Month: April 2025

Okay – any further tweaks to the glasses I am keeping to myself. Instead, I am assigning myself something easy but odd. I mentioned before that this book was owned by my teenaged Aunt Dolores. I’m going to try to paint that portrait (hard, but not Granceil hard) as an oil painting (perhaps less temptation…

I had to see the 270 /Manchester Road pickles for myself. There they are in the purple circle, exactly as promised. They better stay there until they are fully brined.

Today was election day in St. Louis, and in the tony suburbs where friends live, and in my sleepy burb. (A brief primer for non-St. Louisans: every suburb surrounding St. Louis is its own city, with its own mayor and police force. There are about 100 of these cities encircling St. Louis city proper. If…

Well, yet another credit card has been compromised. As in the past, the credit card company has alerted me. I get the call, I look at the statement, I see outrageous charges to hotels and florists and lingerie shops. I suppose those charges are to find out if I am the type of person who…

I was thinking about the myfitnesspal app I use to track my calories. Some vlogger bragged that she didn’t obsess about it. She didn’t track diet soda or diet jello, for example, or pills. “Good Lord, who WOULD,” I thought, and realized, thirteen-year-old me would, absolutely. Because there is safety in the rules. If you…

I watched September 5, the Oscar-nominated movie about how ABC covered the Munich terrorist attack. It tells a familiar story from decades ago, but still forces you to think about how things have or haven’t changed. One thing that remains unchanged are the phrases the reporters use to dance around the truth. In the script…

This week the tumblers went from this: … to this. I was just going to start with this value study and then add color later, but you know what? I’m just going to stop. It’s good, and if I do anything else it will just go downhill.

I was so elated to see a post about the firing of the baseball Cardinal’s manager that I immediately re-posted it to Friend #4, without reading the last few words — the ones that tagged it as a prank. One was an added touch of delight on top of a time I had recently been…