I’m terribly sorry to have disappeared since, well… April 12. I got caught up in my job reporting for The Times (serving Tigard, Tualatin and Sherwood, Ore.) and funneled most of my writing energy into covering a rabbit hoarder arrested for breaking her restraining order against rabbits, a police investigation of a hobo hit by […]
Saw this caterpillar in the middle of a closed road up near the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina Aaaand, a couple more photos from a hike my mother and I took through some bear–infested territory near Craggy Gardens: Fin.
It’s a chimney swift slumber party every night in September at Chapman Elementary School in Portland. Since the late 1980s, Vaux’s Swifts have used the school’s smokestack as a roosting spot during their fall migration to southern Central America. As many as 35,000 of the small black birds circle the chimney each evening around sunset […]
If you’ve never been humbled by a plate of French toast, it’s time you make a trip to Byways Café, a 1950s diner at 1212 N.W. Glisan Street, right in the heart of Portland’s ritzy Pearl District. The down-home café serves a killer plate of Amaretto French Toast — four thick, fluffy pieces of brioche […]
The Ciprofloxacin antibiotic I’m taking to rid my stomach of the issues it picked up in Bolivia can have some serious side effects, according to Medline Plus, a service of the U.S. Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. They can include: agitation anxiety feelings of not trusting others or feelings that others […]
Need supplies to place a blessing or a curse? Find everything on your list at the La Paz Witch’s Market. Market vendors — witches, we can assume — sell their wares every day on the sidewalks and in the stores of the hillside Sagárnaga Street in the Bolivian capital. In the crowded market, you can […]
At his suggestion, Laura and I paid the immigration official at the Bolivian border 100 Bolivianos to let us into the country without the yellow fever vaccinations required for our visas. “Get the shot the first chance you get, or you’ll have to pay again when you enter other countries,” the official warned us sternly, […]
Our jeep barreled for an entire day across the infinite nothingness of the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world. For six hours straight, we saw salt, we saw sky, and that’s about it. The salar is 4,633 square miles of packed salt that measures an average of 23 feet thick. It’s […]
By CHRISTINA COOKE Chattanooga Times Free Press, Aug. 27, 2005 Kathy Berger gave up on her high school education during her senior year at Tyner High after her English teacher threw 16 of her book reports in the trash because they were late. The year was 1940, and Ms. Berger had been so busy planting […]
ESCAPING THIS PRISON would be as easy as crossing the front lawn, stepping off the property and hitching a ride to Moody’s Diner down the road for a slice of four-berry pie and a phone call. At the Bolduc Correctional Facility, Maine’s prison farm, the fences serve to keep the cows in the pasture and […]