+1
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. […]
0
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 […]
0
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 […]
+1
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 […]
0
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. […]
0
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, […]
0
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 […]
0
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 […]
0
The longest short plane ride ever
How, you may ask, did a 45-minute plane ride from Twin Hills, Alaska to Dillingham stretch into six hours? Well, since you asked. . . I was in Twin Hills waiting for my flight to Dillingham, the first leg of my long journey home. One of the paraprofessionals from the school was waiting also. With […]
0