Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
FEBRUARY 8, 2026 – Whenever I pick up Illiana from school on a sunny day, to get the conversation rolling, I remind her that “As I’ve mentioned before . . . between the winter solstice back in December and the summer solstice in June, the north end of the earth’s axis is leaning more and …
DECEMBER 27, 2025 – I remember the time I accidentally crushed an ant on the sidewalk. It registered on my retinas but a nano-second too late for me to rotate my leather-soled dress shoe to avoid the mishap as I rose off the downtown park bench after having finished my Subway sandwich. On my way …
DECEMBER 13, 2025 – I knew it was cold—8F—but I hadn’t taken the stiff wind into account. Two weeks had passed since I’d gotten outside for anything that might qualify as exercise. A head cold and other distractions had forced me to into “low profile” mode. On my way home from the MRI on Tuesday …
NOVEMBER 18 – For Christmas years ago my wife gave me an electronic key finder. It was her response to my periodic insanity triggered by a desperate search for lost keys. The key finder worked fine . . . until I couldn’t find the finder. Everyone loses or misplaces one thing or another at one …
NOVEMBER 15, 2025 – As the rest of the world turned in earnest, I worked (earnestly) in my own little corner of it, continuing the annual fall project I started yesterday: installing protective fences around hemlock saplings and stapling paper “bud caps” on the terminal shoots of the young white pine, all in the woods …
NOVEMBER 14, 2025 – This morning I left town a full two hours later than I’d intended. As I told Beth when she asked what my hold-up was, I said, “Clients come first.” Well, most of the time, anyway. After dispensing with biz, I backed out of the driveway and stomped on the gas. Today’s …
NOVEMBER 13, 2025 – This afternoon on my return from hill climbs in “Little Switzerland,” I espied my hearty friend and neighbor Fred corralling leaves in his well-attended yard of his well-appointed house. (When Beth and I were newbies to the neighborhood nearly 40 years ago, people referred to Fred and his late wife Carol’s …
NOVEMBER 12, 2025 – When I was a kid, Dad bought a fancy-shmancy lawn sweeper to replace the rake that he’d used every previous fall. It was from Sears Roebuck, which meant he had to assemble it himself. I remember watching him pull the parts out of a large cardboard carton labeled, “Craftsman” and assemble …
NOVEMBER 3, 2025 – On this fine day in the city, we left it in favor of a tour of the “Filoli Historic House and World-Class Garden” in rural San Mateo County, 40 minutes and 100 years south of San Francisco. I’d visited the attraction a little over 45 years ago[1], five years after it …
NOVEMBER 2, 2025 – After falling back off daylight savings time, we should have re-calibrated our body clocks to coincide with the early morning sun. Instead, we opted for an extra hour of sleep. We didn’t launch ourselves out of the house, however, until noon. Beth and Kerri headed for Suffs, the road show version …
OCTOBER 30, 2025 – The first highlight of our trip to San Francisco, of course, was our happy reunion with Russ and Kerri. Our connection ties back to common ancestors of Russ and me: Emma and August Svensson, our great grandparents. After introducing us to their quarters (between September and November)—and ours for the next …
OCTOBER 25, 2025 – When you spend lots of time outdoors, especially at the beginning and end of the day, you become attuned to the tilt of Earth’s axis and its effect on the duration and intensity of sun-generated heat and light. At this time of year, especially in more northern latitudes, you become acutely …
OCTOBER 5, 2025 – Over supper this evening back home, my wife and I watched some cable TV news. Big mistake. Giving us a bad case of indigestion were Trump’s weekend speech touting a trillion-dollar military budget and Hegseth’s “warrior talk” about using the military against American civilians in blue cities. These reports were chased …
OCTOBER 4, 2025 – Today we and our Red Cabin guests awoke to unseasonably warm weather and a stiff breeze sweeping out of the south across the lake. Beth served from a large pot of coffee, while I fixed a breakfast of oatmeal and side dishes of fruit, nuts, and an assortment of natural sweeteners. …
SEPTEMBER 29, 2025 – I’d planned to return home today, leaving at around 2:00 to arrive home around the time our almost 10-year-old granddaughter finishes her weekly real-time, online art class. My wife signed her up for the classes, and we’ve developed the Monday routine of picking her up from school, taking her to our …
SEPTEMBER 28, 2025 – (Cont.) At the outset of my Pergola-on-a-Platform project, I’d scoped out a site inside the 20-acre (give or take) tree garden behind the lake frontage. I sought the intersection of three geographic features. The first was one of the trails that crisscross the garden. I imagined that the pergola platform would …
SEPTEMBER 27, 2025 – Fifty years from now, historians studying our era will try to tease out the underlying ingredients and catalysts and analyze their interactions. I say 50 years, because as the great German historian, Leopold von Ranke (1795 – 1886) purportedly advocated, no history worth reading can be written without the perspective of …
SEPTEMBER 24, 2924 – If I were Gilgamesh or Noah and knew the big flood was coming, I wouldn’t limit my response to construction of one ark and restrict access to passengers from the animal kingdom plus my wife, sons and their wives. I’d build a whole fleet of arks, and when God asked, “What …
SEPTEMBER 1, 2025 – Whether or not we acknowledge our circumstances, we are always and in all places part of nature. That is, we’re captive to the immutable laws of physics, the infinite range of chemical reactions, the irresistible forces of geophysics, and the unending wonders of biological processes. It matters not whether we’re glued …
AUGUST 23, 2025 – For the past two days I’ve been at the Red Cabin continuing work on the Pergola-on-a-Platform, a project I started last June. For a good month the project resided mostly in my head until it spilled onto one, two, then multiple pages of sketchbooks. For most of July I got down …
AUGUST 13, 2025 – Today (now yesterday) my wife and I spent in a kind of nirvana—otherwise the Red Cabin in the company of our younger son, his wife and their two-year-old son. For one more full day at the lake, we got to interact with the little guy and watch him absorb all that …
AUGUST 12, 2025 – The bald eagle holds a special place here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. This is befitting since back in the day, the eagle had no place here. Only after the total ban on DDT did this once endangered species return from the edge of extinction. Today bald eagles in these parts …
AUGUST 11, 2025 – Yesterday our grandson turned two. The occasion was celebrated by a crowd of well-wishers around the long table on the porch of the Red Cabin. He is of the fifth generation of Nilssons to enjoy the beauty of Grindstone Lake in northwest Wisconsin. Everyone showered him with smiles and attention as …
AUGUST 10, 2025 – Today our crew—Cory and family, Byron and family, Beth and I—took an extended lake cruise aboard Northern Comfort. After steaming the long diagonal from home port to the channel into Little Grindstone, thence west-southwest along what I call the “Barbary Coast,” I changed course toward the islands in the southwest. Very …
AUGUST 9, 2025 – The gathering had been in the works for a while. Our immediate family (and our sons’ families) would spend a few precious days this month at the Red Cabin on the northwest shore of Grindstone Lake in northwest Wisconsin. Joining us would be Kumar[1] and Emma, close friends of Byron and …