Sheer Delight

I'm sure my mother warned me about shears. They are dangerous, after all. But was she really warning me about sheers? If she was, it's too late. They are now part of my daily life and lingo, sheers are. Turns out they are those gauzy curtains that block out the neighbors' view without interfering with most of your own. Maybe you thought they were called gauze curtains? You were wrong. Sheers. That's what our decorator calls them, and that's what Restoration Hardware calls them too. Restoration Read more [...]

Clipper

Let me report that San Francisco has been marvelous for my core...the latter being a bit of American fitness lingo. In fact, one's bodily core refers, in my limited understanding, to abdominal muscles, back muscles and so on. Always good to have a strong torso, I say. And so it has come to pass, increasingly driving the streets of this fair city, that I can boast of my strengthend core. No, there have been no trips to the gym. No weight machines. Nothing except driving. And here lies the unanticipated Read more [...]

Old

The Destination Bakery is my destination this particular morning. And I am aware of the flimsiness of this mission. It's arbitrary, unnecessary…and in my burdensome work-oriented mind, insufficient. What would suffice? The very thing I don't want, a paying job. Thus, our conditioning. Never mind, for this is not enough to deter me in any significant way. And damned if I am not bouncing out the door and down the hill well before 10 AM in search of…well, what? Well, escape from the pressures, if Read more [...]

Tense

This very morning I was imagining the next time I have to go through airport security. And thinking a lot about, not airports, but security…and, for once, I am imagining this moment with pleasure. Really, it's because at the end I can collect my “personal items" and also collect Jane. She will be waiting just outside the "security" area…but well inside the general security area that is my life. Not too much lingering on the Orwellian name for the personal frisking and baggage probing airport Read more [...]

Mi Casa

When our decorator...yes, I am surprised to say, we have one...sent us a bill for window curtains, well, things reached critical mass. We'd rather spend this on starving children, Jane said without an ounce of irony. Indeed. With the planet going to hell in a gilded handbasket, we felt like enablers. And it felt good, saying no to some cloths dangling in front of windows, a.k.a., draperies. The decorator's proposal would have draped draperies in most, but not all, rooms...at a cost equivalent to Read more [...]

In Forks

The best news this morning is that Messrs. Adobe now make document signing easy (yes, I sound like an advert)...which is no small boon to your typical quadriplegic landlord. It had been hanging over me, getting a lease signed and back to the tenant. But now it's not. My faux signature, rendered entirely on screen, is a Disneyesque improvement on my left-handed, semi-paralyzed scrawl. I needed an improvement in something. My body has been aching ever since its return from Forks, Washington. Oh, Read more [...]