My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
Every once in a while someone comes up with an idea so brilliant yet so obvious (once I hear it) that I am amazed and chagrined I didn’t think of it myself. Dreaming of retirement and struggling to decide where to go, New York lawyers Gilen Chan and Gene Preudhomme were just getting serious about…
Rich never bursts through the door when I’m taking my sister’s online yoga class, so I knew something was up even before he said, “I thought you should know I’ve just gotten an emergency alert. Town officials are telling us to lock our doors and windows and shelter in place. Something’s going down.” Instantly my…
What do you think of California? Frank Lloyd Wright embraced the continental tilt theory that everything loose rolls to California. (True enough.) Truman Capote sneered, “It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.” (False, I hope.) Author Edward Abbey said, “There is science, logic,…
“Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” Ambrose Bierce “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Dorothy Parker “The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.” Charles de Gaulle…
There are few things that make me feel more at home than chaos in the kitchen. Having grown up in a large, boisterous family and hosted countless pot-luck dinners, I love the hubbub, companionship, and delicious meals that somehow miraculously result from the combined efforts of an excessive number of cooks working feverishly in a…
Most of us are turning to comfort food, but some are expressing their angst with voodoo cooking. Photo: Tina Dawson, Love Is in My Tummy It happened at the Punjab burrito place in a nearby village. I was so delighted to see it had finally reopened that I didn’t stop to consider whether, after a…
“It’s a course about what ?” I asked incredulously. “Why would you want to learn how to be grumpier?” The subject was a sensitive one, as the atmosphere around our house has been rather wobbly this week. For a start — and I know just how petty and trivial this is — we completed what…
There are guys you absolutely know are going to be trouble the minute you spot them, and the first person I met in Naples, Italy was one of them. Rich and I had been in town just ten minutes, at the tail end of a three-month railway journey some years ago, and already I had…
Do you have a pandemic playlist? Me neither. But then, I’m the least musical person on the planet. At the other end of the spectrum, the folks giving out vaccines at San Francisco’s vast Moscone Center decided to energize the staff and patients by playing songs that have now become famous around here for reducing…
“You won’t believe what we did last night,” a friend told me Sunday. “We went out to a movie! Every other row was blocked off, and there was hardly anybody in the theater. A few rows in front of us there was a woman with a collie dog. The movie was a classic comedy, and…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
