Last night, while we were out of town, a tanker exploded near the eastbound approaches to the Bay Bridge–yes, we’re talking about the infamous MacArthur Maze. The explosion has destroyed approaches to at least 3 eastbound freeways, including one that I take all the time.
Wow.
Update: more Wow…a citizen’s youtube video of the fire.
Superleggero means “Superlight”–in the realm of cars, superlight ain’t bad. It’s terrific.
The novel is widely regarded as the most desirable (and publishable) format of writing, at least for fiction. Ask a literary agent what she thinks of short story collections, and she’s likely to answer, “Whenever someone presents me with a [...]
(Note: I didn’t expect to win a 3rd Thinking Blogger Award–I had to go google for the French word for “three” (it’s “trois” fyi and if it isn’t obvious by now, I speak very very very very very little French)–if I had known that there would be a third round of these awards, I [...]
My little darling dog is wriggling and running around again. She is a bit gimpy, but very much herself again.
These days, I’m reading Floyd Skloot’s In the Shadow of Memory, a book that Barking Kitten recommended to me–the book is a memoir of his life after an illness attacked his brain and left him [...]
I read my bloglines subscriptions everyday. Yes, it’s an obsession of mine to read blogs, and I’m not satisfied until the “unread” blogs on bloglines indicates: 0. It takes awhile, I’ve got 143 feeds–I try to keep it under control, I unsubscribe to blogs now and then, and others I merely peruse…but still, [...]
yes i know. this blog reads like an awful tragedy, without any bright points, and i write in it with great fear that it will turn into a platform for utter self-absorption. and really, how can it be at all entertaining? but alas, it is my life right now.
i will look for a bright point [...]
i have had enough of phases–tragedy broken down into palatable steps. The grieving process and its phases after my stroke, and now the grieving process after a death in the family. Denial, bargaining, anger, depression…these steps are just small bites of eating horrid news and experiences.
So horrid would these experiences be, if they [...]
It has been a month since she was buried–and so ends sheloshim, the first month of grieving. The men in our house have shaved off their beards, a remarkable visual marker of this transition. After a month of not being allowed to cut their facial hair, and growing unkempt beards…they’ve appeared downstairs, each [...]
Nova listed her 10 favorite short stories, which I think is a fantastic idea–short stories get short shrift, even though they are brilliant literary nuggets. People don’t read enough of them, people underestimate them, and publishing houses scowl at them (it really is harder to publish a collection of short stories than a novel–mostly [...]
On the leg (why the HELL did I write “on the leg”–stupid aphasia). After my previous post on lacking self-soothing mechanisms, I read an old email from one of my MFA peers who decided to dump our “friendship” in the wake of my stroke. Yes, I was reading the actual “dump” email. (”First, [...]
I learned recently that the thalamus is part of a mechanism in the brain that “self-soothes.” For the first 6 months of a baby’s life, there is a lot of fear and crying because the baby has not learned how to self-soothe yet. There is no mechanism in the brain that reassures, “You [...]
These days, to distract from my sometimes grim reality, I am retreating as best as I can into a world of books, literature, movies, and stories. Complete with a soundtrack, really! There are a number of scenes and music that make me happy, no matter what I’m faced with.
I read cookbooks and food [...]
