A Very Special Wave of the Hand 250th Post Listless List

Things I Currently Possess At Least 250 Of (in no particular order)

• Grains of rice (in 25-pound bag)
• Dollars (in bank account)
• Gas in gas tank (in ounces)
• Blank pieces of paper (for printer)
• Lined pieces of paper (in notebooks)
• Feet of thread (in sewing kit)
• CDs (blank, purchased, and accumulated from mix CD swaps)
• Dollars (in Monopoly money)
• Pieces of shredded cheese (cheddar, monterey jack, colby jack)
• Articles of clothing (if a pair of socks counts as two articles)
• Problems (with apologies to Jay-Z)
• Staples (from jumbo-sized box purchased on school shopping trip in 1995)
• Tissues (collected from Japanese street advertisers)
• Posts (in blog)

Thanks to all you readers out there, and here's to 250 more.

Ice Field

There’s a vacant lot on 6th Street in Lincoln where Arctic Glacier stores ice chests of the kind one finds outside convenience stores, and the chests look like they’ve been there a long time. This might be because of the surrounding snow, or it might be because fewer convenience stores sell ice now, and some of the chests really have been there a long time.

Places visited out of season fascinate me. Hampton Beach in wintertime, or the Mount Sunapee ski slopes bare in summer, long meadows running up the mountain with unused mechanical chairlifts strapped to the peak. In the rush and thrill of the season, we forget this is what these places really look like. So much goes unused for so long, and we miss it.