Waldheim Cemetery
It’s hard to avoid them. The western part of Cook County is essentially one long band of cemeteries running north-south at approximately the longitude of the Des Plaines River. Presumably, about 200 years ago, shortly after c...
Cassiopeia A (see footnote 1)
I kinda feel like I lost the first half of this year. The first four months were largely consumed by taking care of my dad, and then the next two in dealing with the aftermath (emotional, logistical, financial) of his p...
hospice window
People who know their way around the hospice experience will tell you about “the rally,” or the bounce-back. Terminal lucidity is the more formal name. For reasons science can’t speak to definitively (though there are theories), patie...
1IL2 -> 4IS3
Dad heard it first. “What the hell is that?”
I wasn’t entirely sure right away, either, but it was obviously coming from outside. A repetitive, mechanical thumping sound, distant yet growing steadily louder. Was it some piece of main...
photo by Aaron Burden via Unsplash
I don’t know where I saw it today. I was idly skimming around the internet, wasting time while waiting for some long-running job to fail and issue a series of cryptic error messages that would take me the next hour...
from a window seat
It turns out that the actual solstice doesn’t occur until 9:27 CST tonight. I thought I’d missed it. Most of us think of this day, December 21st, as the “winter solstice,” and this day is over. It’s been dark for two hours. But in...
‘wet bulb’ trending
I was the kid with weird science kits. Chemistry sets, electronics kits, mechanical toys of all varieties. I even remember an architecture kit where I learned about cantilevers and spans by snapping little plastic I-b...
Hi, friends. Still here. It’s been a busy spring, and while I’d like to use that as my excuse for being one poor correspondent for these last few months, the reality is that I had time to write, and even things to write about. What I didn’t have was ...
Some disconnected ideas on the last Sunday of winter:
Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will remember an odd plot development at the beginning of season 5. Buffy got a new sister, Dawn, out of nowhere. She just appeared in the middle of the ongoing se...
Illinois Sangamo 1910
As I mentioned last time, I’ve been floating around in a bit of an anhedonic funk, wasting time watching YouTube videos and generally not doing a damned thing. I live in a land where the TODO list grows monotonically, and...
