My lawn is covered in leaves.  Copper beech tree leaves, to be specific.  I have filled both of my giant recycling container, and there are still leaves all over the lawn. And the sidewalk. And the street gutters. Personally, I don’t care much about leaves on my lawn, as long as they don’t get so [...]

Back in the middle of the fifties, when I was first introduced to printing, it seemed to me that all pencils were yellow.  They had erasers on one end, they were made of wood, and the class had a pencil sharpener that we were allowed to use at certain times of the day. I took [...]

What if I die before I write all my books? What happens to unwritten books when the author dies?  Is there a character heaven? Or a limbo? Are the characters and storylines suddenly released, to fly out into the world and find a new writer’s brain to settle in? There are books in my head [...]

So, get this. I’m down here on the keyboard, trying to get a few words onto thescreen, because I don’t actually get all that much time to myself on the keyboard anymore.  In fact, I don’t get any time on the keyboard until Robin Hobb has cranked out her 1000 or 2000 or whatever it [...]

Next Saturday, I’ll get to go see Phantom of the Opera at the Paramount in Seattle.  Woohoo! Before Fair season is over, I intend to go to the Puyallup Fair.  I love to watch the draft horses when they show the teams. My little tomatoes are getting ripe.  And despite planting them late, I think I’ll [...]

When I was a kid in Fairbanks, growing up, we had a meat cache in our front yard.  It was a little log structure up on stilts. In the bush, people would have stored meat in them, and sometimes we did that.  But mostly, it was mine.  It had a window in it, something you [...]

 There are ten calories in a maraschino cherry. The serving size is ‘one cherry.’   So, if you were allowing yourself 2000 calories a day, you could eat 200 maraschino cherries and call it good. Does anyone besides me ever stop to think about strange things like that?  

 This year, we will see an increase in motorcycle related injuries and fatalities in the United States. City buses will become more crowded. More children will be riding the school buses this year. Fuel oil and natural gas prices will go up this winter. The number of pages of foreclosure notices printed in the newspapers will [...]

That’s such a cheery way for Livejournal to greet me.  Especially when my only friend is my othe self. Ah, me!  But that’s not really what I was thinking about tonight at all. I had a long day today, one with no writing at all.  I’ll still get my 1000 words tonight, but I’ll get [...]

Today we made blueberry, peach, and a peach-raspberry mix to use up the very last raspberries on the vines. Jam is wonderfully easy to make.  Measure the crushed fruit and the sugar.  Put the crushed fruit and the pectin in a pot, bring to a boil, then dump in the sugar.  When it hits a [...]