Dear Government Goons of Trump – Forgive me for not being more specific in addressing you, but when you showed up to peaceful protests in Portland last month without identification and ready to bash heads and teargas people, “goon” is the kindest word I can think of to describe you. Can we talk about your behavior the last few years? Supposedly, you goons are from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which also heads up…
It’s been a while since I last posted a Frankensteining the Talent Pool (FtTP) suggestion. If you are unfamiliar with FtTP, this is a blog feature I have come back to again and again since starting my first blog in 2006. The history of it is here. No need to rehash it again. So, today’s idea for bringing creative people together to create something new feels so obvious I’m surprised I didn’t think of it…
As I’m out and about walking the dog or mowing the lawn or peering out a window or whatever, I’m keeping an eye on nature. I’m not sure if that makes me a naturalist or a phenologist or just curious about what’s going on around me, but I especially enjoy plants and birds. This year, a pair of woodpeckers built a nest in one of our oak trees. I had noticed that woodpeckers had made…
Happy Easter! Given the pandemic and the necessary stay-at-home order we are under, this is not a normal Easter. On a typical Easter, we would be getting together with family to eat a nice dinner and socialize. It would also be somewhat warmer. Instead, we are all in our individual homes doing homely (in the British sense of the word) things and it’s around freezing in Minnesota, with snow in the metro. I am writing…
During the last meeting of our local writers group, we did a speedy writing assignment. This happens when group members run out of things to share. We didn’t have any sort of assignment prepared in advance, so we took the first line of a book one of our members had with her and used that as a writing prompt. The book was The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe and the first line was: “The…