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When I read the news, my body reacted like I’d been slapped in the face. I went back to bed, started doing French lessons in Duolingo, and made it my entire world to win first place in that week’s Diamond League tournament. I studied French all day every day for the rest of the week, barely stopping to eat or sleep.

When I remembered, near the end of that week, that the song “‘Til I Die” exists and realized that he had now died — and so he’s no longer thinking those thoughts — I doubled over like I’d been slugged in the stomach. Continue reading “Brian”

I’ve been watching Arrested Development with my teen. We’re in season two. He’s been laughing for several minutes at one of Tobias’s lines…

“I just found out my cellular telephone was a lemon.”

This is not even a joke. But apparently, my kid had never heard that idiom Continue reading “Lemon Joke, Mashup Ideas, Rewatching “The Offspring,” etc.”

Learning Danish on Duolingo was a very different experience from learning French so far… There was less in the way of cutesy stories and characters. It was much more straightforwardly like studying with flash cards and simple exercises.

And since there were so few Danish lessons, it felt like I needed to do each and every one very carefully to get the most out of it. In comparison, the French lessons just go on and on, so I can race through them without worrying that I’ll run out of support if I’m not careful. Continue reading “French vs. Danish Duolingo”

My kid was frustrated with an errand running long last night, so I asked ChatGPT to tell us a joke about boba drinks, as we were gonna pick some up as a treat. It got so excited that I started just playing along and telling it, sure, I’d like to see whatever it suggested next… Continue reading ““Steeped in Drama””

The way Battlestar Galactica (‘04) handles politics is really exceptional. I’d forgotten just how good it is, and I don’t think I’d ever realized quite how much it affected my thinking when writing early Otters In Space.

And I wish it weren’t so relevant now. Continue reading “Back in the Pacific Northwest”

While we were in Denmark for five days, I wrote three poems, started Otters In Space 5, did some brainstorming for short story ideas, read a Hans Christian Andersen story in the original Danish, and visited the following places: Continue reading “Copenhagen Itinerary”