So much for my plan to blog regularly about my post-surgical recovery. The truth is, after my total knee replacement surgery on July 18, it took a long while for me to feel up to writing anything. I don’t mean that to sound scary or ominous; rather, surgery is a major trauma to the body,…

  The surgery is tomorrow morning! I’ve been running through my checklists to make sure I get everything done. I’d set aside some time today to attend to what seemed like a huge amount of prep work—like preparing ready-to-go meals for the week ahead, and laundering the bed linens and towels—and then found that I…

With major surgery coming up next week, I’m taking a stab here at documenting my experience in case it helps someone else. Anxiety and excitement share the same physical characteristics: increased heart rate, butterflies in the stomach, singular mental focus, and so on. Years ago, I was on the eve of a skydiving adventure with…

If you subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on social media, you already know that we recently adopted a dog. Everyone, please meet Jax—aka, the Manatee of Dogs, because he is a sweet-tempered, gentle giant. Our current guess is that Jax is a Great Dane/Black lab mix—a Labradane (or a Danelab, if you want…

This week, my latest piece for Sky & Telescope was posted. The topic is burnout, seen through a stargazing lens. Honestly, I feel both relieved and kind of anxious that it’s out there now. I’d struggled with the topic for a solid month before I turned in my draft—not because I didn’t know what to…

I had an experience yesterday that I’m still stewing over, and while the occurrence itself was problematic, there are some larger issues at work, too. What better way to process than through a blog post, I guess? Burnout is a very real thing, and I’ve apparently been in varying states of autistic burnout for long…