Month: August 2026

VIVALDI

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I found Vivaldi when I was a teenager.


Vivaldi – Summer from The Four Seasons | Netherlands Bach Society. These are the original instruments that would have been used in Vivaldi’s time. No director; the soloist, Shunske Sato, is the director. The entire sound is far more startling—a shocking break in weather! You can hear it HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8TFQFQeL0o

In my teens, I attended a lot of concerts. Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, The Beatles, Country Joe and the Fish, the Kinks, the Birds, Ravi Shankar, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel (acoustic at the HecEd), Moody Blues, then Laura Nyro and my favorite Joni Mitchell. I’d had guitar lessons from Candy Mack and played a number of folk tunes from The Joan Baez Songbook. Then college.

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IN FOUR YEARS

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A couple of weeks ago, I watched a reel from “Toby-the-Neuro-Scientist” about maybe not quite failing his A-levels. He failed to achieve a score that would get him into the University program he wanted. So he worked for a year waiting table and pissed that away on clothes and drinking, but got serious about maths and got into uni, but his first year was “rubbish,” and then tried to be better the second year and was hit by a car. His third year was Covid so he graduated “alone in [his] bedroom.” He took a year off waiting table again and entered a dementia program to graduate the top of his class, researched Parkinson’s disease for two years. Ten years after those disastrous A-levels, he has his PhD from a prestigious university. Who woulda thunk it?

In four years, who might you become? In ten?

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SMOKING GUN

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“Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em,” They told my dad when he was training in Arizona for WWII.

In January of 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States announced in print that tobacco smoke was dangerous to health. Cigarette caused lung cancer. The announcement was a political risk to the SG, and a blow to a valuable American industry, which had known of the danger for decades and kept that to itself. The warning was timed for a Saturday so that the stock market would have a couple of days before shivering, and to allow for Sunday newspapers to cover the story in detail. People read newspapers then.

The bull Roosevelt elk are sparring. The Roosevelt are the largest elk in the world, weighing up to 1200 pounds. Neither of these 4-point elk are likely to die or even suffer harm shoving one another across the sand. Twenty minutes after I took this photo, they were both grazing in a neighbor’s yard. It’s early in the season, their velvet is just dropping from their antlers, but in another month or so, local bull elk will not be safe to be around.
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MARRIED

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Our 52nd anniversary is coming up in twelve days. We’re going out for an early dinner that night because I have to be home for a Zoom meeting of a nonprofit. That’s okay. We are nearly always together. He’ll probably go for a walk during my Board meeting, and return in time to watch a show and the next day we’ll drive back to the beach. We figured out long ago that no one else will make time special, that’s on us. We tried for a “special” vacation for our 50th, and when we discovered our favorite restaurant had closed and our favorite hotel had new owners, we laughed and drove home. We spent at least three anniversaries in the ER with my mom. Those special days are unreliable, I’d say. It’s my husband I rely on.

Every time.

Two old people who still love one another. Gary’s straining not to pull another face, and look! Our hair is the same color. I tease him because when his hair was as long as mine in the early 1970s, women used to cross the street to pet it. He needs a haircut.
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AFTER ENOUGH

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After I wrote the first four novels, after I’d committed to this one, after the years of writing and revising, authenticity edits and developmental edits, after proofreading and proofreading again. After I finally decide it’s perfect [it isn’t], there is the next step. Next I submit to agents or small presses who will look at unagented novels. That does not go well for my book.

The world might be better once we’re mostly gone.

Suppose I decide to self-publish? It was always an option. The publishers who would do so much of the work in design and promotion were well out of my budget. Eventually I found a printer who works with small presses and decided to trust them. Books are out and in the mail, with 50 of 100 gone. The process took a while.

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