Or: Come ceramics shopping with me, because I've tried everything a person can do, and still, every week, I plow into at least one deer*. And I love deer. Seven months, no newsletter. Difficult, life-altering events aside, I need to stop being so precious about what I write

I have an old car, so when I'm driving, I play music through one of those Bluetooth contraptions that plugs into the cigarette lighter and tunes into FM radio. The sound rarely drops out and dissolves into static, except whenever I drive by this one Seventh-Day Adventist church.

I was researching something entirely different when I stumbled upon a painting I had seen in Florence in 2011. At least, that's what I thought – because the Uffizi Gallery didn't acquire Cecco Bravo's Armida (1650) until 2017. It might have been because Armida and