Tonight we celebrated my daughter Liz’s 27th birthday. I spent part of the day making her favorite foods for this occasion: spinach and cheese stuffed shells and banana cream pie. Liz’s birthday is not officially until Wednesday, January 16, but because of scheduling issues, we decided to gather tonight for our family dinner and gift-giving….
Category: Timed Writing
1st Day Back in LA
I am sitting here with Cameron, my first student in 2013. She, a pretty brown-eyed blonde with hair halfway down her back, has been my writing student since she was in elementary school (she is now a sophomore in high school). We are both feeling sluggish after a long winter break and are using 15…
Back in LA
We arrived at midnight and now it’s 1:45. We have been visiting with daughter Liz and her boyfriend, Ron, who stayed up late to greet us, which was very sweet of them. Now I am in bed after a warm bath. We are due to get up at 5:45 to go help cook breakfast for…
Westward Ho
We are in Van Horn, Texas, not too many miles east of El Paso and we are grateful to be here. It is 1:30 am now and we have been ready to stop since 11:30. However, the oil boom in West Texas has made every motel/hotel cram packed with oil rig workers. The prices are…
Delayed Trip
We have delayed our trip back to CA because we have had so much to do. Also, because it has been raining along our route either through El Paso or Flagstaff. Alas, it is now 12:34 am and we are still not ready to go. We have lots of work to do in the morning…
Flash Fiction: ‘Tis the Gift to be Simple
Janet wasn’t sure why life seemed so complicated these days. Maybe it had to do with the way the wind was always blowing, tossing her short gray hair this way and that, and reminding her of happier times before Chet died. Chet, her husband of 35 years, who woke up one day and said he…
Time to Switch This Tired Brain to OFF
Welcome to the land of the living dead. Too much work in too short a time. Yikes. I have hit the wall – at least for tonight – and am ready to go stare at the television set with no care for what I am watching. For future reference, please remind me not to combine…
Shopping for a Tiny Apartment Kitchen
‘The house is quiet. It is 11:30 pm. Shadows fall across the floors in 2 rooms I can see from my vantage point in a chair near the gas heater in the staircase room of our Victorian. I don’t have one word to say that I think anyone would find interesting. But here I am…
5 Star Recipe for Orange Cranberry Pecan Muffins
I love collecting recipes and this one came from a recipe box I bought at an estate sale several years ago. The box is made up of two long file drawers in a small oak cabinet and each drawer is crammed full of the owner’s favorite recipes clipped from newspapers or magazines, along with hand-written…
Three 21-Year-Olds on a Road Trip
Our daughter Rachael and her two friends, Natasha and Keara, decided last week to take a road trip from Los Angeles to our home in Sherman, Texas, which is 60 miles north of Dallas. They arrived today after 22 hours of driving spread over 2 1/2 days. The girls, all college seniors, arrived tired, but…
20 Minutes a Day 