Watching “Jeopardy” can make you feel smart, as I infrequently do; or watching “Jeopardy” can make you see the gaping holes in your education, as I always did when watching Amy Schneider play.
As the snow piled up last weekend, I went fishing.
It was during a phone call with my boss that the text came in.
That one piece over there, the one with the two tabs and the one hole with the red line going through it? I picked up and tried that one piece in this corner at least 8 times, never losing hope that this time it would fit.
“You still have some of it left,” my daughter said, making an air circle around my head and torso with her hand. “Better get moving.”
For a minute there, I was thinking it was that creepy Drosselmeyer’s fault.
My Smoothie, the sheltie, is about the size of a very large loaf of Italian bread. I’d never made that comparison until this week, when a bread-related incident sent me scrambling for relief – for the dog, also known as Sir Smoot – and launching me into anxiety.
My calendar has always had two seasons: bike season and sad season.
The worst part of any vacation or trip is the packing. It’s stressful enough to pack for a trip to the beach, where a swimsuit, some shorts and three shirts will do, but packing for a cruise requires more planning.
On the drive to the restaurant, Leslie talked about the salad.
The first car I ever bought new croaked on a bridge over the Monongahela River because I didn’t think to have the oil changed. Ever.
This last week of October always brings back a weird memory for me. I’m crawling through a dark tunnel, eyes shut as I feel my way, jammed between a friend in front of me and a friend behind, and I am freaking out.
Life around here changed this week when my neighbor texted me a photo.
We had one last bit of filming to do before the documentary was complete, just a couple of pick-up shots of a baseball player on the pitcher’s mound. The WQED crew and I were at Mounds Park in Monongahela this week, our fourth or fifth time there during production of the film about the youth…
Remember shabby chic? Remember the years, probably the late 90s, when it was fashionable to have worn, lumpy sofas and frayed curtains?
These are weird times to be getting a fever. But 100.4 it was, and when the body aches started, I put down the thermometer and went around the house testing to see if I could smell and taste things.
Grace was worried about me.
As of this writing, we still don’t know who will be the new host of Jeopardy!, and to be honest, it doesn’t really matter to me. Alex Trebek was, of course, the best; if we based the choice of replacement on nothing more than the way Alex said “Noooo,” then the producers have an impossible t…
The only things I’ve had to buy and restock more often than peanut butter or coffee creamer are sunglasses. Being the kind of person who weekly loses or breaks sunglasses, I’ve developed a work-around that’s involved buying inexpensive sunnies when I’ve seen them on sale.
We’ve all visited tourist attractions notable not because they are historic or particularly beautiful, but because they are weird. The Spillway at Pymatuning Lake comes to mind – the place where the carp flop over each other as they fight for bread the tourists toss into the water.
The news of it came on the radio as I was driving last Friday, and it landed with a gut punch.
Something is amiss when breakfast and dinner are identical. In my case, the symmetry meant eating Wheaties twice a day – morning and evening.
It is fact that groundhogs like watermelon, I looked it up.
The uniform was pale gray with blue pinstripes.
The last thing I said was, “right brake first, then left.”
When we least expect it, some small gift will show up, presenting itself as a harbinger of better times ahead. In this case, it was a shoe, left shoe, size 10, that made me laugh at my good fortune and, for once, believe my luck may be about to change.
That black stick that had fallen across the bike trail turned out not to be a stick, a fact I discovered just in time to lock up my brakes and avoid running over it.
On a recent dive down the YouTube rabbit hole, I came across an interview with a 90-something woman from Appalachia who walks miles a day and has the limber knees of a rag doll.
The sun was beginning its descent over the diamond when I was called up to the pitcher’s mound, and I was not prepared.
As we all know, the world has been spinning all wobbily this past year or so. We can blame the global pandemic for most of the trouble, but not all of it.
The mask with the reindeer fabric was under the passenger seat. A couple of the flimsy paper masks were jammed between the seats. And my favorite – the mask with the first lines of the U.S. Constitution on it – finally turned up. It was under the driver’s seat.
People talk about which COVID vaccine they received; they talk about where they received the jab and how they found the appointment. They talk about how they felt the next day.
That dot on the map, the one moseying along thousands of miles behind the rest of the pack? That dot would be me, on my bike, dragging my team down.
YouTube is rife with rabbit holes. Type in a topic and the page offers up so many similar videos that you find yourself pulled into the swirling depths of mindless but irresistible content.
It won’t be long before we all emerge from our pandemic dens, sluggish and fluffy after so many months of languishing. How challenging it must have been for those who count their footsteps, aspiring to the healthy 10,000 a day.
Last Sunday I took a walk. I laced up my sneakers, peeled open a trash bag, put on rubber gloves and headed down the trail to pick up litter.
Twice in the past week while reading in bed, I felt a little something crawling on my shoulder. Propping myself onto my elbow, I twisted around to have a look.
Every Saturday or Sunday, I drive the hour or so to the little college town where my daughter lives and studies. We sit on a picnic table outside her apartment and talk while she digs into her favorite take-out pizza I’ve brought from home. The meetings usually wrap after an hour or so; she …
Twice a week I fill a dutch oven pot with brown rice and water and set it to boil on the stove. After that I take two chicken breasts from the freezer and put them into the microwave oven to defrost and cook.
The great author of history, David McCullough, writes on a manual typewriter. So did the late playwright Sam Shepard. Tom Hanks owns dozens of typewriters, his favorite of which he uses to type thank you messages, noting a quick e-mail doesn’t convey real effort or gratitude.
Want to know how to appear more youthful to members of Generation Z, even if that may not be possible?
It looks like we might be moving toward the speck of light at the end of this pandemic tunnel. Maybe it’s the news of fewer COVID deaths, or maybe it’s the advent of a third vaccine that’s bringing this sense of hope.
Dinner last night was an omelet with potatoes in it. With the cupboard pretty bare and the car too encased in ice to drive to the store, I rummaged around in the kitchen and found enough to throw something together. The potatoes came from a can. It was a plate of brown, bland food.
One vitamin C, two vitamin Ds, two Bs, a cod liver oil capsule and half an allergy pill – that’s the morning routine. At night it’s a different amount of the same things, minus the allergy pill.
This is a recounting of how a search for a half-inch disc of plastic hijacked my attention for an entire morning.
Of all the many disheartening words spoken in reaction to the horrific events at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, these struck me as the most sad.
The come-ons arrive in the mail a few times a week.
Let me tell you about my poorly planned and ill-fated jaunt to the mailbox during the winter storm Wednesday night.
My friend Dana starts most days reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. And after that, she sings the “Days of the Week” song.
So, I’m reading the transcript of an interview I did for a television story, and the truth jumps out at me.
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