Although Pennsylvania is locked in ice, the baseball season is starting up in Florida and Arizona.  The following is the best baseball story I’ve ever written that no one has read.  It is a repost here and can be found at my website (jeff-howe.net) under “Stories” as &ldq/… Read full post »

“Keep the juices moving by jangling around gently as you walk.” – Satchel Paige

The act of walking is so basic, so elemental, so essentially human that we take it for granted.  We don’t analyze it.  We don’t think about it. We just put one foot in front of the/… Read full post »

I've been busy over at jeff-howe.net this morning doing some general cleaning and posting a few new pieces:

-  the new slide show on graphics is doing very well

- there's a new blog post called "Snooze Alarm"...  I wrote it as soon as I woke up this morning.

-… Read full post »

I don't really produce a lot of artwork in any given year, but I keep at it.   Now, after 60 years, I find that I do indeed have a body of work.   If you enjoy the pieces below, I invite you to visit a more extensive virtual slide show at my… Read full post »

There was a day in May of 1985 that was the single best mineral collecting day of my life.  Leaving my campsite before dawn, I gathered perfect garnets from a mountain of rhyolite, culled barite and staurolite crystals from rocky outwash slopes and stumbled upon pegmatites so fat that they seeme… Read full post »

When Big Novak went down, the first thing I thought about was her mother.  Scanning the half-empty stands I spotted her on the other side, in the top row with a knot of other mothers, head in her hands, staring at the court in shock, concern and disbelief – waiting like… Read full post »

On a crisp and frosty autumn day, the kind for which Vermont is famous, two friends pack day-packs and set out to traverse the Green Mountains from Underhill to Stowe.  One is a botanist, a champion of all that is green and alive – the magical life forms that have learned… Read full post »

(I have recently been diagnosed with Idiopathic Parkinsonism, a spectrum disease with no known cause and a generally less than pleasant outcome.      I've decided  to do what writers do - I'm going to use my website to  write about this affliction until I… Read full post »

“Jeez, it’s cold outside!” 

This time of year that’s a comment that you hear often, especially when the north wind rolls out of Canada and works its way beneath your coat, to your shoulders and the small of your lower back.

But it’s NOT cold ou… Read full post »

Happy New Year!

I have been working hard to fill my OS pages with rich, 14 point, Georgia* font for three years now.  It has been an honor, a pleasure, and a creative privilege to be able to do so.   In that time I have written, amongst other things, about exploding… Read full post »

The lovely and talented Candace (aka femme forte) Mann has asked me to write a “guest” piece at her sparkling new web site, Adobe Soup (adobesoup.com).  She plans to feature a series of writers in the future and I am honored to make the inaugural run. 

I… Read full post »

There was a time when I lived in a small apartment deep amongst the redwood trees in Northern California.  Out the front door were the usual staples of apartment living: a patio, a few deck chairs and a small parking lot that led through the trees to the road into… Read full post »

I teach science classes to college art students.  At first blush that may seem an impossibility, but once you get past the purple hair, fear of math and multiple body piercings, you find them to be an endlessly fascinating source of irreverent observations and colorful stories.  The… Read full post »

There’s a basic law of nature that immediately goes into effect whenever an unhandy person foolishly decides to become “handy”.   It is a survival-of-the-fittest notion that is unerring in its aim, striking the unhandy down with cunning precision.  Frankly, it’s… Read full post »

The main thing that Tom Schlegel and I had in common was the fact that we both were the only men in households full of women.   His father passed away in the great influenza epidemic of 1918 when Tom was only 6 months old.  As a result he grew up/… Read full post »

Forest fires that burn thousands of acres can be set with a single carelessly tossed cigarette butt.  Entire buildings can burn to the ground as the result of a tiny spark from the frayed end of a wire chewed by a mouse, and the family home can be destroyed by/… Read full post »

Autumn is the best time of the year.  The bugs are gone, the light is low, and the leaves are turning color and swirling in the wind. The heat and humidity have retreated south, replaced by fresh, cool air sweeping down from Canada and the Great Lakes.  The woods smell/… Read full post »

I’m looking for a buzz with the taste of fine wine, the sparkle of brew fresh from the tap, and the kick of smooth, aged whiskey.  I’m looking for a buzz that feels like the juice of a perfectly cooked cheeseburger trickling down your throat behind the crunch of fresh lettuce. … Read full post »

My Mom, Theresa A. (Howe, Sautman) Twigg passed away this evening at 5:45pm, CST.  She was a vibrant and stunning beauty who was slowly worn down by marriage, children and the 20^th Century.  Through it all, she kept her unending enthusiasm and zest.  In the end, she went spiraling down… Read full post »

It’s the hideous, screaming, bone jarring “BAM!” that I can’t get out of my mind. 

It keeps echoing over and over and over again in my head like a gun shot going off next to my ear.  It’s the broken glass and the sudden rudeness with which my car’s path… Read full post »

 (Sunday, October 2, represents the five year anniversary of the day that a heavily armed man walked into a one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and opened fire - killing five young girls and wounding others.  I was less than five miles from the school house when the shooting occurred… Read full post »

I shocked my daughter and my wife at dinner the other night when I announced that, at the age of sixty, I was thinking of taking up smoking cigarettes.  Carbon-green and healthy to the core, they looked at me like I was nuts.

“I dunno,” I said, “people have been… Read full post »

(I teach an Earth Science class for college art students. This weekend we are taking a required Saturday morning field trip. I know that many of them would rather stay home in bed. I wrote this last night to hand out in class on Thursday, the day we/… Read full post »

At 8:30 a.m. on a blisteringly hot and humid morning – it is already 94 degrees outside - I step into the deep marble air-conditioned cool of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Carlisle, Illinois. The dry wall of cold is at first shocking, but as I become accustomed to it I… Read full post »

(Cape Cod, late summer)

They were residents.  They lived here.  Zeke was a musician/house painter who fixed cars and wrote fiction.  Glenda was an oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic.  He spent his days melding seventh chords into shape and makin/… Read full post »