Giving Thanks for … Chard

And why not? It’s the last ragged remnant of my harvest. The tomatoes visible behind the chard are actually riddled with fungus. They wouldn’t taste like summer anymore, anyway. After taking months to recover from our pair of hungry bunnies, the chard is still bitterly delicious. It apparently enjoys a light flirtation with frost. I [...]

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Non-Jaundiced Memories of Newborn Days

My next-door neighbors, who just welcomed an infant daughter into their lives, had to make a trip to the ER today because she appeared jaundiced. She’ll be fine, the doctors said. She won’t need to be readmitted. They were lucky.
I was glad for my neighbors. But as I heard their story, I also flashed back [...]

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Classical Gas Approaches Plasma, Asymptotically

I haven’t been very bloggerific lately. Real life – teaching, grading, watching kids’ soccer – has cut way into my time for writing. So in lieu of my half-baked thoughts, this (via Jim Yeager at Skippy the Bush Kangaroo):

Tommy Emmanuel shows his virtuosity, but his technical brilliance is never overshadowed by [...]

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My Adventure As an Electro-Pincushion

If you’ve been reading Kittywampus for a while, you know that I’ve had some weird health problems ever since Inauguration Day (a coincidence that still amuses me, when I’m able to laugh about my problems). For a while there, I thought I was losing my ability to think straight. Maybe I did lose it; you [...]

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Caturday: Baby Lions in Columbus!

Congratulations to mama lion Asali and daddy Tomo, parents of three cubs born on September 22.
(Photo: Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, via the Columbus Dispatch)
A few days ago, zookeepers finally got to check them out, acccording to the Columbus Dispatch:
The triplet lion cubs born at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium two weeks ago got their first [...]

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Lefthandedness, Intersex, and Biological Variability

My son the Tiger is lefthanded. He’s getting pretty good at invented spelling, which our teachers stress in kindergarten and the first grade. His classmates’ writing is often tricky to decipher, but the Tiger’s requires skills in cryptography. Or a mirror. Because if he’s not prompted otherwise, he’ll write right-to-left and produce a perfect mirror [...]

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The Music That Makes Me Cry

Just over five years ago, my husband suffered an autoimmune attack on his nerve system. It was sort of like Guillain-Barré, but not exactly. It may have been a mix of a paraneoplastic syndrome (the body running amok due to cancer) and a case of MADSAM (aka Lewis Sumner syndrome), which damages peripheral nerves, though [...]

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Feminism and Maternal Pleasure: Getting the History Right

Katie Roiphe isn’t wrong when she says feminist thought is underdeveloped when it comes to the pleasures of mothering an infant. I personally would extend this critique to the pleasures of parenting an infant, and the pleasures of parenting children at different ages, too. Of course it’s not just feminist writing that has failed to [...]

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Dog Days Caturday

Whoever dubbed this hot stretch of August the “dog days”

knew

absolutely

nothing

about

cats.
(All photos taken by me, Sungold, at the Columbus Zoo yesterday in 90 degree-plus heat. Fur is not necessarily an advantage during these, um, cat days.)

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Fifteen Years

Today is my fifteenth anniversary; my husband’s and mine. Fifteen years, solid and fragile.
So many things might have derailed it. I might not have arrived in the line for Berlin Philharmonic tickets, breathless from running, just seconds before the man I would marry. We might have decided that the two-continent problem was just too big [...]

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Why Everyone Should Have …

… a butterfly bush.

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The Cloud of Doom

We’ve been having some uproarious thunderstorms in Berlin. This was the view off our balcony just before one of them broke at dusk two days ago. Yesterday, the whole family got caught out on bikes during a downpour that featured both thunder and sunshine – all at once.
My mood’s not actually one of impending doom. [...]

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The Birth Plan that Got Skunked

Exactly six years and two hours ago, my little Tiger slipped out his wet, dark, fetussphere and arrived fully in this world.
I’d been apprehensive about his birth, because my first delivery had been pretty horrendous. (I’ll leave the scare stories to another day, though.) So here I was, this feminist critic of medicalized birth, wanting [...]

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On the Last Day of School, Slightly Cosmic Gratitude

I’m not a Mormon, but I’m fascinated by their idea that pre-born souls are lined up in another dimension, waiting for their entrance ticket to the Earth. My husband and I were just discussing how remarkable it is that we got precisely these two kids, the Bear and the Tiger. In particular, we were marveling [...]

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The Wrapped Reichstag in Motion

Okay, so this is pretty far afield from my blog’s usual fare – but it’s pretty cool, too, so I can’t resist. Thursday I accompanied my kids’ classes to the spring performance of the university’s School of Dance, which is one of the really strong programs here. All but one of the pieces were riveting [...]

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Scenes from a Chinese Restaurant: Why Equality Is the Future

The evening after Prop. 8 was upheld, I went out to dinner with my family at China Panda. The food there is pretty good, but the TVs that are mounted on the wall are a distraction, even with the sound off. The last time I’d been there, Dick Cheney’s snarling mug was befouling the ambience. [...]

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Digging Aggression

Following up on my last post about my run-in with a raucous proponent of ev psych, I should clarify one thing: I do believe humans are naturally aggressive. We don’t learn aggression as kids. We learn how to channel it, sure. But the impulse is with us from the beginning – possibly from the first [...]

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Sexuality and (the) Incarnation

I realize Easter isn’t about the incarnation of Jesus, it’s about his death and resurrection. But honestly, Good Friday has always seemed so brutal to me, I get stuck on the story of his suffering and never arrive at the empty tomb. I’m too creeped out by the cruelty.
So even if it’s unseasonal, I’d rather [...]

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Seeds, Sentiment, Magic

Sorry to illustrate a post about seeds with a flower I grew from a bulb, but hey, this is what’s blooming in my garden today. The photo shows my little rock iris.
Today I started to plant my garden. Well, that’s the truth if you don’t mind a little embroidery. My garden is entirely indoors, so [...]

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The World Sparkles and Spins to a Halt

Last time I posted a picture of this vine, it bore a clematis blossom.
Today we woke up to an ice storm that kept the kids home from school for the third day running. They’ll be home tomorrow, too; we’ve blown through all of our snow days, and then some.
The university closed due to weather for [...]

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