Summer stroll

We went hiking today on the mesa trail above NCAR in Boulder, heading for the Chautauqua trail head. Everything was perfect: the wildflowers, the color of the sky, our favorite hats, my old shoes.

Puppy pursuit

What does it take to own the perfect puppy? For us, it takes (finally) living together in the same place for more than a few months at a time. It also takes a four-wheel drive and a lot of reading. In pursuit of the perfect Golden Retriever, we’ve been researching breeders and stocking up on […]

Steering the Craft

Last night I sat up reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1998 book Steering the Craft, a collection of writing exercises for the “Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew.” I’m currently a lone navigator, getting used to being alone with my craft, so I marked a number of Le Guin’s writing exercises to try out later […]

Estes Park Wool Market

The Estes Park Wool Market had so many woolly animals to admire, I didn’t have time to buy any wool. (That’s right: I went to the wool market and bought no wool! Too much to see.) There were sheep herding demos: Golden-eyed Kashmir goats: Leaping llamas! And all kinds of insanely beautiful beasts.

Back in the mountains

Just a quick note to say that I’ve made it to Colorado with one husband, two pairs of red shoes, three cats, four hundred fantasy novels, five dozen skeins of yarn, six wilted houseplants, an eighty-year-old violin, and a few large bottles of porter. I have my priorities. Speaking of porter, almost as soon as […]

One Last Look

After digging up the perennials and donating half of my furniture to charity, we packed all my books and cats and yarn into a small moving van, and on Thursday we left the house in Wisconsin for good. When I was teaching in Scotland, I once found myself on a train to Glasgow, sitting next […]