Twelve years ago this month, my mother, Mary Ann Corsino Lantos, passed away. A New York City native and, after a nine-year detour to southwestern Connecticut, a resident of St. Petersburg, Florida for 22 years, she was 69 years old at the time of her death. She was survived by her husband, two adult daughters, and one teenage grandson. But our family had truly lost her well before that. For over seven years, she had […]
After last week, I really feel that those who would diss people who use social media to reach out during times of crisis honestly don’t get social media. Those of you who follow my Twitter feed or are Facebook friends are probably aware of the crisis my family experienced last week, and which triggered this not-terribly-original observation. A recap follows, via Facebook updates (most of which were pushed from Twitter, so they’re pretty brief). Starting […]
Image via Wikipedia This post was originally published on the now-defunct Los Angeles Moms Blog in May 2010, and has been lightly re-edited for posting here. I hope you had a lovely Mother’s Day. It was pretty much an ordinary Sunday for me. Due to certain oddities of the calendar and the custody schedule, it seems that more often than not, my husband’s kids have been with him on Father’s Day…and on Mother’s Day. I […]
Saturday was a busy day for Tall Paul and me. We started early with a drive to Orange County to spend some time at the Wizard World Comic Con in Anaheim. I didn’t find it quite as much fun as last year’s; it wasn’t my first time, the programming was a bit different…and now I have San Diego Comic-Con to compare it with. It wasn’t the best trade for the Los Angeles Times Festival of […]
There are stories I don’t tell here because they really aren’t mine to tell, but sometimes I find myself thinking about them anyway, and that’s what led me down this particular path…in search of an angle from which there might be a story I could claim and tell. After almost 27 years as an only child, yesterday my son just became a big brother to a baby sister. (NOT from me – I would have […]
Cross-posted at TheSmartlyLA My son’s been out of college for almost four years. He lives 3000 miles from me, and about 1000 miles away from his dad’s hometown. He’s got a good job, his own apartment (no roommates!), his own activities and interests, and the occasional girlfriend (but not “the girlfriend,” at least not yet). He doesn’t own a car – he has chosen to live in a city where he doesn’t need one – […]
This Friday, October 8, it will be eleven years since my mom, Mary Ann, passed away. A resident of St. Petersburg, Florida for 22 years, she was 69 years old at the time of her death. She was survived by her husband, two adult daughters, and one teenage grandson. We’re left to remember. But our family had lost her well before that. For over seven years, she had been living in a nursing home, incapacitated […]
We didn’t have much planned for our Wednesday in New York City until evening…but before that, Katie needed to find some shoes. Wet hopped on the subway headed to the 34th St./Herald Square Station. These days, nearly every city has a Macy’s, but there’s really only one MACY’S. Two full city blocks, seven floors, those historic wooden escalators…and the shoes! After our shopping trip to Macy’s, we rode back uptown, stopped at the hotel to […]
On the day we arrived in New York, I received an unexpected – and more than welcome – message from a dear friend asking if we might be able to meet up during my time in the City. Ann and I met over 20 years ago, when I was an accounting temp and she was a secretary for a communications company in Ithaca, New York, and hadn’t seen each other since I moved to Memphis […]
The Washington, DC portion of our trip was recapped here (part 1) and here (part 2). Days 7 & 8, Sunday-Monday June 20-21: For Tall Paul’s first-ever train ride, we boarded Amtrak’s Acela Express at Washington’s Union Station on Sunday morning bound for NYC’s Penn Station, just like East Coast natives travel! We passed through Baltimore, Wilmington DE, Philadelphia, and a couple of New Jersey stops before arriving in the City around 1 PM. We […]
Part 1, in case you missed it… Day Four, Thursday 6/17: On a sunny, hot, and breezy Thursday morning – duh, it’s Washington DC in June, but I will say it was slightly less muggy than usual – we hopped aboard the Tourmobile bus to make the rounds of some of the city’s famous Presidential and war memorials. Seeing these places in person, when I’ve seen them in photos and on screens so many, many […]
Thanks to my unfortunate incapacitation and temporary one-handed state, I had to revise my vacation-recap blogging plans to be more photo-sharing and less story-telling. (It takes fewer left-handed keystrokes to browse and paste pictures.) This is the first of several installments, and just a sampling of the pictures. It will take longer than I anticipated to cover the whole trip… Day One, Monday, 6/14: After a long day that started very early in order to […]
