High Desert Tea

My week in New Mexico hasn’t been ideal for getting writing done, but like every great vacation, it’s allowed me to empty my brain and refill it again. On Friday, we went to the St. James Tearoom for high tea, and I refilled my brain with scones and clotted cream. In the interest of looking […]

High Desert Market

Saturday was meant to be a hiking day. We’d planned to get up at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning to hike the Pino trail to the top of Sandia Peak, taking the cable car back down. But the Pino trail has been closed for weeks due to the extreme wildfire conditions, and giant slurry […]

Sandia Summer

I’m in Albuquerque this week, in the foothills of the Sandia mountains, enjoying a holiday with friends. And by friends, I mean the Texas Blue Scale Quail that inhabit the backyard: The exotic orange-eyed Curve-Billed Thrashers that hop about in the sage and the cone flowers: And the gorgeous roses. This is “Party Time,” an […]

Summer stroll

We went hiking today on the mesa trail above NCAR in Boulder, heading for the Chautauqua trail head. Everything was perfect: the wildflowers, the color of the sky, our favorite hats, my old shoes.

Puppy pursuit

What does it take to own the perfect puppy? For us, it takes (finally) living together in the same place for more than a few months at a time. It also takes a four-wheel drive and a lot of reading. In pursuit of the perfect Golden Retriever, we’ve been researching breeders and stocking up on […]

Steering the Craft

Last night I sat up reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1998 book Steering the Craft, a collection of writing exercises for the “Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew.” I’m currently a lone navigator, getting used to being alone with my craft, so I marked a number of Le Guin’s writing exercises to try out later […]

Estes Park Wool Market

The Estes Park Wool Market had so many woolly animals to admire, I didn’t have time to buy any wool. (That’s right: I went to the wool market and bought no wool! Too much to see.) There were sheep herding demos: Golden-eyed Kashmir goats: Leaping llamas! And all kinds of insanely beautiful beasts.