OF NEWNESS AND PATINA

I have a record of attraction to worn things. Before Kindle, back when I read paperback books, they appealed to me far more after I roughed them up with: dog-ears, notes in the margins and swollen pages from the times I read them in my hot tub.

WORDS WITH FRIENDS

My New Year’s resolution is to learn how to play Angry Birds. But an essay in the New York Times suggests that daydreaming increases creativity. Daydreaming requires time, time I dump into playing Words With Friends. Words With Friends, though, is more than just words. It’s confirmation that my sister, my …

Marathon Women

On an ordinary afternoon in 1998, Eliza, my sixteen-year-old daughter, plopped her backpack at my feet, waved a brochure so close it grazed my nose and declared, “I’m signing up for the Marine Corps Marathon. I’ll be running with a group that raises money for AIDS and trains Sunday mornings …

SMILING STRANGERS

When I, always the initiator, smile at a stranger and the stranger smiles back, it puts a musical note in my step. Or in my pedal, as was the case on Christmas Eve day. I was on a long bike ride from New Jersey to Staten Island and, when a driver …

ANXIETY ABOUT GIFTS: GIVING & GETTING

‘Tis the season to obsess . . . about gifts. For someone like me, who gets overwhelmed by choices, and–even when the options are narrowed to two–can’t decide, this can be a hard time of year. So I resort to creative gift-giving, like ice cream sodas for the third night …

ANTIDOTE TO WORRY: CRUNCHY SALAD

I needed an antidote to worry this weekend, when my bike got a flat tire and then my car wouldn’t start. So here is the latest in my Antidote to Worry Series of food photos and such. Here’s how I compose this satisfying crunchy salad: A base of arugula Trader Joe’s …

10 TWITTER QUESTIONS & 1 TWITTER TALE

Note to those of my peeps to whom Twitterspeak is as foreign as Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan-ese: You may not want to slog through this one. If you do, RT means retweet. I spend a lot of time on Twitter sharing links to articles I write. I have cultivated a variety of followers. …

IN SEARCH OF JOLLY GEORGE: OUR FAMILY GLOSSARY

If our family were contestants on a TV know-your-family game show, and the emcee were to ask, “Who is least likely to be a pest?” we would all shout “Emy!” The rest of us can be annoying, not least of all yours truly, but never Emy. When my three daughters were …

HOARDING WATER LIKE CHICKEN SOUP

While shops experience brisker business on weekends, blog traffic slows, at least mine does. So I’m posting this shortie today, hoping for weekend visitors. What I’m about to write is one of those things I wouldn’t give a second thought to, were I not examining myself all the time for …

ANTIDOTE TO WORRY: POPCORN

Popcorn is one of my favorite comfort foods. It fills me up, is healthful, tastes delicious and I pretend that eating this overflowing pot of it, sprinkled with sea salt, won’t make me feel squeezed in the waist by my elastic waist pants. When my oldest daughter Eliza was a toddler, I …

NOISY SEASON RANT

Beware of asking me to rant. I am liable to start today, five days after autumn began (also National Good Neighbor Day and National Pancake Day), and never stop until Flag Day. If you really want to hear loud and wild talk, ask me about the leaf blowers whose noise …