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It has been almost ten years since I visited* the Grand Canyon. I dispersed camped in the Kaibab National Forest surrounding the park. There was a subtle alkaline acrid smell everywhere in the area. I never figured out if it was from the stone and soil or some vegetation. I can’t say it was exactly […]
I don’t go to “cons,” but I am going to the Worldcon this year, the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society. I don’t even know why, exactly. One of the features of a con is the opportunity to meet celebrities, but I can’t say that I’m particularly excited about that. My interest in […]
When I had first heard about Skyward, it seemed interesting, but I ultimately decided not to read it. Brandon Sanderson is an amazing author who has become one of my favorites, and the description of the story was definitely interesting, but when I found out it was YA fiction, I decided to pass. My recent […]
[This is not about the Netflix series.] All my life, I have lived in the St. Louis area, which is at the northeast corner of the Ozark Plateau. A great deal of my outdoor life takes place in the Ozarks. The Mark Twain National Forest is scattered throughout the Missouri Ozarks. My favorite nearby hiking […]
My vacation was fraught with problems, the biggest one being the sudden and massive coolant leak in my truck. That’s fixed, but now I (probably) have a blown head gasket. I wasted days of my vacation on it, and ultimately I had to coax it home despite chronic misfiring. I will end up spending weeks […]
I am building a workbench using mortise & tenon joints. Somehow, this is the first time I’ve attempted to do so, despite owning a mortiser and a tenonning jig for two decades. I’m finding that they are both well suited to fairly flat tenons, one width of the chisel, or up to two if the […]
Perhaps two decades ago, when I was still married, I was a subscriber to National Geographic Magazine. I occasionally succumbed to other purchases from the National Geographic Society, mostly maps, which were very good, but we once ordered a book of all the national parks in the US. It was a coffee table book, with […]
I succumbed to temptation and bought a smart watch. It is the Samsung Gear S3 frontier, which is really the first one that caught my eye. It’s gorgeous, full-featured, has good battery life, and integrates well with my phone. After discovering it, I researched many others, but ultimately I came back to this one. I […]
Montana, I am told, is a place with bears. Brown bears. The big, aggressive kind of bears. Probably not all of Montana, but certainly the national forests and parks in northwestern Montana. There are black bears also, but brown bears are literally a whole other animal: bigger, bolder, less likely to back down, and less […]
I just finished watching the last episode of the first season of The OA. Without spoiling anything, it definitely did not leave me with a sense of closure, but it also wasn’t clearly a cliffhanger. I couldn’t even tell from that ending whether there would even be a second season. Fortunately, just twelve hours prior, […]
