Greetings from sunny Walla Walla. Extraordinarily sunny and hot Walla Walla. We are in the middle of a week-long heat wave with highs in the triple digits. As I write this (Thursday evening) the mercury has just edged from 105 to 106. Yes, it is dry heat. Dry like an...

Greetings! These past several weeks it seems that I’ve been writing about sad and serious things, always looking for that nugget of good, that silver lining, of course, but. . .This week it’s time to reset my palate and veer toward things that are more casual, more...

Call it by whatever name you will, life has its seasons. Shakespeare famously visited this theme in his “seven ages of man” speech, given by melancholy Jaques in As You Like It. It’s the monologue that begins with “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women...

July, the month of patriotism in America. Or these days, maybe not. Patriotism, in my view, requires courage. Lately there’s been precious little of this coming out of the branch of our federal government known as the Supreme Court.   But I digress. Today I am...

Summer is here, and with summer comes the call to travel. Today, Lily, 9 and I embark on a road trip, 400 miles and 8 hours’ worth of driving one way, from Walla Walla to Port Townsend.   It’s not quite traversing the distance between the two most distant parts...

New week, new circumstances. Hoosegow and I are survivors.   The past three and a half years have, in some ways, been our own private reality TV show. When we moved to Walla Walla there were 7 in our household. Now our herd has been winnowed to two.Two humans,...