The Lone Prairie Blog

My small hometown post office. As it turns out, sending a Christmas present to Germany is more difficult than crossing the Maginot Line.

I’m not new to inappropriate Thanksgiving tales, but a decade ago, after significant professional degradation during this time of giving thanks, I discovered that chocolate was king and some people just deserve the side-eye.

While watching my overweight cat swat his partially empty food bowl around and while looking at me accusingly, I was reminded that there are several ways a civilization can fall, some more dramatic and worthy of historians’ attention than others. I considered how the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that unfortunate trajectory we are all on, in which entropy (disorder and randomness) always increases as time goes on. I also considered people who don’t put away their shopping car

In February 2006, I ordered a copy of the book A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose. Originally an essay, the author, B. R. Myers, expanded it into a tidy little book that took a swing at the growing pretentiousness in literary fiction. Mixed metaphors, odd imagery, weird word choices.

I got a new Bible last week. This is kind of traumatic.

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved. I don’t know how the kids did it, during the pandemic. I don’t know how they were able to learn via Zoom and online platforms. How were you able to, for example, diagram a sentence without spitballs flying overhead? How were you able to work the quadratic equation without some moron in the back row tossing freshly sharpened pencils into the ceiling tiles? How were you able to learn without textbooks, piles of paper and noteboo