family observations

Columbo’s Dead Air Space – Johnny Cash Edition

My husband enjoys watching reruns of Columbo. For the kids out there who aren’t familiar with Columbo, this is a TV series that features actor Peter Falk playing Los Angeles homicide detective Lieutenant Columbo. Columbo always appears to be bumbling around while solving the murder, but he always knows right away who did it. Whoever he hounds the most is the one who committed the crime. Having watched the series too many times to count,…

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family home products projects

Easy Shed Installation

Arranging the space in our new house continues a year-and-a-half in. While we have significantly pared down from our previous house and business, we still have more to jettison. We’ve also discovered that the garage isn’t quite big enough to hold lawn tools and equipment along with vehicles, so we decided we needed a shed. Longtime readers of this blog might suspect that Hubby and I are fairly handy, having torn out plaster and lath…

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health history pragmatic historian reading

Can’t Get Scalzi’s Lock In Series Out of My Mind

My book reading pace has not slowed this year. So far, I’ve read fourteen-and-a-half books, and we’re not even half-way through the year. It’s like I’m playing catch-up on the low-reading years or something. It helps that I’m reading mostly fiction, which I tend to read faster than nonfiction. I’ve also continued on my John Scalzi book binge, which I wrote about last month. Since then, I have read the first two books in Scalzi’s…

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family home nature observations

Suburban Wildlife

After living in a rural town most of our lives, a little over a year ago, we moved to a suburban city. One of the biggest surprises about our new home is how much “wild” wildlife we see here. Sure, at our previous home, with its large backyard enclosed by trees and bushes, we saw plenty of squirrels, rabbits, birds, and butterflies. The robins had parties in our yard in the spring, plucking through the…

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reading

Scalzi Book Binge

Normally, I read between 20 and 25 books per year, a mix of fiction and nonfiction. In 2022, I only read 4 books the entire year because we were packing and finishing up home improvement projects in order to sell our house. In 2023, I managed to read 13 books, well below average, because we were still sorting and getting rid of stuff from the move, as well as clearing out long-term storage and helping…

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