Happy Thanksgiving Eve, everyone! I hope you’re happily prepping for the holiday whether that means confirming your reservations at a favorite restaurant or harvesting persimmons to make Aunt Nell’s favorite pudding. Around here we’re baking pies. Well, truthfully, we’re watching my mom bake pies. Because that’s the kind of helpful children and grandchildren we are. [...]
On this first Friday in November I’m thinking about gratitude. Throughout the year I try to count my blessings—sometimes in a daily “gratitude journal” but more often than not by documenting the (mostly) good and interesting things in my life on Instagram. (Thank you, Insta!) In case you haven’t tracked this yet, Thanksgiving comes late [...]
After a week on the East Coast working and visiting our kids I came home with happy memories and a little intestinal bug. Not big enough to warrant a trip to the doctor–we didn’t bowl in Ebola-exposed lanes while in NYC–but some queasiness lingered for nearly a week. I looked up my symptoms and learned [...]
In our new modernist home, a few splashes of orange around the house and a skeleton on the front bench suffice for demonic decor. I’ve been experimenting with deer-resistant plants in the front pots and though several perennials have given up the ghost already the nasturtiums are thriving. Right now a strand is crawling into [...]
Reading about the young Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, this link to an earlier film about her life appeared. Watching it I was struck by her shy smile, the rushing waters where she lived in northern Pakistan and the inescapable violence that surrounded her. But I was also fascinated by her parents–the never photographed mother [...]
We were lucky enough to have old friends over for Saturday lunch. The wife is undergoing treatment for a brain tumor and after nine months of procedures is just now taking short trips out and about. Longtime friends, we used to camp and hike together when our children were little. Now I worried she wouldn’t [...]
About this pie. It’s made from this recipe in response to an offhand remark from my son-in-law Dan that “everybody likes a good strawberry-rhubarb pie, don’t they?” Apparently, a good number of people do, as 6,366 people have paused to look at this pie photo so far today on Flickr. I’d shared the photo in [...]
Reading this essay about a woman asking for a better table when given a crummy one made me think about a recent failed attempt at being more forceful. Claire was in town from the frigid East and wanted to spend every minute of the weekend out in the sun. So we drove over to Point [...]
Happy Valentine’s Day! A few weeks ago I was stuck on a muddy road outside Tarma, Peru waiting over an hour for construction to clear. Was I frustrated? Of course. But after awhile I stopped fussing about getting to our destination and started focusing on the unexpected beauty around me. I saw a good [...]
For years, I wrestled with pie-making. I’ve been the designated pie maker ever since we started traveling to the Monterey Peninsula for Thanksgiving and until a few years ago it was mostly a failure experience. A confident and experienced cook, I was baffled that pie crusts Would Not Cooperate. I played by the rules—chilling the [...]
