Mistakes about the 1956 World Series Yankees and my Dad (with apologies to the fans)
All my life I grew up thinking my dad loved the Yankees. He’d met the team in Japan. I love Japan. I loved living in Japan. I loved learning Japanese. I loved meeting Japanese people. I loved all of that. It’s been 20 years now this spring since I got on the plane to fly there for […]
Moon Rise, Moon Set
I saw both the moon set and the moonrise yesterday. It was nearly full and spectacular. Silver white against the deep blue of the predawn sky, just above the horizon of the jagged mountains to the west of our desert valley, it took my breath away. In fact, I had to change my running route […]
Welcome to Goathead Island, Kids
It’s February 16th and about time to pull weeds again around here. The air is full of smoke from weedburning. Ever since my husband and I moved to this town 13 years ago, we’d been looking for land to build a house on. It’s a rural area with a slow economy. I figured, “How hard […]
Pac Man Fever versus MineCraft Fever
“Cache Valley Mall, too good to be true…Close to you.” That was the jingle on the radio near the beginning of the opening of the Cache Valley Mall in Logan, Utah. At lunch yesterday, I was trying to keep my kids from numbing my mind with unintelligible chanting and endless talk about the videogame “Mine […]
Is Revising a Goal the Same as Quitting?
I have revised my New Year’s Resolution. Already. I mentioned this to my husband, and he said, “It’s good to give up sometimes.” But, I argued, it’s not giving up. It’s changing my focus as a result of better information. My big plan was to make myself stop eating cold cereal—any cold cereal. This is […]
Reading to Keep Out the Cold
I know, I know. I live in Arizona. I have NO right to complain about the cold. I spend 3/4 of the year wishing it were colder, to be honest. But this morning, when it was about 20 degrees and we still have no heat in our house, I thought, dang. It’s cold. We worshipped […]
Going Dark for DC/ Threats and Bribery: The Delicate Balance of Parenting
So, for the past week I basically went dark on internet interaction. It was weird to leave the “computer me” behind–all my editing projects and writing and this great swirling pit of time-suck known as social media that must be done when a person has a book recently in publication. It was nice to just […]
Great Googly Aggie Moogly!
So, I just checked Facebook and a post from my cousin Jared told me he’d seen the Aggie Alumni Newsletter and I was in it. Shazammmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! What a nice article they wrote. It’s so cool that they featured Big in Japan, and mentioned Christopher Loke (also an Aggie) and Jolly Fish Press (populated by many […]
The Law of Compensation (free audiobooks included)
I dropped my kids off at school Monday morning after a long Christmas break with a lot of family together time. (Whether togetherness always counts when 5 or more of us are absorbed in some screen or other is up for debate.) But it was a fun break, and seeing it end got me all […]
A Merry Little Christmas
I’ve got no deep thoughts today. Just too busy having the merry little Christmas with the family and children. We’re watching lots of good movies, eating easy food, reading books and taking a pile of brownies over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house. What could be better?
