More Than Four Sides

Category: Family & Friends

  • August … Already?

    I really hate winter and cold weather, and I struggle through the dark months of the year holding out hope for the reviving warmth of the sun. I have trouble with vacations, because my hopes and expectations often don’t match the reality that is possible. So far, this summer, we’ve gone away twice, once over the July…

  • Feeling out of place

    When I left high school for college, I boarded a train in Oakland, CA, bound for Kalamazoo, MI. Looking up the AMTRAK schedules listed now, I think it must have been the California Zephyr route, which ends in Chicago, and then there is a connecting train to Kalamazoo. Why was I headed for Kalamazoo? I…

  • Addicted to reading

    S actually feel asleep tonight in a sphinx-like pose in front of his tablet, reading the first Percy Jackson book, The Lightning Thief. How can anyone sleep like that? After about 10 minutes, he finally rolled off his elbows. Good night, dear readers!

  • Mental illness … and the Nature of Evil

    The past fifty years have seen a huge change in society’s understanding and attitude toward mental illness, but stigma still remains. Just this past week, the news that caught my ear (since most of my news comes to me via NPR) was that lawmakers are attempting to make it easier to force people with mental illness…

  • FaceBook, across the political spectrum

    My daughter recently asked me: why do you keep engaging these people on facebook?! I understand the desire for conversation across political sides, but they don’t seem capable of rationality, or reading comprehension (if they’d at least post counter-arguments that were coherent, that’d be something) If you are a “friend” of mine on FaceBook, you’ll…

  • The Idea of Him

    When I met him in the first few weeks of my freshman year of college in the depths of the rural midwest, he was wearing a dashiki shirt and sandals made from old tire rubber, I thought I’d met my soulmate. He was six and a half feet tall, with strawberry blond hair, and grew…

  • Ski day

    It looks like the snow is finally gone (i hope), so before the memory fades, let me document my day off skiing with the boys. It was a Sunday, and Dad was out of town for the weekend for a business trip. When we first met, he was an avid skier, but we haven’t gone…

  • Dear Media People: Quit Using the Word “Adoption” | Raising Kvell

    Dear Media People: Quit Using the Word “Adoption” | Raising Kvell. What a fascinating article! This was shared by a friend on Facebook, and, at first I thought, “Oh dear, another rant about the stigma of adoption.”  But, I’m so glad that I read the article, as it opened my eyes to some weird and…

  • Switching seats

    For a long time now, S has claimed the passenger side seat, and J gets the seat right behind me. This arrangement allowed me to have conversations with S when J wasn’t yet talking, and S and I could make eye contact (or, at least, he could see part of my face while I was…

  • The smell of new linoleum

    I walk into the hospital complex where I work through a new entrance, which opened just a few months ago.  It’s a lovely entrance, with a security desk.  It’s of a grand entrance – a foyer – with a lot of photos of benefactors who funded this new building creating an impressive mural lining a…