Pattie and I had hoped to keep our air conditioner off during the month of May. Despite temperatures hitting the 90s this week, so far we’ve hung in there. But I would not be surprised if things change at 12:01. Truth be told, I’ve just been thankful that my desk is in the basement. It’s […]
Wow, the Inquirer must have known I was in a mood to write about voting, because they have an article about a state representative who wants to hold hearings on instituting a vote-by-mail system. I’ve written before about why I think the current one-day-of-voting plan doesn’t work so well. But I will note that in […]
I was reading through some post-mortems on the Philly elections that discussed the relatively low turnout – somewhere around 35% of registered voters showed up, and you could probably adjust those numbers to get lower figures (for all voting-age residents) or higher (just for Democrats, who were the only party with a competitive primary). The […]
Thank you to all who serve or have served in the nation’s armed forces. Thank you to all who have given their lives in that service. I don’t have much else to say today, but readers may find the site for Arlington National Ceremony worth a look, especially the Ceremonies and Historical Information links.
I decided to take a crack at making homemade chocolate syrup last night, and printed out Alton Brown’s Cocoa Syrup recipe from the Food Network site. I really should have gone to the Alton Brown fan page to check out the episode transcript just to see what details I missed, because when the printed recipe […]
The Boston Red Sox are 11.5 games ahead of the New York Yankees in the American League East, and I must confess this makes me quite happy. (Although it could be a setup for a major gut-punch collapse, in which case, won’t that be a story and a half.) Part of me feels bad when […]
So today is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, also known as the day George Lucas attached a vacuum to my wallet. My major commemoration of the anniversary has been to dive into the excellent new Making of Star Wars hardcover, which I’ll be reviewing in a few weeks over at theLogBook. I enjoy the […]
I went to an open house at the neighborhood public school today – Alex will start kindergarten this fall, so we registered her there. I got to look at the kindergarten classrooms, and the kids there seemed enthusiastic. Lots of projects and signs were hung around the room, and while it wasn’t the brightest of […]
There’s a lot of anger in antiwar circles about the supplemental spending bill that came out of the House-Senate conference committee, which appears to strip all timelines and mandated consequences from the bill. It’s being portrayed as a blank check for the president’s war policy The major thing I’ve been grappling with in this discussion […]
After years of discussing it, today I filled in two areas in front the house with small white stones – snowchips, as the rock store called them. Rather than make roughly three hundred extra trips to Lowe’s, we ordered the rocks from a wholesaler. Thus it came to be that at around 3 in the […]