Barrel shaped cactus plant with giant cluster of white flowers with a yellow center.

Wordless Wednesday: Flowering cacti

It’s springtime for the cacti too.

Snippet of Carrie Lederer's Lost in my abstract garden is a swirl of purples and green in various floral shapes.

Palo Alto Public Art Project: Lost in My Abstract Garden on California Avenue

Palo Alto has installed eight new temporary murals designed to give residents struggling with the pandemic a bit of an emotional boost this spring. Last week, I visited the murals along California Avenue, and found myself spending a great deal of time with Carrie Lederer’s mural, Lost in My Abstract Garden.

Mural of a marching band consisting of a variety of foods playing various instruments. The mural reads Welcome to California Avenue.

The Palo Alto Public Art Project is helping us remember how to be in public spaces again

With Santa Clara County slowly resuming economic and social activities, looking at some freshly installed public art is a great opportunity to get my entire family used to roaming freely around the world again.

white blossoms on a tree branch against a bright blue sky

Detecting and neutralizing misinformation, a couple of book reviews, and other tidbits that crossed my desk this week: A Caterpickles miscellany*

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about how to detect and neutralize misinformation this week –and how to teach my daughter to do the same. Here are a few of the articles, blog posts, and books I’ve found most helpful.

Wordless Wednesday: Spring flowers

Apparently, this is the week we get spring flowers in Northern California.

Sam the Eagle and Jean Pierre Napoleon in a still from Muppets Most Wanted. I picked this photo because they have their index fingers against their face like they are thinking hard about something puzzling.

Sam the Eagle: Bald Eagle, Harpy Eagle, or Shoebill Stork?

I grew up watching the Muppets. For years I wandered through life, filled with the happy conviction that I knew everything I needed to know about Sam the Eagle. This happy state continued until I saw a video of the African shoebill stork on Twitter. It bore a disconcerting resemblance to old Sam. To make matters worse, while researching shoebills, I discovered that some think that the harpy eagle is actually the model for Sam the Eagle. There’s only one thing to do when your world has been rocked by this sort of question: compare and contrast.

First Impressions: Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

The last novel in verse I read was Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. After finishing it, I decided that novels in verse are fine, but poems are a kind of contrived way to tell a story. Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam’s Punching the Air is forcing me to reconsider.

Funny Things My Mom Says, As Recorded by The 13-Year-Old

Longtime readers will remember that in the early days of this blog I used to devote Saturday mornings to funny things my daughter said. As she got older, she asked me to stop doing that. However, given the heaviness of our current news environment, the 13-Year-Old has given me permission to post a special illustrated edition of “Funny Things My Mom Says as Recorded by The 13-Year-Old.”

Well, that sure was something

Before I resume business as usual here on Caterpickles, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge what an utterly disorienting moment we are living through…

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Someone on Twitter commented that living through 2020 had given them a new appreciation for the relentless partying that broke out during the Roaring Twenties after WWI and the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. Living through 2020 also made me think about the Roaring 20s differently. I finally understand why so many women in vintage flapper photos are giving such achingly sad side-eye.