In the last two months, I’ve become fascinated with clocks and automatons. My family never owned a mechanical clock, but I had an aunt with a musical cuckoo clock, and a grandfather clock that showed the phases of the moon. I wondered what made the pendulum keep swinging (was it magnets or batteries?), and what […]

Some people begin the new year by pledging to lose weight or quit smoking. My usual pattern is to try to find two or three new obsessions each year. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that these obsessions find me! This last year, those obsessions included digital photography, photo mosaics and logic puzzles. After 20 […]