I drove out to visit my Great Aunt Anne today.  She is 88 years old and is still living on her own.  For that last few years, her situation has been less than ideal, but workable.  However, these days it’s not going well.  She’s essentially stranded in a suburban ranch house with nothing around but […]

Apartment 2024 is smelling appealingly of cloves and orange oils right at the moment because I took a brief break this morning from the nearly-finished thesis to make a pomander ball.  There was something soothingly mindless about making rows with cloves in the skin of an orange that gave me a much-needed break from words, […]

Last night I crawled into bed, all ready for sleep, with my computer.  It was midnight and I was tired, but I needed to do a little more work before I could rest.  I worked for about an hour, writing posts for Slashfood and Green Daily before turning my mind to some school work.  Just […]

Here it is, folks. The very last episode in our Thanksgiving series, in which we make a dish that I like to call Turkey Pot Shepherd’s Pie. It combines all your Thanksgiving leftovers neatly into a single dish that is easy to make, very flexible and quite tasty when reheated the next day. […]

I used up most of my brain power today working in the writing center at school.  We’re getting to the end of the semester and so from 4-8 pm today I sat in a chair as an array of students plopped down in the seat across from me and handed me things to read.  I […]

Until this last July, the only time in my life I had been paid for my writing was when I ten years old and submitted an essay to the Oregonian’s Thursday children’s page. They paid a whopping $10 for the right to print the story, an amount that seemed thrilling back in 1989. […]

I didn’t leave my apartment today until 6:15 pm.  I spent the day puttering.  I did a load of laundry.  I put away all the kitchen appliances that got pulled out as I got ready for Thanksgiving (I have a kitchen storage annex behind the coats in my front hall closet, as my kitchen isn’t […]

I spent the evening with my family out in Plymouth Meeting tonight for round two of Thanksgiving dinner. I brought half a gallon of gravy and there were three kinds of sweet potatoes and no regular ones. The food was delicious, although it was a little chaotic getting everyone seated and settled at […]

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Last year this time I was out in Oregon, getting ready to cook dinner with my parents. The celery, mushrooms and onions were chopped and bagged, ready for the stuffing. Multiple heads of garlic had freed from their papery skins and the defrosted turkey was resting pertly in the fridge in my mom’s […]