Ah, honey, that magical elixir. Put a dollop in your tea, and it will soothe your sore throat or assuage the ache in your heart, or maybe do both at the same time. It’s delicious by the spoonful and is a natural sweetener that adds some food value and calories. Come to think of it, […]
Category: Travel Stories and Other Flights of Fancy
For topics that wander off the beaten path and won’t come back.
My Martian vacation
Imagine Planet Mars from the surface of Earth: a bright, reddish star that sometimes appears in the early evening. Think next about the various reports that I had heard growing up: no liquid water, an entire surface bare of any plant or animal life, rocky soil composed mostly of iron oxide, also known as rust. […]
Oddball Earth
I am beyond picky when it comes to reading fiction, but recently I realized that one of my pet peeves isn’t founded in fact. I tend to get really irritated when a science fiction author describes a planet as a “desert planet” or a “jungle planet.” I was muttering about this to my husband one […]
Me, my sisters, and the web-crawling spider-bots
These days I am starting to get a few subscribers to this blog that don’t come from my inner circle of oft-exhorted loved ones. Thank you, new friends! I am eternally grateful to my sisters Mary and Laura, though, because for quite a while it seemed like they comprised my entire audience, and they have […]
Mosquitos across time and space
Some years ago, my husband and I took a trip to Panama, and of course we visited the canal. Of particular interest to me was finding my great-uncle James (nickname Jinks) Jervey’s name, as he had been an engineer on the canal building project in about 1903. Sure enough, the list of names in the […]
Remembering Lakeside
I haven’t been to an “amusement park” in over forty years, and I’m not about to start back up. I have two categories of amusement park: “Lakeside” and “everything else.” “Everything else” includes Kings Dominion, about an hour north of Richmond on I-95. When it opened in around 1976, we of course had to go. […]
The fourth state of matter
Weren’t we all taught in elementary school that there are three states of matter, solid, liquid and gas? It’s a nice neat concept for an elementary science lesson. You can demonstrate with a block of wood, a bottle of water, and a balloon. But along comes “plasma” to muck up the equation. First of all, […]
Adventures in caving
Southwestern Virginia sits on top of a magnificent system of limestone caves, some of which span multiple states. When I was growing up, one of our family vacations was going to Luray Caverns for the guided tour. We saw formations called fried eggs, drapery, soda straws. . .Luray had boardwalks, spotlights, vending machines, and, way […]
Would you like fire with that?
For about six weeks in the summer of 1980, I worked as a cocktail waitress in the Club Candalejas, a salsa (music) bar in Hollywood, California. I had worked as a waitress before, but this was my first time in the dog-eat-dog world of a bona fide cocktail lounge. Nobody had their own station: we […]