We’ve been traveling, so I missed last week’s post. Today’s is late, and I didn’t record the audio this week either. We were camping last week and the weekend before we visited Hailey, ID with friends. The guys rode their motorcycles and took a scenic route while my girlfriend and I drove a car and brought mountain bikes. I loved the little town, and it made me miss living in Lake Tahoe. But there are drawbacks to living in a resort town. Sometimes the part-timers act like they have more claim on the area than the locals. People who work and support many of the scenic Idaho towns can’t afford to live there since the mass exodus during the pandemic. click to continue reading…
Category: Older Blog Posts
Blogs from the ten years before my kids left home.
This too shall pass—but you shall not
We had to quarantine for another COVID case last week. The good news is, now everyone in the house also has natural immunities. It’s still pretty easy to manage. I’m not talking about the virus itself, but dropping off the face of the earth. The forgiveness to cancel last minute, free grocery pick up and the ease in rescheduling appointments. I think everyone I know had it or had a family member with it this past month. Since it was my husband who felt horrible, not me, I was out of excuses, trapped at home and compelled to finally mop the floor. I’ve been trying to let the robot and the floor work things out, but they were at an click to continue reading…
Please wait, still (verbal) processing…
The day my daughter turned 18, she sought me out and asked breathlessly, “So, when does it happen?” I looked at her earnest face and asked what she meant. “I’ll know everything.” She wanted to know if all the confidence and knowledge adults had would just download into her brain. Or did she need to wait until she’d been 18 for 24 hours? Come to think of it, she might have had more smirk than earnestness in her smile. I have a friend who used an interesting phrase about teenagers. She calls it the stage where they “try on all different kinds of personalities.” I love the grace in that because we shouldn’t hold kids to all the things they click to continue reading…
The story of a testimony snippet
I recently tried to define story. I know there are probably thousands of succinct descriptions of “what is a story” already waiting to be quoted, but for the sake of my conversation at the time we were trying to agree upon a common vocabulary so we could then talk about the meaning of story. (The conversation stemmed from the two latest books from Jonathan Gottschall .) We needed the simplest description before we could go further. Most conversations benefit from taking a minute to verify vocabulary. Especially in our house, we’ve been known to argue the same thing on both sides with different words. I finally landed on, “A story has a beginning, a middle and an end.” I’m sure click to continue reading…
Matriarchal Wisdom
Things my grandmother used to say: You make a better door than a window. It simply means please get out of the way. I heard it every time I stood in from of the television. Always add as many eggs as you want, and one for the pan. This is for scrambled eggs in a cast iron skillet. Since she was raised in the dust bowl close to the Great Depression, I’d consider it luxurious generosity. When you get married, everything should be new inside and out. Buy new panties. You can’t tell on galloping horse. This is in reference to uneven stitches on homemade clothing for children who spend most of their time running. But remember it for any click to continue reading…