Gifts for Us All for the Holidays
Some of our neighbors put up Christmas Holiday lights two weeks ago. Jim followed suit, thinking why not do it when it’s warm outside? I’ve long been a bit of a grinch when it comes to starting the December holiday season long before we’ve eaten the last of the Thanksgiving turkey, but this year I’m all in with lights and color and everything else joyful that we can manage. (I’m not alone, apparently tree sales are already booming.) As we all know, it’s going to be a challenging winter. (As if things haven’t been challenging enough.) Anything and everything we can do to lighten our lives is a good thing, and we know that one way to do that is to give to others. And so here is my starter Read More
Go Ahead, Play Hard to Get
Growing up in the 1960's, girls like me were advised to "play hard to get." (I notice now that the phrase was not "be hard to get," but "play hard to get." Sigh.) This, we were told, would make us more attractive to boys. I had no trouble with this in high school, because the only thing I wanted to play at was being around horses, and the only boy interested in my skinny, gawky body was a Physics nerd who thought it was cool that I kicked ass in algebra. We went to Prom together and shook hands after it was over. As awful as the "hard to get" advice sounds to me now, the fact is that scarcity, or its allusion, makes anything more valuable. Female Redpolls, plain brown birds with a tiny Read More
Biology of Dogs: Book Review
I've been looking forward to receiving my copy of Tim Lewis's new book, The Biology of Dogs: From Gonads Through Guts to Ganglia for a few weeks now, given all the buzz it has generated. And wow. I have not been disappointed. Lewis is a professor of biology at the University of St. Thomas (MN), lives with two sheep-herding Border Collies and "hovers on the edges of the dog agility and canine freestyle worlds with his wife who competes in and teaches these sports." So he's got the chops: Solid science and two feet firmly planted in dog poop and hairy couches. He's also a wonderful writer. Here's from the Introduction: ( Somewhere in the book he asks us if we've read it and pleads with Read More