A Wee Bit Late, A Burns Night To Remembe...

We have a great group of English and Scottish friends with whom we usually celebrate what we call the Trifecta of the High Holy Holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. In fact, we have so much fun on these occasions, we’ve been searching for years for other suitably hallowed events on which to gather. Finally, someone recommended Burns Night, a traditional Scottish...

Catcher on the Mississippi

Illustration of Huck Finn by E. W. Kemble from 1884 first edition The announcement of J.D. Salinger’s death has me thinking about my favorite alienated, wandering adolescent searching for truth in a corrupt world. I’m not talking about Holden Caulfield. Caulfield is just a snarky, overprivileged preppie starring in what is surely one of the most overrated novels in the...

Owning My F

There, I’m just going to say it: I got an F in Spanish 1B this Fall Term. Now I’m going to explain. With more enthusiasm than foresight, I signed up for both HTML Programming and Spanish 1B last fall, completely ignoring the fact that Fall Term runs right through grape harvest and winemaking season. By midterm, it was clear I wasn’t going to make it through the...

Just a Little Botox for Mother Nature

Earlier this week, I braved a rare break in our winter storms to get up to Sonoma and check the progress that John the Baptist and Louis have made in our trails and vulnerable flood areas. After last year’s storms, the rains that filled our seasonal creek, in addition to a number of felled trees, caused massive erosion. John and Louis swore it wouldn’t happen again....

Terrier Riders On the Storm

California has been pounded by rainstorms this week, complete with thunder, lightning and lots of power outages. Add one nervous, neurotic terrier and it’s a recipe for disaster. Or at least a week of no sleep. Lucy would be that terrier. And from the first loud clap of thunder on Tuesday, she became the shivering, hyperventilating poster pet for animal medication. The problem...

The Kitchen of the Damned

We always knew it would come to this. After 25 years of living in the same San Francisco Victorian and slowly redoing it room by room, we knew we’d eventually reach the point where we were back at the start, redoing the first room we redid. That would be the kitchen, which was barely functional when we moved in lo these many years ago. We’d been in the place a month when...