The last weekend in April is always a great time for Southern California book lovers, as we make our way to the UCLA campus to party with the books! I don’t usually go for the entire weekend, but this year I made a full day of it on Saturday – and it was a full day. Several book bloggers had been planning to meet up and experience the Festival together, but no thanks to a […]
Baseball’s back, baby! Play ball! I was raised on baseball. It’s a sport I can actually follow. Everyone takes his turn, and everyone has a specific job responsibility on the field. I can make sense out of it. I was raised on New York Yankees baseball, actually. My dad spent many hours of his youth and young adulthood in Yankee Stadium, where he saw many of the legends play with his own eyes, and at […]
As I mentioned several times recently, I spent the weekend of my birthday at Disneyland. This year, Disney’s parks are featuring the theme “Celebrate Today,” and encouraging visitors to come there for their special occasions. One incentive they’re offering is free admission on your birthday, which is what prompted the whole idea to go there. My birthday’s falling on a Sunday, and the fact that the kids had no school the next day due to […]
…especially on rainy roads in normally dry Southern California. Sometimes they involve a lot of cars. If you’re truly unfortunate, one of those cars is yours. Guess who was truly unfortunate on Monday afternoon? My family spent the President’s Day weekend at my mother-in-law’s, and started the drive home after lunch on Monday. The weather was iffy, so we wanted to allow extra time for traffic tie-ups. Even so, we weren’t doing too badly time-wise […]
I think I may have mentioned a few times that we moved to a new place at the beginning of November. We’re mostly unpacked now, so I have some time to catch my breath and think about what we’ve done. We only moved across town, but it feels like a very different place. For three years, we lived in an apartment complex that was literally built around the train station. Each building had 18 to […]
This weekend, I had another of those special opportunities to break the fourth wall and meet some of those folks I’ve gotten to know via blogging Live and In Person. The Los Angeles Moms Blog, where I’ve been a contributor for several months now, had its official launch party, and an excellent time was had by all! This collaborative is actually my first experience with a “moms group” of any kind, after over 24 years […]
This road-trip-inspired post, which is partly a meditation on religious instruction, was originally published in a somewhat different form on the Los Angeles Moms Blog. I don’t have an official “Hump Day Hmm” going up for this week, so I thought this post could fill in for that. Bright and early on a Saturday morning in mid-June, the day after the school year ended, the five of us climbed into Mom-in-law’s SUV and headed off […]
When I first started blogging, I really didn’t have much of a grasp of its social aspects, but as I started to make my way around to other blogs – and to be found by them as well – I discovered how much I liked that part of it. People whose blogs I commented on regularly, and those who often left comments for me, started to feel like friends – and if I happened to […]
Julie recently reflected on some ways in which the climate of the USA today isn’t all that different from the way it was 24 years ago, and ended by posing some related questions for this week’s Hump Day Hmm: For those of you who don’t recall (or weren’t born yet) in 1984 Democrats Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro challenged Republican incumbents President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush. It was unprecedented: a ticket with […]
This is the last of four posts recounting the story of our 2008 family vacation – the others are here, here, and here. Day 8: Williams, Arizona and the Grand Canyon The kids and I were going to be seeing the Grand Canyon for the very first time, and Tall Paul had arranged for us to go there via the Grand Canyon Railway. It’s not the fastest way there, since it takes 2.25 hours to […]
Day 6: Yellowstone to Provo, Utah After leaving my contacts out for a full day, my left eye looked and felt much better, and I decided that I’d go ahead and wear my glasses again for the coming day on the road. We got an early breakfast, loaded up the car, and headed out. Our first stop came pretty early – the general store at Grant Village, still inside the park. The Boy had bought […]
Day 3 – Logan, Utah to Yellowstone National Park Our drive on Monday continued up US 89 from Logan, and most of it was designated as “scenic route” on our AAA map. They weren’t lying. The road wound through the mountains, past lakes, and in and out of tiny towns (population 600), and there were times when it seemed like each view was prettier than the last. The road took us through a corner of […]
