This family bleeds Farmall red

My brother checks out a Farmall during our annual Thanksgiving rite of scamper-on-the-tractors.
At an antique tractor show last fall, I had the chance to drive an old restored Farmall tractor in the event’s short parade of vehicles — an International Harvester Farmall B Cub. What I know of these machines has been introduced to me [...]

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Bees Through the Looking Glass, part 2

Note: This post is part of excerpts from an essay I wrote in 2007, part of my continuing experiment. Here’s part one.
Most days in the winter, when the daylight hours are shortened by the tilt of the Earth, I steal up to my 6th floor museum office and turn on my computer in the dark. [...]

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Gearing up for Green Acres

Quadrupeds like this one, born in March, will be our new neighbors in June.
I offer here a bit of unsolicited advice, should you be so foolish as to take on the following simultaneously: a high-energy job, graduate school, remodeling not one but two bathrooms at the same time, learning how to blog, becomming a landlord, planning [...]

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Why we get along (most of the time)

In this, the penultimate year before the big 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (and his 200th birthday to boot), I’ve been tucking in evolutionary concepts into a couple of the unoccupied nooks and crannies of my brain. I always feel underead, and in areas of science, the pangs of inadequacy are [...]

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Bees Through the Looking Glass

The bees at the museum where I work began to die last fall. More generally, bees were struggling nationwide (and may be still, though it’s early in the spring and hard to tell).

My writings about the museum bees became a full-length essay called “Undertaking at Dawn” that recently won me [...]

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