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There’s a bunch of really big, really beautiful sycamore trees on our street. Last week, they all started dropping leaves, which was… worrisome. They still have plenty of leaves, but the drifts of crumpled green leaves by the curbs have been disconcerting. I called up West Chester’s arborist, Debbie (another great thing about West Chester…

Gay Street here in West Chester is being used as a stand-in for Kalamazoo, Michigan during shooting of Marley & Me starring Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson. It comes out after Christmas, and the Kalamazoo scenes are snowy, so the crew is busy taping white Tyvek to all the sidewalks and laying white batting on…

In 1994 and 1995, I was one of two schoolteachers on the set of the Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete and Pete. One of the recurring characters on the show was Mr. Tastee, the mysterious, masked ice cream man whose comings and goings were as unpredictable and inscrutable as… …well, as a real ice…

This weekend was supposed to be gloomy and rainy, but it was still sunny when we woke up this morning, so we rousted Lydia out of bed early and told her we were going to have a "surprise", and then drove down the road to the Goshen Fair Grounds for the Chester County Hospital May…

(This is the followup to an earlier post, which you can find here.) “Call no man happy until he is dead”, Herodotus quoted Solon as saying. I first heard that quote in junior high, when teenage boys are most prone to accept facile philosophical aphorisms as THE PURE AND COMPLETE TRUTH, and it scared the…

A few days ago, Kate put a couple of Ken dolls up for auction, posting a picture that was just UNBELIEVABLY sad. I think it was the startled (but resigned) expressions on the patchy, ridiculously mustachio-ed Ken dolls’ faces. Who knew the pathos of mid-life crisis could be so accurately and mercilessly captured in doll…

With the rain and the fresh leaves across the street, the azaleas in front of Harold and Vera’s house have gone NUCLEAR pink.

My nerdlepoint shop is now up on Etsy! You can visit it at nerdlepoint.etsy.com. This is the first time since the Retropod that I’ve offered something directly for sale on the web, and I hope this venture goes along more smoothly than that one did. Etsy users, what am I overlooking? Did I make any…

About every ten years, I see a T-shirt that I SUDDENLY MUST HAVE. In 1992, I followed the J.A. Serusa Water Well Company owner’s van home in Vineyard Haven, Massachusets because their gushing-wellhead logo was SO AWESOME and it was printed with regular ink, not plastic ink. I still mourn losing that shirt. In 2001,…

Kate is selling two Ken dolls, much the worse for wear, that she got in a lot of mixed Barbie patterns and other miscellanea the other day. I thought the Freddie Mercury Ken was kind of funny, but OH MAN THE PATHOS in the picture she took for her eBay listing. What is it about…