Bush Senior coffee mug

(every so often, Urban Outfitters doesn’t suck.)

Carry on.

Are You Ready for…Kittens??

Gypsy, the stray who adopted my parents last month, produced four little kittens this past week. Bandit, Oscar, Merry and Pippin are the names they finally settled on. So here it is, this year’s gratuitous Cute Kitten Post. You’ll have to imagine the squeaking yourself:

(even cuter in person…)

Florida Burns

Don’t come to Florida right now unless you like the taste of ashes. Even here in Tallahassee, 100 miles west of the fires near Lake City, the sky is gray and the air smells like dead bonfires.

I left for Europe ten weeks ago on March 1st, flying out of Jacksonville for New York, directly into that bitch of a tornado-spawning storm that stretched from Kansas to New England. It’s rained exactly twice since then, here in town. Neither shower lasted longer than fifteen minutes. Seventy-five days of crackling dryness.

I’ve always been a lover of sunshine, but I’ve found myself longing and aching for rain, as surely any living thing in this area has been doing of late. First the terrible pollen season, now the burnt air and dusty, wilted plants. I’ve read that we’re fifteen inches below average for rainfall this year. We’d basically need a tropical storm to hit to get back to normal—but we can’t risk the lightning.

Pray for rain! These woods that are burning are quite beautiful, the last refuges of many animals who have already lost much of their land to development. Florida needs all the forest she can keep.

Spring Semester 2007 at FSU: a summary