do you remember stringing cranberries and popcorn?  the cashier girl at the food store asked me what i was doing with the cranberries and popcorn and oranges. “a recipe?” she asked.  i told her about stringing cranberries and making dried orange ornaments. “cool.  i’ve never heard of that.”

In my mother’s basement, the Christmas after my grandmother had died, I found the top of a box that had belonged to her. My mother and I were down there retrieving ornaments and lights so that we could decorate the tree, a painful Christmas that year, 1995. My stepfather had died not long before my [...]

January 22, 2011 Stuart Florida, Martin County I’m on my way to Florida to join an impressive group of authors at the 17th Annual Bookmania festival.  I love my job.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 23,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping [...]