I am writing this as I look out my window. The sky is so strange, everything is a bit yellow and when I walked outside to take the trash out it all felt kind of ominous and weird. I remember last summer felt like this too, for days and days until ash rained down from the sky. Is this our new normal?

I have a feeling it is. A feeling based in all of that science about climate change, and based in patterns of past summers as heat and drought keep rising and more and more things burn.

This current…

vix·en

/ˈviksən/

noun

1. a female fox.
2. INFORMAL a spirited or fierce woman, especially one seen as sexually attractive

Published June 29th, 2021, The Vixon, a novel by Francine Prose takes us back to the early 1950s and to a nation in turmoil over what it means to be an American, who gets to be an American, and what and who are the threats to America.

From the back cover, “It’s 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money…

On the drive down to Vegas we saw
Wild horses, wild donkeys, a dead bloated cow, upside down
Military secrets, signs for hazardous waste
We saw where aliens might have landed, might land still
Where bombs go off and off and off, testing 1, 2, 3
In perpetuity

We saw a landscape change subtly
From some green, to all brown
With specks of bush, tiny fluffs of sage
Those cacti that are famous, or protected, or rare
Joshua Trees
Arms up, dancing without movement — nothing really moves here

The car rolls on, I worry about things
Overheating, blowing up this…

We were ready to wrap up our short Vegas vacation. My car, a 2011 Subaru, made the drive down so I assumed she could make the drive back — 7 hours through the desert, with few towns in between. It was going to be a hot day, temperatures were predicted to reach 115 in and near Vegas and stay in the 100’s for most of the drive back to Reno, so we left early in the morning at around 5am.

And then it happened. Somewhere around 80–90 miles outside of Vegas my car lurched and started to shake. I pulled…

I was always proud of myself for downloading Credit Karma to work on my credit. I had perfect credit up until 2015 when I was financially taken out by a high conflict divorce and custody battle that resulted in my score dropping to the lowest of lows. But, I had Credit Karma so I felt like I was keeping an eye on things, doing my best to pay off what I could pay off, monitor what I could monitor, and even maybe one day apply for things that might help raise my credit score.

This week, I learned the hard…

My daughter and I recently took a vacation to Vegas, from Reno. Not a major vacation but still something in this time of COVID. We had originally wanted to go back home to the Midwest to visit family and friends but circumstances prevented that trip from happening and Vegas was closer. Well, 7 hours closer via road trip family vacation style. In the back of my mind no matter what vacation plans I was making is the ongoing reality of this still with us pandemic.

Traveling during COVID, even with vaccines, even with all that we have been through, is…

The drive from Reno to Vegas and back again, if you are lucky, is one of plentiful desert, beauty, mystery, adventure, and oh, okay, I have to say it — terror. Coming from Reno you will start out on good old 80 and then meander through — — to eventually get to US-95 heading towards Vegas.

Now, US-95 is where things get wild. Wild as in a two lane highway, lots of desert and if you are traveling in the summer: heat, heat and more heat. This journey is truly the definition of “the open road.” So enjoy it, but…