The Coffee Scoop

My sister, Cindy, and I live on opposite ends of the country and rarely see each other. When my mother died in the Autumn of 2001, we each packed our bags and headed to Mom’s condo in Arizona. There we spent a week together to arrange and hold Mom’s memorial and to empty the place out. We needed… Read More »

My favorite YouTube channels

Since I wrote a long post listing my favorite TV shows, I thought I’d follow that up with another source of my screen time: YouTube. While there are many other channels I turn to, this post lists the YouTube channels that I watch with some regularity. Here’s a list of the topics in case you want to skip… Read More »

The high cost of the work-to-live treadmill

My mind broke a little bit today. Unable to sleep in the wee hours this morning, I [foolishly] picked up my phone and was browsing through a few social media outlets when I came upon a post that put into words something that I have very worriedly obsessed over for years. This worry has seemed so big, so… Read More »

TV Gems

I used to treat this as a shameful secret, but a few years ago I came out with the truth: I love to watch TV. As apparently lots of folks have extra time on their hands [I started writing this up during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020], here is my list of favorites. There… Read More »

The lasting effect of kindness

Recently I came across a document that is meaningful to me in several ways: the divorce document from January 1987 that finally ended my first marriage. As I held the papers in my hands, I smiled as it brought to mind something that, at first glance, seems unrelated.

Eagle demonstration

A number of years ago, my brother and I were driving toward town in Ilwaco, Washington. It was a crisp early-Autumn morning, and the sun was positioned just right so that everything was backlit. Just as we pulled up to a stop sign, a bald eagle swooped low in the sky in front of our car.

My spatial idiocy

Nothing spatial is intuitive for me. Up or down, above or below are clear. But when I encounter left or right, clockwise or counter-clockwise, east or west — I have to put intense effort into matching the word with a direction.

Simple thoughts about the end of everything

Today I am pondering the potential for the recycling of the universe. We know that the universe has been expanding from the instant of the big bang, and we also know (well, theorize) that this expansion is accelerating.

On traditional opera

I love many kinds of music, including classical — especially modern classical, and particularly the music of Philip Glass. But despite my fandom of Glass and my adoration of his earliest work in opera, I have a confession to make:

Glass surprises

Whenever I talk about Philip Glass to people outside of the musical world, I usually meet with blank stares. When asked if there was anything by Glass that they may have heard, I start listing some of the many, many soundtracks that Philip Glass has scored (and repurposed), and I usually get an “a ha!” from the person… Read More »

My obsessive Glass collection

I am quite a fan of the music of Philip Glass, and for many years I’ve purchased almost every CD of his music that I could find. In the mid 20-teens I slowed down this trend, as there are so many recordings

Image metadata standards

I’ve been on a quest for the perfect Digital Asset Manager — DAM. One of my requirements is that the program must write all of my added tags, captions, or descriptions to the file’s metadata, not to a separate file or into a database. My partner pointed out that this topic is a quagmire of competing standards, and… Read More »

Dallas, Texas – February 2020

it didn’t take much effort to find things to impress in Dallas. From now on, when asked what I think of Dallas, I’ll talk about the wonderful art and theater scene there rather than how nice it was to rent a car and drive away.

Kathleen’s dehydrated red peppers

Wanting to make full use of my food dehydrator, I thought I’d try to dry up some foods that would be good ingredients to have on hand for those days when we couldn’t make it to the store. I decided on one of my favorites: red bell peppers. I’d only dried apples up to now, so I thought… Read More »

Kathleen’s Dehydrated Apples

Is there anything as satisfying as the crispy crunch of a nice, thick potato chip? Well, yes: the crispy crunch of a dehydrated apple! If you love a crunchy finger-food snack but would rather skip the calories and saturated fat, this is the way to go. Of course apples are not calorie-free: a medium-to-large apple has about 80-110… Read More »