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Catless
Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years. We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. But not the same sort of sadness as to find it suddenly so… Katie lived longer than the other two indoor cats we had — somewhere around [...]
Midweek Music Break: The Fleetwoods
The Fleetwoods were one of those groups more successful than one-hit wonders — they had several hits — but they never quite broke through into super-stardom, either. They seemed to be here, and then not-here.* The group seems to have formed almost by accident: In one version, high-school students Gretchen Christopher and her friend Barbara [...]
Perfect Moments: Two Beautiful Women, a Certain Amount of Booze, and Maybe I’ve Got a Story…!
In the mid-1990s, boy, was I ever confused, perplexed, and probably (by many measures) in need of adjustment. Especially about my writing. Here’s what my quote-unquote oeuvre consisted of then: A non-fiction Op Ed memoir(ish) piece in a regional edition of the New York Times. A published mystery. (Depending on who I was talking to at [...]
Perfect Moments: “I Shot ‘im, Paw.”
The house in which The Missus and I live now is over twenty years old, as is our immediate neighborhood. But the area in general has only recently started to get built up. Real honest-to-gods wildlife, not yet squeezed out by housing and new roads, can still be spotted here and there — foxes, a [...]
Midweek Music Break: Haunting Songs
I noticed a few months back that The Missus and I have a favorite way to describe certain music. Haunting, one of us will say, and the other will nod. A very haunting sound. Haunting lyrics, aren’t they? And so on. The ingredients which go into making a song haunting, vs. all the other ways it [...]
Real-Life Dialogue: Wardrobe Culling Edition
[The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. He has stayed home from work on this day to prepare a guest bedroom for painting. In this guest bedroom is a closet, and in the closet are His clothes. All of them. Woven shirts, knit shirts, jeans, suits, ties, socks, underwear, shoes... It's not a [...]
On the “A” Word
[Image: "Left-Hand Rule." For an explanation about something other than the subject of this post, see this page at the University of Maryland's Department of Physics site.] …or: what It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has to do with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Well, no, not really. The post started out to connect [...]
Victims of Fashion (Men’s Department)
Someone, no doubt, has taken a census of active bloggers and other social-media types, focusing on gender. I don’t know what the breakdown might be; maybe I’m stereotyping at least one sex, if not both, but I would not be surprised to learn that more women than men contribute to the ebb and flow of [...]
Emerging, Blinking, into the Sunlight
If you’ve been visiting RAMH for more than a few months, you probably know I’ve been a bit… distracted recently. And it’s probably going to happen again in a few weeks, when I again take up my rock hammer, rope, and lanterned helmet, wandering back into Seems to Fit for the Nth and final time.* In the meantime, [...]
Midweek Music Break: Theme-Park Earworms
The Missus and I took a much-needed mini-vacation this past weekend, trekking off to central Florida for (among other things) our first visit to the other theme park in that neighborhood. We love amusement parks and fairs (county, state, you name it), but neither of us is a big roller-coaster fan; most of the rides at [...]