Charles Frenzel

Yesterday was my seventy-fourth birthday, a not particularly auspicious or momentous event. My wife was away on business and my best and closest friend, Jack, ( he claims that I am his favorite American author, bless his heart) took me down to Portland where we feasted on turkey and steak pies at a British Pub […]

I was a child. My first encounter with the idea of chaos sent me spinning headlong into a panicky contemplation of emptiness. I retreated from this awful, mistaken vision of chaos to the human nature of natural laws. I committed the error of logical positivism by retreating from a subjective understanding of science to the […]

I built my first telescope in 1953. It was an affair of left-over optics from the local eyeglass shop. The lenses were glued into a cardboard tube left from Christmas wrapping paper. It turned out to be good enough to watch a neighborhood girl kissing a boyfriend in their tree house on the next hill. However, […]

One dictionary defines a Monocule as: A small crustacean with one median eye. My coinage of Monocule is completely different. On Twitter©, monocules are, well, plainly silly and are apparently related to a misapprehension of monocular as an optical instrument that lacks stereoscopic vision qualities. Here’s what I think. I think I have a grand theory which will lead to a complete […]

I have been a fan of Bill Moyers for many years. I may not always have agreed with him, but I have watched him grow from his days with President Johnson and believe that he is one of the most dedicated defenders of the American people. He chooses people with wisdom and debates their answers […]

There’s a charming little coffee house called Brewed Awakenings near where we live in Vancouver,  Washington. Lydia and I come to write here most mornings. I sit by the window and see Mt. Hood in the distance. Snow still covers its peak. Fall is creeping in at our lower altitude, and the leaves on the trees are beginning […]

Walfer Falls, a medium sized town west of Fort Worth, sat on top of the largest gas field ever discovered. A couple of engineers and one drilling superintendent were privy to this information, and they were sworn to secrecy with hints of the kinds of unfortunate things that would happen to them and their family […]

The beginning of an enchanted evening. Star gazers welcome. The sky cleared out later that night. It amazes me how much you can see when the air is clean, even if I’m in the middle of and urban environment.

Summer is here, but the snow lies heavy on Mt. Hood. It’s hard to believe that an active volcano seems to tower close enough to reach out and touch. Of course, it’s a fairly far away. Nevertheless, I can only imagine the havoc an eruption would create if Mt. Hood were to act up like […]

The falls are a lot larger and deeper than it looks in this photo. It’s a place along the trail where I walk quite often, especially when I feel puzzled about life. Age is supposed to bring the possibility of wisdom, but unless wisdom mainly consists of wondering if I ever knew anything at all, […]

These falls are located in the Columbia River Gorge not far from where I live. The experience is more like standing in front of a natural altar than it is watching water falling. Maybe someday I will try to walk up to that bridge you see crossing high up the side next to the first […]

And there we were, crossing another valley near Moab, breaking free of the storms in the mountains and driving into a landscape of our dreams. Vancouver was still four days ahead of us.

After a wonderful winter with plenty of rain and beautiful fog, spring in Vancouver promises to be something that will bring back my memories of childhood when everything was filled with wonder and only good memories were likely to be set aside for later addition to the fiction of our lives that we create.

Lydia and Charles Frenzel (pen name L.C. Frenzel) announce the pre-publication of “Claire and Pem” on Amazon Kindle in mid-December. Read more on fatsquirrelpublishing.com or lunarianepic.com Back Story: Lunaria is an old world with a culture that at first seems medieval, but slowly Claire Miller finds what seems like magic is actually underlying technology that […]

Over the years I fancy that I’ve gotten pretty good at baking bread, either soda breads, regular yeast breads, or sour doughs. Lately I’ve discovered another principle behind aging gracefully. I may have to give up on my favorite sour dough. Used to be that the quick rising yeast had me frustrated because it was  […]