Unpacking Mental Boxes
My husband and I closed on the sale of our house in Kansas City recently. We moved to Seattle five months ago, and through the winter the empty house was a worry. Kansas City had a cold and snowy winter. That meant a risk of frozen pipes and other cold-weather disasters, as well as a […]
Carkeek Park: Beaches and Beavers and History
On the fourth Wednesday of the month, I usually write a post with a historical theme—an event or place that features in one of my historical novels, for example. Today, I am detouring slightly to write about a place I recently went to that brought historical events to mind. One of my favorite things about […]
Popcorn Brain
A friend of mine recently emailed me an article from the Mayo Clinic on “popcorn brain.” I might have thought she was trying to send me a message, except she copied several other people on her email, too. So I decided she was not singling me out. I’d never heard of “popcorn brain” before. But […]
Tax Time Again . . . It Gets Worser Every Year
As I noted in a 2015 post, I started using an accountant to prepare our tax returns for the 2014 tax year. But my dealings with the accounting firm have not gone well, as I noted in a 2019 post. Nevertheless, inertia is a powerful force, and I am still using the same firm. Even […]
The Birthday Dinner that Wasn’t
My granddaughter just turned two. Her parents and my husband and I planned a pizza and cupcake dinner at our apartment to celebrate—complete with gifts and singing, of course. Unfortunately, midday on the Big Day my daughter texted that the birthday girl had vomited. With toddlers, one never knows if stomach upsets are a fluke […]
Random Photos: My Husband as a Boy
One of the fun things about digitizing many (most?) of our photographs last year was discovering things about my husband as a boy that I’d never known. We didn’t meet until he was in his mid-twenties, and he’d just spent five years as a U.S. Navy officer. He was a pretty serious guy, though he […]
Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad
I was looking for a historical topic for today’s post and came across a reference to the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad. This railroad was incorporated in 1873, the year in which most of my current work-in-progress takes place. My novel deals with the coming of trains to the Pacific Northwest, but in my research […]
Moving Along on My Work-in-Progress
Last November, I set a goal to work on my novel every day until the end of the year. I met that goal, and I have continued to work on it every day thus far in 2025. My writing stints aren’t always long, but the regularity gives me a sense of progress. Over the last […]
Mementos from Nanny Winnie
I had to make some hard decisions when we moved last fall. I had several bins of things from my parents’ house, including mementos from their lives and from my grandparents’ lives and gifts that they gave me over the years. Some of the hardest to get rid of were items that had belonged to […]
Being Present in 2025
Here we are—another year begins. I start 2025 with both hope and trepidation. Hope, because it is a new beginning, and I have many things I can explore in my new home—new museums and parks, new cultural events, new friends. But trepidation, because so many things in my life are uncertain. My husband’s doctors are […]