Category life

Happy Pride?
It’s June. Pride month. In the tradition of what goes around comes around, the whole thing as we all know by now, started with the Stonewall riots back in 1969. Tired of the constant police raids, patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back. I was a kid then and years away from realizing my own […]

Writing Prompt: Shoes
Tell us about your favorite pair of shoes, and where they’ve taken you. I’ve never written to a WordPress prompt. Didn’t even know they existed, but I saw this and thought, why the heck not. So…I’m not really a shoe person. I wouldn’t say I have a favorite pair, but the notion of where I’ve […]

Gut Check
No one needs to read another cancer story, so I’ll give you one that’s about dodging that particular bullet. And how you can too. Absolutely no one wants to read about prepping for a colonoscopy, so I’ll save the graphic details for my notes for the next one, because there will be a next one. […]

Q&A Part 3
More of my updated Q&A with the wonderful Women and Words (sadly “on hiatus”). A lot of the answers are still good, and I’ve updated others. Here’s the rest of me. Is there a book by another author that you wish you had written? I don’t know that there’s another book that I would like […]

Q&A Part 2
Several years ago, I did a Q&A with the wonderful Women and Words (sadly “on hiatus”). A lot of the answers are still good, and I’ve updated some others. Here’s Elaine! Part 2 Tell us about your biggest guilty pleasure. For example, do you sit naked in your pantry in the middle of the night […]

Construction Day Done!
The work is finished. I can’t even begin to believe it. Seven days and they took several tons of rock and sawed and hand chipped into shape two lovely patio/walkways and stairs. I thought I’d be blogging the long process of this project because every project undertaken at this house and my last one took […]

Construction Day 1
There’s a phrase, live lightly on the land, that would be nice to adhere to, but sometimes to get there you have to make a mess first. When my wife and I moved to our little slot of paradise a few years ago, we knew we wanted a nature preserve vibe. We’ve worked to remove […]

There’s Birding and Then There’s Birding
The house wren is back. This insouciant little guy clicks and clatters a call that sounds more like a baseball card in bike spokes than a bird. For a couple of years he tried building a nest in my satellite dish (for internet before my small town finally got wired). His girlfriends never went for […]

So, Back to Writing
I’m reading a very cool book, In Search of the Canary Tree, by Lauren E. Oakes. It’s early yet, and in it she’s just starting her Ph.D. research project analyzing yellow-cedar forests on an island in the Alexander Archipelago of southeast Alaska, near Sitka. What does this have to do with writing? I’m enthralled by […]