Lavender is kind of the *it* thing to grow these days. There are huge festivals dedicated to the plants and I know several people who devote entire garden spaces to growing nothing but lavender....
Fish were a big part of life where I grew up in far northern Wisconsin. Muskie, walleye, bass or trout — whitefish and sturgeon from the big lake, Superior. Best of all was the...
It’s been a summer of intense heat, lightning strikes and seemingly non-stop wild fires here in the Inland Northwest. The smell of smoke is ever present, the sun is either invisible or appears briefly...
Autograph books were popular with girls when I was eight or nine. They had fancy gold writing on decorative leather covers and were probably designed to collect actual autographs of famous or semi-famous people...
For the most part, I like exercise. It clears my brain and the endorphins are nice — the physical benefits are secondary. I zip along outside with my dog every other day — my...
When my kids were still at home I baked cookies a lot. Chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, M&M cookies, peanut butter cookies — I turned out pan after pan. Three growing boys and their...
I headed off to my regularly scheduled Spanish class last week and when I got there, there were people I didn’t recognize plus an interpreter signing in the front of the classroom. For a...
I stopped at an outdoor market the other day to pick up some fresh produce. The weather was above a hundred and it seemed like a pretty miserable job to me, babysitting all those...
I have a series of family pictures taken when our kids were young and we’re all walking backwards. I don’t know if anyone outside the family would realize that we’re doing that — although...
I cancelled a vacation. It was a trip that had been planned for quite a while and then whammo, a couple of big financial obligations crept into the picture — a massive car repair...
