Every week or so I get an email from the Red Room Author/Reader site that tosses out a blog topic. For whatever reason, this one appealed to me. A couple of years ago, I signed up at Red Room as an author, but it seems I’ve since disappeared. But, never one to waste a blog, …Read More

I’m not sure why I’m so surprised to find that my second Shiny Object Saturday subject is another home labor-saving device.  It probably has much to do with my being born under the sun sign Cancer. (Did anyone else devour this book as a teenager?) We’re reputed to be homebodies, and I think I am, …Read More

I’m just about to finish reading Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca for the sixth or seventh time. I don’t have an exact count, but my daughter tells me that we have at least three copies of the novel in the house. At first, I didn’t notice that this particular edition had extra goodies packed into it: …Read More

In high school I was never assigned the novels CATCH-22, CATCHER IN THE RYE, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or LORD OF THE FLIES. So I never read them. I remember reading some Dostoevsky, THE GREAT GATSBY, a lot of Shakespeare,  and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. The program I was in was advanced–and it was …Read More

Did you ever buy something and just fall in love with it immediately? That’s exactly how I felt when I bought Pinckney a Keurig one-cup coffee maker for his office for Christmas. It was so cute, so compact, so…sensible. We frequently spend big bucks on coffee at Panera. We rarely make pots of coffee at …Read More

One of my favorite J.T. Ellison quotes is, “Just how many serial killers can Nashville have?” J.T. is the bestselling author of the Taylor Jackson thriller novel series set in that fair city. In this interview, she reminds me that not all of the Taylor Jackson books are serial killer tales–but it’s certainly the case …Read More

Spring snuck up on me this year. Actually, it sneaks up on me every year. The past couple of springs I missed prime planting time by over a month. My new garden wasn’t laid out until late last year and I was (quietly) very grumpy with the guy who put it in because it was …Read More

A few weeks ago a new Kindle DX arrived at our house, destined for the hands of my DH. It’s big. It’s fancy. It puts his students’ manuscripts in a handy, readable format that doesn’t require paper. It reads books out loud. It’s just what he always wanted. Given that I had almost five hundred …Read More

Sacrifice. Talk about a loaded word that we tend to use too lightly. I’ve always been fascinated by the animal sacrifices of old. (Santeria and a few other religious still practice it on a smaller scale.) In cultures that lived so close to the earth and whose resources were almost exclusively physical–and small–animal sacrifice must …Read More

Here comes Valentine’s Day, that day that strikes delicious, amorous terror into the hearts of so many. When I was in sixth grade, I had a boyfriend–one of the nicest boys I’d ever met. I had no idea what having a boyfriend entailed. We took a lot of walks that fall with our friends. I …Read More