Jeremy recently said a line that he'd heard somewhere about how middle age is just the process of setting arbitrary goals for yourself. All the real achieving is done, so why not complete a marat...
A successful year with forty-one books read! A number of ones that I enjoyed. In my mini-foray into nonfiction environmental books, there were the excellent Desert Solitaire and On Trails. I fin...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/2023-year-in-review.html
To those who have asked, Amelia has said that her favorite Christmas gift is her butterfly clips: four large, plastic clips that cost thirteen dollars at Target (I’m not bitter). I remember suc...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-31-butterfly-clips.html
For the first time in my entire life, I celebrated Christmas not at my parents’ home or at the home of Jeremy’s parents, but at my home. It was a far quieter day with just the four of us, but...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-30-christmas.html
"So-bad-they're-good" movies are having a heyday, what with long-running podcasts like How Did This Get Made and The Flophouse. I'll enjoy the podcasts occasionally myself, but I rarely watch mov...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-29-bad-movies.html
Clara's been asking for weeks to learn piano. I've been hesitant, mostly because it went so poorly when I tried to teach Amelia a few years ago. We carried along for several months, but she becam...
We got back from my mother-in-law's mid-afternoon today. We'll be leaving again on the 26th to visit my parents, but we have the next two and a half days at home and no food. So what does that me...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-27-grocery-store.html
There's a cartoon that resonated with me completely when I was a new mom. It's of a mother nursing her baby, but her cell phone is just out of reach on the bed. The mom looks at the phone despera...
In an attempt to be more environmentally friendly, I've avoided using wrapping paper for the last several years. I save all the gift bags from birthdays, Christmas, and other special events to re...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-25-directed-drawing.html
The first time I saw a movie alone in a theater, it was the summer of 2004, and I was interning at the Feminist Majority Foundation in Washington, D.C. Though I enjoyed the graphic design work an...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-24-solo-movies.html
The white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) is ubiquitous in Ohio. Over 200,000 were "harvested" during the last hunting season, and yet our state still has a population of approximately 750,0...
There's plenty of Ohio jokes in the fact that yesterday I wrote about "unseasonably warm days ," and today I'm writing about snow. The first snow of the season! It began mid-morning and continued...
I've already noted that we've had unseasonably warm weather the past couple months. We're fully into colloquial winter and will soon enter official winter, yet we've had a surprising share of da...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-21-unseasonably-warm-days.html
I've been reading Claire Dederer's Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma for a couple of weeks. Dederer, a professional film and book critic as well as a memoirist, writes about one of the big questions fac...
Three years ago, I switched to a "gradeless" classroom. Instead of grading individual assignments, I provide narrative feedback on students' work, and at the end of each quarter, they write me a ...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-19-reflection.html
Jeremy and I have spent the last two nights watching Scrapper, a recent British movie about a rebellious twelve-year-old who must forge a relationship with her absent father after her mother's de...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-18-subtitles-and-glasses.html
I have a distinct memory of when Jeremy and I purchased our current kitchen table. We'd been using an Ikea table that I acquired right out of college for twelve years, and it was clear we needed ...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-17-kitchen-table.html
My dad has put up Christmas lights for as long as I can remember: fat, multi-colored bulbs strung along the roof of our house. Even though white lights, icicle lights, and others have come into f...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-16-christmas-lights.html
I came upon this line from Donald Hall in John Green's Anthropocene Reviewed: "We did not spend our days gazing into each other's eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was ...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-15-doctor-who.html
Yesterday's evening forecast called for continuous heavy thunderstorms. Still, we decided to press our luck and visit the Cincinnati Zoo for its annual Festival of Lights. We prepared appropriate...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-14-rainy-weather.html
Yesterday I had the day off work, and I spent the morning as I normally do on days when I have off and my children are in school: hiking. I went to Mount Airy Forest with a friend from work, and ...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-13-mount-airy-forest.html
Yesterday was the annual Christmas concert at school. After we got through the band performance--which sounded like a group of 6th graders who just received their instruments for the first time--...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-12-christmas-concert.html
Both my monstera and my fiddle leaf fig at home have new leaves. It seems like it should be too late in the year for new leaves to emerge, particularly on these plants, which don't push out new l...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-11-new-leaves.html
On Saturday, I took my girls to see the new Trolls movie. One of the previews was for Ordinary Angels, what appears to be a treacly, Christian-message film about ordinary citizens banding togethe...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-10-sentimental-movies.html
I debated about what to write from yesterday. I was tempted to talk about Taylor Swift. Amelia choreographed a dance to "22," which she performed for me and Clara, and afterwards we watched a bun...
http://tiasbook.blogspot.com/2023/12/essay-9-neighbors-and-taylor-swift.html