Our preparations were progressing smoothly yesterday, when Willem asked if I had taken my passport out. I confidently went to its usual storage place and opened the drawer to find the empty travel wallet that I usually keep it in. I looked disbelievingly at the wallet for several seconds, examining and re-examining every compartment before convincing […]

Unless you have been under a log this week, you have been barraged with countless assessments of the president’s first one hundred days in office. According to his own estimate he has accomplished more in his first one hundred days than any other president in US history. Period. I think he has convinced himself of this, […]

Friday is the day I volunteer at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA. I like the idea of contributing to the community I live in and I also love this particular attraction. The private collection is solid and the building that houses it is fabulous. I applaud the community for having had the daring […]

I marked today for cleaning the downstairs. That’s where the boys live. The boys are Vanya and Vasya, two very large, Siberian beauties with lots of hair. A thorough cleaning entails vacuuming, shaking and washing the mats around the litter box, and scrubbing the residue of any hairballs I happened to miss when they were produced. […]

I had planned the week before our travel begins to space out all the little chores that have to be done before an absence of ten days. Today was the day I had set aside to clean and vacuum the main floor of the house. You see, I have this sickness that makes me want to get […]

The photo above shows the beautiful Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, where we will be a week from now. On our last trip we stayed in the Maritime Hotel, directly across from the bridge. This time, we were bummed to find out that the hotel has been converted to a hostel. Instead, we will stay around […]

As the blog’s name suggests, the action of the story is intensifying, becoming more complicated, leading to the final denouement. In this case it is also a metaphor for my life. I am working on the plot of my current chapter, both literally and figuratively. In a figurative sense, at seventy-five, I am creating this late-in-life chapter […]