Social Media: Reconnecting and Lurking
I’ve written before about how social media has helped me reconnect with relatives and friends. Well, I’ve had two new experiences in the last couple of weeks where social media again has warmed my heart in this way. A second cousin found me on Facebook recently. I’ve met her and her branch of the family a […]
World Gratitude Day
September 21 is World Gratitude Day, a day celebrated since 1966 when an international group meeting in Hawaii agreed to designate a day to express gratitude and appreciation for the many wonderful things to be found in the world. I haven’t taken much time to be grateful in the last couple of years. I’ve been […]
Gail Elizabeth Sullivan
In my last post, I mentioned that I developed some friends during my second grade year, the first school year I spent at Christ the King School in Richland, Washington. One of those friends was Gail Elizabeth Sullivan. Gail was a bubbly little girl. She was smart (in the A reading group with me). She […]
Second Grade Anonymity
Throughout my first-grade year, I felt exposed. As I’ve written, I was a superstar during my three weeks of kindergarten and in the first first-grade classroom I attended, because I could read and the other pupils couldn’t. Even after we moved and I came into a new first-grade class in November of the school […]
No One To Ask About My Tantrums
I had to deal with a financial problem the other day, right in the middle of working on the last edits on Now I’m Found, the novel I hope to publish within a few weeks. Turning my mind to taxes was the last thing on earth I wanted to spend my time on. I wrote […]
On Glaciers, Goats, and Change
I’ve written before about the family hike we took in Switzerland in 1998 when my kids were teenagers. It was a good experience, but far more strenuous than I enjoy. My husband and (now-grown) kids recently took another hike in Slovenia and came back raving about the scenery. I had declined to accompany them, because […]
Now I’m Found—Cover Reveal!
A year ago, I showed readers the cover of Lead Me Home, the first book in my Oregon Chronicles series. Today I am ready to reveal the cover of the sequel—Now I’m Found. (I might revise the cover slightly, but this is close to final.) I’m working on final edits of this book, and it […]
The Squash Dish
One of our family’s go-to recipes is what we call “the squash dish.” I don’t have any better name for it. It was either my sister’s or my brother’s family that started making this, and I don’t know where they found it. But once we tried it at a family gathering, my father, my siblings, […]
A Glossary: Troops and Sports Fans, Ace Guys and Dirt Bags
I suppose every family develops its own lingo, terms they use to describe their experiences together. Our family’s jargon is heavily influenced by my husband’s time in the military. He went to the U.S. Naval Academy, spent time on active duty in the Navy before I knew him, and for the first 24 years of […]
The Vagaries of Mail Service During the Early California Gold Rush
One of the issues I have dealt with in my novel about the California Gold Rush is long-distance communications in the West between 1848 and 1850. I have characters living in Oregon, others in California, and they have relatives in Missouri and Massachusetts. The only way people could communicate over distance was through letters, but […]