(NOTE: This is based on an exercise we did in my writing workshop this week, and I thought it might work as a Weekend Cooking post, although I don’t think I’ve ever participated in Weekend Cooking before! Weekend Cooking is a weekly blogging feature hosted at Beth Fish Reads.) I made a batch of family-recipe marinara sauce last weekend. The specifics of our recipe tend to vary–every cook in every generation of my mom’s family […]
This was the exercise: Empty your purse, backpack, briefcase, or shopping bag and look at what you’ve taken out. Now choose one or two or more objects that say something significant to and/or about you. Describe them. How are they related? How are they not? This is an exercise in three things. The first is your powers of description. Second is your ability to analyze, to move from the concrete to the abstract, to see […]
To pick up where we left off, I can tell you exactly when my reading preferences shifted from almost exclusively fiction to avoiding fiction as much as possible–it was late 1999, into early 2000 (I would say the “turn of the millennium,” but it was actually a year earlier)–and I can tell you exactly why. My husband (not the one I have now, in case that doesn’t quickly become obvious) started a relationship with another woman […]
family photo courtesy of Teresa Lantos DeGagne (I call this “The Annual Alzheimer’s Post” because, with minor changes, it goes up around this time every year, to accompany the annual Walk to End Alzheimer’s. Details on the 2013 Walk, and my team’s fundraising link, are below.) On October 8, 1999, 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. […]
…no, not from this place! I’ll own up to using an intentionally misleading post title, though. Yes, we really are using professionals for a move next door–there’s some big, heavy furniture going up and down stairs in both houses, and we are not young people. (Well, two of us aren’t, and the one of us who is a young person is only thirteen and a bit less than full-grown.) They’ll be coming on Saturday morning, […]
The further into the week it is, the harder getting up at 5 AM feels. You’d think that would be worst on Monday mornings, but oddly enough, it feels toughest on Thursdays. The problem isn’t so much the waking-up-at-5 part; I usually respond to my alarm–which is a fairly pleasant wind-chimey thing, nothing raucous–just as it goes off. It’s the getting-up-at-5 part, which has to happen in order to accomplish everything I need to do […]
I still feel like it was a good idea, but it didn’t really go as I’d hoped–there was only a very small turnout for my Book Purge Giveaway this weekend, and I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by some no-shows. But with that said, I really do appreciate the few people who did come by and take some books away! Getting to where I live does require deliberate effort–it’s really not […]
After a couple of weeks of cryptic remarks and references buried in blog posts, I was able to spill the story yesterday. (If we’re Facebook friends, you may have read the short version already. This is the just-slightly-longer one.) Tall Paul and I started down the road to home ownership back in the spring. It’s been a bumpy one, and we’ve been keeping our progress–and the frustrating lack of it, sometimes–quiet. But we’d just gone […]
The women of Generation Fabulous are out to show that the internet isn’t just for kids (and their moms). I’ve been part of this “voices of midlife” community for a few months, and it’s grown too big for Facebook to hold it any more. Founding members Sharon Greenthal, Chloe Jeffreys, and Anne Parris have just built GenFab its own little bit of online real estate, and it’s opening the doors to host the group’s monthly […]
I’ve lived close to 40% of my life in places that don’t have four distinct seasons, and winter has always been the one most noticeably absent. My teen and college years in Florida were summerlike for about ten and a half months a year, including most of the months we were in school. I’ve lived in Southern California for the last decade, and while I really do appreciate the appeal of the mild climate–and my […]
I originally wrote this after the Tucson shootings in early 2011, and revised it a bit after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut last week. Members of the #GenFab bloggers’ group have been sharing their responses to the Sandy Hook School shootings with the hashtag #stopitnow. What follows are my personal opinions on the generalities of a very complex issue, with links to facts on the matter where appropriate. I’ve linked to others’ posts in a […]
Those of you who have been reading here for a while have probably heard this story before, maybe more than once, so you get a pass on reading it again (unless you really want to, of course!). But it’s a story I particularly enjoy telling, so I’m sharing it again as part of the December #GenFab Blog Hop: the theme is “How I Met My Spouse/Husband/(Otherwise) Significant Other.” There’s something in my spam e-mail almost […]
