Alternate title: You want me to drive where?? So over the holiday weekend, the fam and I went camping. It was the first camping trip for our now 4-month-old puppy, Brin. She is in the tent pic. It’s a “when you see it” kind of thing. I’m sharing this because the real story is in…
Yesterday, I read this list that Meg Dowell compiled. It describes 18 things that writers should stop worrying about, and one item in particular jumped out at me, but not for the reason you might think. 6. Writing things your friends and family will read/love. I suspect the reason that item is there is along the…
Sixteen days ago, I went out to dinner with some friends. One of them told me about a TED talk she’d seen about how long it takes to learn a skill. We were talking about the 10,000 hours to achieve mastery statistic, I think, and my friend disagreed. “Twenty hours to proficiency,” she said. Yeah,…
Meet Lily. We adopted Lily in 2010 along with her sister, Daisy. Lily and Daisy were part of a larger litter owned by a former student of mine, and when her family was moving out of state, the kittens needed homes as quickly as possible. From the beginning, Lily was skittish. When we picked her…
I was watching American Pickers last night (the episode was called No Stoner Left Unturned. Ha.), and the guy Mike and Frank picked was an aging hippie guy in California. He was a real character, this guy. A free spirit. He was also an artist. In one of his bigger projects, he turned a Kawasaki…
This week, the hubs and I will celebrate our anniversary. Our 13th anniversary, to be exact. Our marriage is officially a moody teenager. You know how each anniversary has a meaning that goes with it? Like the 1st is paper and the 25th is silver? I looked up the 13th, half expecting to discover it’s…
I need to write from my heart today. Last spring, cancer took my grandmother. Last fall, it took my other grandmother. Last night, it took my friend. I wrote this as I lay awake in the darkness early this morning. I didn’t write it to win sympathy from anyone. I wrote it as a promise…
This is a Thanksgiving post. There are others like it but this one is mine. Several readers of this blog live in other countries – Canada, England, and Australia, to name a few. I obviously don’t know what American Thanksgiving looks like from your perspective, but from here it looks something like one of…
Allison Maruska 