Although the travel party usually heads abroad for Christmas, this year Ray took a spring sabbatical off from university teaching at the start of 2023, freeing us from voyaging over the high tourist season at the end of December. Nonetheless, flights were prohibitively expensive to Australia, New Zealand, or Buenos …
Kon Marie in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up counsels letting go when an object no longer sparks joy, acknowledging service well rendered and wishing the object good journey on to its next home. I wish in 2023 to thank so many of my life aspects for service well rendered. …
This year, my life began its transition into a new chapter, a quieter and more insular one. A lot of what brought me to San Francisco has left. Friends have either moved away, broken up, no longer go out, or drifted onward. I do miss conspirators to paint the town …
With pandemic raging through the new Omicron variant of Covid, we wanted this year to travel somewhere close, sunny, and rural. We chose Costa Rica for a jungle and beach adventure. Ruben prefers cities to high-flying treetops, but Ray and I did go with stalwart traveler Adriene, her entomologist beau …
2021 may have fared even worse than the miserable 2020 as the pandemic dragged on for an unexpected further year. We got vaccinated, but still many venues remained shuttered. How much longer do we wait? 2021 brought too much illness. In February, my Mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Before …
On the first day of January, the omicron variant of coronavirus spikes cases in the United States to new daily highs, cancelling flights, clogging airports, and closing New Years Eve festivals. Along with the rest of the country, I’m languishing. We’re two months away from the two year anniversary of …
In two days, on April 1, I receive my second vaccination shot at the massive and efficiently run Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco to which I take my afternoon walk down decrepit Market Street. My company joined the rest of Bay Area biotech to call me a lab …
For most of March, I budget thirty minutes each day to organize and clean another section of my little apartment. I tackled a bedroom closet yesterday and today move on to the entrance hallway and its floor. Wrestling a bulky mattress off the frame, I pulled out a gray dirt …
Stephanie wonders whether I have a degenerative neuromuscular disease. Coming from a practicing neurologist, her prognosis spirals me into days of reflection. I’ve never had a body similar to anyone else. So scrawny as a kid, my elbows and knees were oddly double-joined. My toes are not independently flexible, more …
My poor Mom has Alzheimer’s. I have not been home in over a year due to Covid and growing distance from my aging parents. At the end of February, during my weekly weekend calls home, I could tell that Mom was getting both increasingly confused and delusional. She mixed up …