NOTHING EVER HAPPENS ON MY BLOG
Our bookshelves, ourselves
Night Rise
Glad to have this out in the world in the May/June edition of Cricket.
Lucky Duck
I reworked an earlier piece for the new #KidLitVibes contest run by a very engaged and generous PB critique group. I spun the wheel and got lucky, literally, as my word. I wasn't going to enter as nothing had occurred to me, until I went for an evening stroll and...
Fired Up
Fires are for reading by, chatting and napping by, cooking over, adding light to the night and warming up winter. That in 2021 U.S. citizens, including elected school board members in not far enough away Spotsylvania County, VA, promoted burning books they don't...
To the Lighthouse
I made it to the lighthouse on a recent family beach visit, decades after I wrote the best chapter of my college honors thesis on Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse. Hello, Lighthouse by Sophie Blackall was more in keeping with the reading list for the trip as my...
Fall Writing Frenzy 2
So Lydia Lukidis and Kaitlyn Sanchez are at it again with their Fall Writing Frenzy contest for children's writers. Pick a photo from their stash and get inspired to write something somehow related that's under 200 words. The above is not that photo, but thanks...
Bookshelves and Blog
A couple of weeks ago I couldn't get to sleep, so I counted bookshelves instead of sheep (shout out to Kate Wolf's line, "Countin' troubles, 'stead of countin' sheep.") I have no idea what number I came up with, but it was in the teens. Just now walking through the...
Delaware on My Mind
Delaware is the First State, which you know if you've driven I-95 in those parts, but it might be one of the last states you think to visit though its image has been burnished by the Bidens of late. This old travel piece from 2007 has some delightful Delaware (and...
COVID HAIKU
Been volunteering with the Medical Reserve Corps in Virginia for a month or so and I have developed a specialty in parking lot management. Until I'm fully vaccinated I'm happier working outside anyway and it has been an upper seeing happy and relieved folks getting to...
Merry Most Things?
I used to do a December holiday gift guide back when I was doing Real Richmond Food Tours, focused on Richmond, not surprisingly. Now that I'm a free agent, I still want to plug local, well-loved businesses, and now that my daughter's Richmond, VA-based business,...
Oaths
The firefighter oath my son swore several years ago said all sorts of things I expected it to say and several I didn't. Didn't expect them to uphold the constitution of the U.S. but glad they won't turn fire hoses on us. Did not expect that they are promising to...
Barely a Blog Because of Fire, Flour & Fork
So it's been a while. And the alliteration keeps coming. Even when actual thoughts do not. But I have been thinking about you, blog, just haven't had any thoughts that aren't Fire, Flour & Fork-related, coming up Oct. 30th-Nov. 2nd, 2014, so I spared you until...
Food Writers of the World–or Mid-Atlantic–You bite!
I don't pretend to be a food writer though I have tweeted more than 12,000 times and most have involved either putting food or my foot in my mouth or putting words together halfway wittily which is different from half-witted. Then there's my children's writing that I...
Culinary Cred
I'm not sure if I will rate more or less of that once this gets posted. In my refrigerator when I first wrote this were way too many house made Sour Watermelon Gummy Bears. I had very little to do with the making of them and even less to do with the eating of...
Got my Number
One of the perks of having one's mother move in with one is to have it confirmed--by the movers at least--that though my birth order makes me the third, in fact, I'm #1. Swear on my mother's storage unit that this is what came out of the well-wrapped box among many...
Not Her
Having been an operating system for the benefit of others for many years now, it took me less time than it takes Siri to botch my latest phone call to need a system reset after watching a preview of Her, the new Joaquin Phoenix/Spike Jonze movie about the...
Nuts
I found the fountain of youth last month, but I'm not interested in partaking of it again. It was at a Catholic church here in town during Advent. Almost as soon as I walked in the door with my 81-year-old mother, I felt transported back to adolescence--all...
Sing it With Me
It's the time of year when people focus even more than usual on food. Grocery stores are stocked with holiday must-haves. Time to bake and shop and simmer. Yet the week before Thanksgiving I was stewing over what I was going to drink with a bottle of Mirilax to get me...
Pork Belly of Sorts
I might be the only non-homeless woman in the United States who walks into an Ann Taylor Loft dressing room with a couple pairs of pants and a shirt to try on with a 1/3 of a pound of sliced chorizo in my bag. It was Zoe's chorizo from Formaggio and it was what I like...
Rico, We Hardly Knew Ye
I'm a mild-mannered sort. Until I'm not. Last month while on vacation, I sat on a porch and shamelessly ogled a shirtless guy who ran by the house every day--up and back. Not so surprising in a beach town with lovely weather (the running, that is) but what was odd was...
Things That Don’t Go Bump in the Night
It was a dark and stormy night when my husband and I arrived in Cape May for a September vacation, so we didn't do much gazing off into the distance as we unloaded what we needed to get to bed. The next night, Friday, the 13th as it happened, I was out on the front...