Month: April 2016

This little ol’ A to Z Blogging Challenge is trying to whoop my a**. It keeps yelling:

“Stay down, you moron!” This little ol’ A to Z Blogging Challenge. The big bully.

Continue reading “Nothing Ventured”

Day 3 of the 3 Day Quote Challenge, and I’m ready! Thanks one last time to Lindsay Nell (you can find her at Home, Hugs, and Huskies) for challenging me.

As my final entry for my Wisdom from Fiction theme (whose background you can see here), I’d like to offer thoughts on our most certain finality… or is it?

Continue reading “3 Day Quote Challenge”

Since I brought up what I do for a living in my L post, I thought I’d show you some of my favorite stuff. Enjoy. (I’d say, “Be amazed,” but that’d just be wrong.)

Given a choice of fabrics, this is what 3 year old Charlie chose.

Continue reading “Making Money”

Thanks again to Lindsay Nell of Home, Hugs, and Huskies for nominating me for this challenge. This is Day 2.

I’m continuing my Wisdom from Fiction theme, whose background you can find here. Today, I focus on small people — specifically, Whos, Hobbits, and Humans.

Continue reading “3 Day Quote Challenge”

I wrote letters when I was growing up. Mom insisted. Dad had escaped the Midwest with all of us in tow, so all our relatives were 2,500 miles away, wanting to know how we were and what we were up to. Especially Mom’s two older sisters, Sis and Dorrie, authentic maiden aunts who lived with their mother all her life, and together all of theirs.

Strangely enough, they were not crazy cat ladies. In fact, their living situation didn’t seem the least bit peculiar to me.

Continue reading “Letters and Livelihood”

Many thanks to Lindsay Nell of Home, Hugs and Huskies for nominating me to take part in the 3 Day Quote Challenge. (What’s a community without a chain letter or two?)

Storytelling has been part of humanity since the beginning of language. From oral histories handed down before the development of written language (still a big part of most families around the world), to scary tales around a campfire, to scifi and fantasy, fables and fairy tales, romance, adventure, and mysteries, we seem to have a genetic need for stories.

Each kind of story has its own purpose. Some end with a moral, some with a twist, some with an inspiration or call to action. We’re happy if they just entertain us, but if they touch us more deeply, they become part of who we are.

My favorite stories changed me. Whether it was my literary introduction to science fiction with Rusty’s Space Ship by Evelyn Sibley Lampman or  J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy or Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram, these books, and many others, have stayed with me.

To honor the stories that are part of who I am, my theme for this challenge is Wisdom from Fiction.

Continue reading “3 Day Quote Challenge”

There is a different attitude here. Commenters are kind. Not everybody comments; even I don’t comment on every post I read — there simply isn’t time. But apparently there’s time for a little magic. This is a story about being saved by that magic.

Continue reading “Kindly respond. Kindly.”

Isn’t it cute? A vintage 1950’s Tommee Tippee sipper cup exactly like the one my mother said was mine. Not my older sister’s. Not my baby sister’s. Mine. The one I drank from even after I didn’t use the mouthpiece anymore. The only one Mom ever offered me.

The one I couldn’t look at because it scared me to death.

Continue reading “Introduction to Infinity”

I was going to be a parent. I was ready. (It’s so cute that I thought that.)

Parenting is hard. Single parenting can be torture. We make mistakes.  We have no idea what we’re doing. We’re sure we’ve ruined our kid’s life — or kids’ lives — because:

“No one taught me how to be a parent!” Every first-time parent.

Maybe you just weren’t paying attention.

Continue reading “The Horror!”