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Quick Favor
We’re packing up before heading out tomorrow on our three-week road trip to the East Coast. First stop will be three nights in Chicago. My hope is to put up some Picture of the Day posts along the way, but first: I’ve got scaffolding in place for the Writing for Social Media class that…
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Midsummer Litany of Complaints
After doing a home exchange with a couple in Minneapolis last weekend– something that became possible in 2010 when we ran ads looking for an exchange for my sabbatical year…ads that ultimately yielded no viable international exchanges, but which did turn up one wonderful nibble from a travel writer who lives three hours south of…
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When I Was in Junior High, My Home-Ec Class Had a Fashion Show During Which We Modeled What We’d Sewn, and All I Remember Is Being Mortified Because My Mom Was Weeping As I Galumphed Down the “Catwalk” in My Navy Polyester Slacks
Imagine if she’d had a blog, back then in 1980–oh, the photos of me she could have posted for the world to see! Small mercies. Anyhow, this Millenium Mom is going to use her blog, right here, right now, to brag about the highlight and joy of her twelve-year-old daughter’s life, and, Praise The Evolution…
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You May Apply an Expensive, Fine-Line-Diminishing Moisturizer Both Morning and Night, but If You Use Email to Communicate with Your Friends and A Video of Your Birth Wasn’t Posted Online, You’re Not Fooling Anyone
My mom is 77. She’s had a digital camera for years and uses it all the time—but she’s never downloaded a single picture from her camera to her computer. Instead, she snaps her photos and then takes the memory card from her camera and puts it in the photo printing machine at Walmart. She has…
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Plaster, Pairings, Pacing
It’s going to be a summer of pictorials over here, I fear. Suffice it to say, my head is full of children–often perky, often listless, too often full of the words “What should I do?” now that school’s out. Interestingly, and I remember this from my own youth, they want something to do, but they…
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In the Yard
The kids are in their last days of the school year here, and I’m already in Week Two of teaching summer classes at the college; strangely, there’s something melancholy about this time of year–something about the end of rituals and the starting of new daily schedules, something about the winds contemplating pushing warmer air our…
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Plant Trees Under Whose Shade You Do Not Expect to Sit
It all started with stand-up comedian Marc Maron. Personally, I only find Maron occasionally funny, only sometimes as good as he wants to be. Mostly, his overblown ego and need for attention quash any shot at charm. You may have dated someone like this in high school. Although painful at the time, it was for…
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Gulp
It started with about one hundred applications from all over the country, even a few mailed in from other countries. We on the committee read through the CVs and multi-page cover letters, winnowing down the pool of applicants to thirteen. With those thirteen quarter finalists, we conducted telephone interviews. From those thirteen, five semi-finalists were…
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How Do You Wander In To That Room of Your Own?
Can we make this one more about the comments than the post? I know many of you post something every day, and I know many of you simply post whenever you feel so moved. You post when and how you do, and you have your reasons for that. So: 1) Why do you write blog…
