemplating a career in the sciences. All twenty competitors raised their [...]
We in the Washington, DC, area have broken our total winter snowfall record, and it’s only Feb. 11. Right now we stand at 55.9 inches, far beyond our season average of 10.4 inches. (And at the moment, Baltimore’s 79.9 is beating Syracuse at 75.9 and Rochester at 63.9, according to Golden Snow Globe.)
Yesterday, just to [...]
Snow is lovely, and shoveling can be fun. But I draw the line at storms that dump more snow after one has already cleared it away three times in 24 hours. Just saying. The flakes should stop, at least, while one is actively clearing them away. And DC, for sure, should never need to use [...]
So, book club started the year with FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies, this first of his Deptford trilogy. I read it in two days, enjoying the flawed narrator and the epistolary structure. This reads like a mature writer’s work, with hard-edged wisdom amid the old-fashioned storytelling.
But I have never thought that traits that are [...]
Gifts from the spouse:
buds beneath
heavy snow on bough
spring will come
Here are some of the things you can do during Brain Awareness Week, the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. The video is from a BAW tour for school groups at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, in 2009. The photos are [...]
We are in final edits on a cute little video showing some of the fun stuff people do to celebrate Brain Awareness Week, which this year will be March 15–21. It’s my first foray into video-making since the early 1980s, and I am quite a bit rusty, so this will be an “unauthorized” version, but [...]
I found Salman Rushdie’s breakout novel all it was cracked up to be, though it did take me about 50 pages to fully commit. It is dense and circular, eschews some common internal punctuation, and has a fantastic story bedded in sharp detail and joy in the wordsmithing. For a dense book, I read it [...]
This is down our street 12 hours after the 24+ hours of snow stopped (4 pm, Sunday, 12.20.2009). No driving today! The car at the corner turned back and didn’t come down the street.
Taking advantage of the camera’s POV.
Cleo is tired from a day of running from window to window.