IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Fat Bear Week is starting early this year! www.npr.org/2025/09/19/n...

Skype a Scientist executive director Sarah McAnulty had told her cats that people without an eel facts advent calendar may one day be at a “deleterious deficit of eel information” compared to those who do not participate in eelvent in 2025. (EelFacts.net)

A while back I saw a post here that referred to their phone as "the anxiety machine that lives in my pocket" and I think about that daily ... and yet somehow don't take the hint.

The cat has informed me that I cannot go to work today, I must stay home and pet him.

I wish there was a way to summon a Mister Softee to your block.

"GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert."

Following @sarahmackattack.bsky.social is making me wish I lived in Philadelphia, a feeling I have never had before in my life.

My kid has gotten obsessed with a gaming podcast and just spent nearly an hour explaining to me, in depth, the lore and controversies of a game franchise neither of us has played or will ever play. Please send help.

We've had this cat for six months and he's just this morning discovered the axolotl tank. We are carefully monitoring this development.

so majestic

Look I'm having a pretty crap day, but then there's this guy with his cute little feet.

This is the most Gen X mood thing I’ve seen for a long while. I don’t care if it’s not originally of the period. It is the bullseye.

Friday off from school and everyone was like, have a restful weekend! Meanwhile I spent the day baking: bread for next week, pizza for dinner, strawberry cupcakes and lemon cookies for one family event this weekend, three flavors of rugelach for another one.

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

@maryrobinettekowal.com We are just starting the Fluent Pet buttons with our cat! You and Elsie have been inspiring. 😀

It's been so long since I read a book at the beach that I forgot what sand does to mass market paperbacks.

I do think the gharial might be my favorite predator. At least at this zoo.

Saturday morning at the zoo.

No offense to my real life or anything, but I would prefer to stay on vacation forever.

I don't remember who recommended "We Solve Murders" by Richard Osman, but whoever it was, thank you! This book is delightful, which is a weird thing to say given the high body count, but true nonetheless.

Aaaaaahhhhhh so excited about this.

The insanity of being a fire ecologist in the epicenter of a major fire event, bags packed and ready to evacuate, watching active fire from my window, while taking media requests and explaining to the public, for the 100,000th time how climate change is largely responsible for this

I used to be very skeptical of people who were all, oh no, I can't get up, there's a cat in my lap. But now I am one of those people. I had all sorts of stuff to do today, but the cat climbed on my lap and fell asleep, this is my afternoon now.

Tried to soothe my election anxiety with a long hike at Harriman State Park. It mostly worked.

My kid described this book as "imagine if Amazon and Tesla had a baby, but it was a town and you had to live in it."

The kiddo stayed up late last night to finish Happy Town. I'm sure you have a lot of big fans, @gregvaneekhout.bsky.social, but my kid is one of the biggest. He ran up to his room to read when I showed him it had arrived in the mail.

I'm sorry, this story is apparently real, and it is amazing. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/...

I rode pedal-bike go-karts around Governor's Island all morning with my kid, and I'm thinking a lot right now about the value of play.

I couldn't get anyone in my household interested in how deeply and profoundly weird and unsettling this story is. wapo.st/3WX5Ju3

Yay pokeweed! I have to be careful not to let it entirely take over my yard, but I've been letting a couple big pokeweed plants stick around every year. They're very showy and they get very tall.

Today's London adventure.

We started re-watching The Good Place, this time with the kiddo, and the further we get into this show the more convinced I become that D'Arcy Carden is the best comic actor working today.

"if you see this, post or quote post with a tree or tree-lined path." This is from a walk I took yesterday at the New York Botanical Garden.

Just spotted the first lanternfly nymphs of the season. Sigh.

Our pre-order of Puzzleheart arrived yesterday; despite promising he wouldn't, the kiddo stayed up way past his bedtime reading it, today said @jennreese.bsky.social is one of his favorite authors ever.

Just introduced my sixth-grader to the pomodoro method, he now thinks I'm a genius, I'll take it.

That was crazy! We never have earthquakes here, I'd forgotten what they feel like.

There is going to come a time in my life where I'm too old to keep taking 6am flights.

I just started Cahokia Jazz and the dedication ("In respectful memory of Professor Kroeber's daughter) has already brightened my day.

No seriously, this "Bigfoot is just black bears" thing is absolutely making my day, and I can't even explain why, it just makes me very happy.

THIS IS AMAZING.

Very happy with the flavor balance on my cookie plates this year.

Today's Bonne Maman advent offering is my favorite so far. (Raspberry and dark chocolate.)

I admire Mister Softee's hustle but it's like forty-three degrees out.

A substantial handful of our trick-or-treaters tonight were teenagers who had drawn on their faces with eyeliner or something and were using their school backpacks as treat bags, and you know what, they get candy too. Life's too short to gatekeep the fun.

I am redoing a moderately small area of my yard, and in a fit of optimism and enthusiasm I just ordered, like, sixty dollars worth of seeds. That's a lot of seeds, thousands of plants worth of seeds, all gorgeous native wildflowers, but I am planning way bigger than I can execute.

Today's hike kicked my ass a little bit, on account of I am middle aged and overweight and it was six miles with about a thousand feet of elevation, but it was also amazing, so there's that.

Knocked a couple of items off the paralyzing to-do list yesterday and then ignored the list entirely today in order to go hiking. If you never make room for joy, all you ever have is the work, day after day after day.

Halloween costume shenanigans are underway.

This morning my eleven-year-old announced at breakfast that "the Enterprise E is the derpiest ship," in case anyone was wondering what happens when two former college science fiction association co-chairs raise a kid together.