I’m in Portland, OR right now, on the week off between the end of the spring semester and the start of my summer class.  However, it isn’t really a vacation.  I’m here to go through the stuff that’s mine in my parents’ house and do something with it.  For the last two days I’ve been [...]

I volunteered to make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids at an after-church lunch on Sunday*. I went to Trader Joe’s this afternoon to buy the makings and ended up buying some white bread for those kids who are exceptionally picky eaters. As I stood in line, I felt the [...]

When I moved to Philadelphia back in January of 2002, I thought of the move as a temporary. I figured that I would spend three or four or possibly even five years here before heading back out west. I had been a west coast girl my entire life and the idea of making [...]

I’ve always believed that when you see patterns develop in your life, that there’s something to be learned from those patterns.  One pattern that has appeared in my life over and over again is that when I get a break from school or work, I get sick.  As soon as my life slows down, my [...]

I recently met a Unitarian minister who said that most ministers tend to give the same sermon over and over again. It might be called different things, and might come at the topic in hundreds of ways, but essentially there is one area that is most near to each minister’s heart and so they [...]

A couple of years ago, the young adult group at the Unitarian church I attend started talking about creating an alternative to the Sunday morning service. The idea would come up every couple of months, it would get tossed around for a while and then fall back down into the abyss of our busy [...]

I was standing in my kitchen tonight, peeling some old wrinkled apples in order to turn them into apple sauce, when my cell phone rang.  It was my mom, calling from my sister’s concert.  She was calling to tell me how much she wished I was there.  I felt a quick, sharp pang near my [...]

Unpacking my suitcase this morning, I realized that I brought bits of animal fur from the Portland menagerie across the country with me.  The dog’s course white hairs were woven into the fleece of the cheap neck pillow I bought at the Newark airport on the way out to Portland last week.  Silky black whisps [...]

When I was in high school, I often found myself driving home at night in rainy, foggy weather. One of my favorite parts of those drives would be when I would have to cross the Fremont Bridge from the east side of the Willamette River to the west, where my family lived in those [...]

One of my favorite things about not having a job is being home for lunch. Yesterday I made braised swiss chard and quinoa. Today I made a huge bowl salad with Boston lettuce, feta, turkey bacon, avocado, tomato and red onion. It was really good.
I met up with some friends during the [...]