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It’s freaking cold here in West Chester the past couple of days: in the mornings, there’s frost on the inside of the storm windows (which means something less than good about the condition of our weatherstripping, I’m afraid.) Christmas morning, Kate and I bundled the baby up in a blanket and dashed, in our slippers,…

We received our Christmas Eve luminary kit from our block captains this morning; eleven white paper bags, eleven white candles, and two quarts of sand in plastic bags. That’s one paper bag luminary for each square in the concrete sidewalk outside our house. Around four o’clock PM, all our neighbors were out folding bags, scooping…

The new house has enough room for a proper, tree-sized tree, and the three had enough room for three long strands of colored lights, and so I did something I hadn’t for maybe twenty years: I put the lights on the tree, turned out every other light in the house, including the stove light, nightlights,…

My mom’s a photographer; when I was growing up in Austin, Texas (this was when my dad was hunting UFOs), I remember when she covered a national Frisbee competition. I usually get this stuff all wrong, but I have very distinct memories of lean Texans in bandannas hurling Frisbees over huge distances, and their lean…

The first Thursday after Thanksgiving is time for the Turkey Pro National, Kate’s dad’s end-of-season motorcycle rally. The Turkey Pro keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it repeatedly goes back underground in order to keep things manageable. This year, one pot of “weenie water soup” (pictured above) sufficed to feed the 60 or so attendees,…

A joke where a priest, a rabbi, and Ayn Rand are waiting for a bus? A literal orgy of capitalism? The Rough Beast driving to Bethlehem in 4WD? I give up. I’ve had a little bit of Blog block for the past month, because I came across a writer’s challenge that I’m unequal to. I…

This is the first year that I’ve lived in a house that gets trick or treaters, and it was everything I hoped it would be. For adults, Halloween begins at about 2PM; everyone is out front raking their yards, hanging cobwebs on their house numbers, and arranging jack o’lanterns in the front yard. The children…

The class formerly known as “Mommy and Me Swimming” I’ve been looking forward to baby swim class at the Y ever since we knew that Kate was pregnant. The first class was about a month ago, in the superheated short pool. Lydia wore a swim diaper and a little bathing suit, and she took the…

Seneca and Shiznit Life is very busy, and I’ve been reading Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life during 15-minute lunchtime pizza breaks, as a kind of guilty pleasure. “Be careful who and what you spend your time on!” says Seneca, with a righteous fervor that inspired Elizabethan moralists and continues to live on in the…

In the 1800s, the menfolk would forge ahead into the wilderness, pick a likely spot, then girdle all the trees with a hatchet and wait for them to die. Meanwhile, they’d construct a rude lean-to with saplings and any canvas they were able to salvage from their cargo wagon after they’d overturned it in a…