Meant to post this yesterday. Happy lunar new year everyone.
GO PHILLY!
The other night I dreamt that the earth’s atmosphere spontaneously boiled away. Magnificent special effects, the swirls of white carrying the blue sky into the blackness of space, but then we were all still there, standing around, wondering at it, talking about it. Shouldn’t we be dead of asphyxiation? I wondered. And wouldn’t the temperature be swinging wildly from day to night? So I checked my phone, as one does, and indeed Weather Underground predicted a high of 180°F the next day.
Cozy studio, fresh pot of tea, birds at window, snow outside. What could be better? How about all of the above, and also not cutting my finger?
Proper snow at last. Not much, but I’ll take it.
I finally cleaned up and shared the high school environmental science curriculum I developed for home school: The Earth From Home. It opens with Wendell Berry’s NEH lecture “It All Turns On Affection,” relies as much as possible on North Carolina ecosystems and resources, includes lots of field trips, and ends with a 15-page research paper. Or you can just play with the nonlinear population modeler I built.
Here’s a little tip for all y’all thinking about staying in and cooking this weekend: lentil soup is much better if you remember to put in the lentils. Ask me how I know.
In Which the Morton Salt Girl Falls on Hard Times
Ran across an outline for a story about the Morton salt girl: The trouble started when Morton needed a new slogan. People used to non-clumping salt didn’t get “when it rains it pours.” in-house ad guys come up with “we gather it ourselves for purity.” But they don’t. Executive (chomping cigar, etc) says “send the girl!” The Morton salt girl, happy for a hundred years except for the occasional bout of pneumonia, is sent to work in salt mines of Bolivia.
“All We Need Is Here,” December 2024.
