Traditionally, my New Year’s resolutions come with a hefty dollop of guilt. I don’t, by any means, think I’m alone in this. The very nature of a list of resolutions involves tasks that we feel a nagging need to do — lose weight, get married, lose weight before getting married, etc. Since my birthday is [...]
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Once, when I was taking an adult Bat Mitzvah class, I mused that, as a Jewish convert, the thing I missed most about Christmas was the smell of Douglas Fir in the hall. (Apparently, I’m not alone; the rabbi smiled and said, “everybody says that.”) I didn’t mention that I also miss my grandmother. Weeks [...]
Monday, December 14, 2009
Ten years ago last Tuesday, we went from a family of two to a family of three.
Everyone says that when you have a baby, your life is changed forever. What struck me, when our tiny, spindly little person arrived, was how oddly the same everything was. Most of my tiny, non-nuclear family was in the [...]
Monday, November 16, 2009
(Untitled Fantasy Novel is winning, though it’s a close thing. The dirty dishes are the real loser here.)
I’m at 22,241 words of a novel I never thought I could write. I am behind the NanoWriMo curve (I should probably be around 26,600 words by now) but I’m assuming it will all work itself out. All [...]
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Things I have been doing instead of blogging:
1) Halloween
My son is obsessed with the San Francisco Municipal Railway. (No, I don’t know why, either. We just roll with it.) I thought he would enjoy dressing up as a MUNI driver for Halloween.
I used my sewing machine! I made my own pattern! The funny thing is, [...]
Thursday, October 22, 2009
I’m the girl with the hair.
I’ve always been the girl with the hair. It’s always out of the ordinary: thick, puffy, definitely nappy, and, strangely enough, really long. My hair is my calling card, my icebreaker, whether it is cornrowed, natural, wet, pulled back in a bun, relaxed, or pressed within an inch of its [...]
This Columbus Day, while some protest and others laud the discovery of America – and some dispute if a land with inhabitants can even be discovered – I’m going to take a break from all the controversy and celebrate another, lesser-known explorer: my grandfather, Jewell ‘Burt’ Burton. If Columbus discovered Hispaniola, Burt discovered America.
When I [...]
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
My favorite photograph of my grandfather depicts a little boy, three or four, dressed in tattered clothes beside a dusty Model T Ford. He looks grim and determined. My grandmother said the first time she saw the picture it made her cry.
There were many reasons my grandfather left Arkansas for San Francisco, and there are [...]
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Project Spectrum is the creation of Lauren Weinhold of the Lolly Knitting Around blog. Her goal is to prod artists to explore the impact that color has on their lives and, in particular, their artsing and crafting, using a series of themes throughout the year. A good exercise for me, since, left to my own [...]
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Upon the release of her private diaries, the (British) world was recently shocked to discover that beloved children’s author Alison Uttley, was, apparently, not very nice:
She created the enduringly charming children’s characters Little Grey Rabbit and Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog but the private diaries of Alison Uttley reveal the author to have been a controlling, difficult [...]