We checked into a Chicago hotel Friday night and soon discovered that we were sharing the premises with the Lutheran Marriage Encounter. All those nice people walking in with their notebooks--I wonder what they hoped to improve over the weekend. Half the fun of hotels is sharing them with Groups. We've passed through lobbies full of Mary Kay reps (High heels! Perfect faces! Pink Escalades!) [...]
"Did you find everything all right today?" said the grocery store cashier."Yes, I did, and I was looking for a lot of weird stuff," I told her.Like spreadable goat cheese. And pesto. And roasted red peppers.We've got a Fast Sunday tradition around here of eating a big meal made made from all new recipes (also known as Dishwasher's Dismay). Currently, we're working our way through [...]
A Montana cowpoke that falls for a night-class teacher. Two brothers that would like to throw each other off the ski lift. A father in mourning, doing what he should've hired a detective to do. An Argentine aristocrat, longing for the old days.These are some of the people that appear in Maile Meloy's short story collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It.Meloy's [...]
I love my UrbanSpoon app. I love the way it nudges me to try new, independent restaurants all over town. Aren't I just the queen of variety, sampling barbecue up on the northwest side, and sandwiches slicked over with garlic butter down in Bloomington and waffle cones in Cincinnati? Then again, maybe not. I can pick up a menu, splashed with colorful pictures of [...]
Somebody in my writing group keeps handing us chapters of her novel about a family broken up by a fatal car accident. The narrator girl and her father struggle through the year after losing Mom and Big Brother. We get a lot of silence-at-breakfast scenes, losing-ourselves-in-competitive-swimming scenes and re-entering-teen-life-with-a-birthday-party-at-the-country-club scenes. (Where, naturally, a hunky boy appears. With an Aussie accent. And he's a swimmer, how [...]
The grass is a sickly yellow. The shrunken edges of our pond reveal grassy banks that usually remain well hidden. The weeds have taken over every lawn along my walking routes. Given this droughty state of things, we have been warned not to play with matches around here, or fireworks, or any other sparky things.I'm on board with this, having recently seen pictures of Colorado [...]
My pet peeves. A list. No, just one item. Big one though. Sentence fragments. Drive me nuts. Doubling over. In pain. Oh, the pretentiousness! That's why I quit The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor. Amazon fell in love with this book, touting it as one of the best of whatever year it came out. A story about simple people who have a good idea [...]
Winter has set in, as you know, and I'm dying to escape it, even if it's just in the pages of a book. Sadly, the books I have chosen lately were a pile of duds. So let's just dive in to the Finished Book Pile today and express our frustrations, OK? This pile of duds included Dangerous Laughter, a collection of short stories by [...]
Let's start this time with the food.Chili Corn Bread SaladI don't want to stay away from this stuff. I want to eat the whole pan! This is why I need a life of the mind, so I don't languish, thinking of the corn bread, the bacon, the cheese, the gooey ranch dressing stuff, the . . .Ahem. Where were we now?Oh, yes. Life of the [...]
Let's start today with The Finished Book Pile. We have If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, a collection of short stories by Robin Black.Her conversational little stories grew on me. Black writes about quiet people, many of them aged and broken down. Mostly, I remember Jean, hiding her stroke-affected arm in a fancy-scarf sling, claiming it's some small injury. Her daughter has [...]