In February of last year, on the last day of my trip to Rio de Janeiro, I had the entire day to myself. I spent the morning riding skycars up to the Sugar Loaf Mountain and traipsing around a series of fetching wooded paths populated by tiny monkeys the size of squirrels. In the afternoon,…
Excerpts from “Blue Nights” and My Own As-Yet-Unwritten Memoir
Joan Didion wrote “The Year of Magical Thinking” after her husband, John Dunne, died of a heart attack at the dinner table, and her daughter, Quintana Roo, collapsed into a serious illness from which no doctor could retrieve her for 20 months. Shortly after The Year of Magical Thinking went to press, Quintana died as…
Luck o the Irish
This past weekend was a camping weekend for us – sort of. The Professor’s family, in years past, made a tradition of a Memorial Day weekend campout. We skipped last year, probably in large part because of our own personal upheaval (what with the move and storing our stuff and the bar exam and…
MILP Roundup # 293 and 294 and OhMyGodI’mATerriblePerson
I failed to post my MILP roundup in late February, causing a domino effect of lost MILP updates. I would claim bar exam nuttiness, but we are all busy ladies in the land of the MILPs and that is no excuse. So I humbly beg your forgiveness for screwing up the chronology, and heretofore offer the…
Snapshot of My House at Four Thirty on a Wednesday Morning
The dog, suddenly alight with some devilish notion, runs up and down the stairs a couple of times, clackety clack on the hard wood. It is pitch dark outside, an hour before the alarm should go off, but wakefulness wins out over sleep. (The dog, on the other hand, having seen to his mysterious but…