• Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page Five

    Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page Five

    The day we left Albuquerque, we headed towards the town of Taos–a place known as an “artists’ colony” and as the location of actress Julia Roberts’ ranch. Mostly, it’s a town of stores hoping to sell tourists wind chimes, junk to put in their gardens for decoration (should the garden itself fall short of appeal),

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  • Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page Four

    Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page Four

    After our first few days in Albuquerque, my sister returned to Denver, and my brother returned to work. Fortunately, our niece Sofia got to stay at my brother’s place for most of our visit, which meant we lucked into a bonus third child for our final few days in New Mexico. Because Sofia rarely has

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  • Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page Three

    Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page Three

    For Days 7 and 8 of our road trip, we were joined by my sister, Kirsten. We had just seen her in Denver, where she lives, together a few days earlier, but then she had stayed behind to do some training for her job as an elementary teacher (specifically, for her newer role as a

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  • Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page Two

    Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page Two

    By Day 6 of our road trip, we were ensconced in my brother’s two-bedroom apartment, our home for the next week. My brother, Geoff, was exceedingly gracious and made us feel relaxed and at home. In other words, he handed us locally made beers and showed us how to use the remote control so that

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  • Scrapbookin’ the Road Trip: Page One

    One of the greatest gifts my parents passed to me was a love of travel. With some time, money, and will, a person can hop in the car, on a train, into a plane–and go see stuff. When I was growing up, due to having aunts, uncles, and grandparents spread across some northern states, our

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  • A Princess, Some Peas

    I was nestling into bed one night when my boyfriend observed, “Look at that grin. You never smile bigger than when you’re lying down in the bed at night.” At that point, although I didn’t yet have the perspective to see it, I was wading through my least-favorite decade of life: my twenties. Before my boyfriend–that

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  • Coffee Break

    I’m feeling very fortunate. During these busy summer months when finding even ten minutes to sit down and write seems impossible, I’ve been lucky enough to have a fine writer named Shelly become a Facebook friend. Shelly has been wanting to share a story of something that happened while she was traveling–yet she hasn’t wanted

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  • My Year as a Nanny: Tending Mary Jane

    “Looks like they had a good time last night,” I thought to myself, pushing the pipe, bag of buds, and lighter behind a lamp in an effort to conceal them from the children’s view. The last thing I needed in my job as a nanny was the task of explaining to my charges, “When Mommy

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  • Becoming a Badass

    When I first started blogging in 2006, I learned to make the rounds of other people’s blogs. As we do. First, I read one person’s blog, and then I’d click on the comment of one of the readers of that blog and be taken to his/her blog, and so on and so on and so

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  • Resonance

    I bet your’re a book reader. That is: like attracts like, and I am a book reader, and you are here. So we are readers, yes? I’ll go even further and guess that, because love of reading is innate in us–or because we learned it as a joyful or comforting habit in childhood–we are well

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