My writing has taken center stage in my life as far as my free time lately. Last night, for example, I was rushing into my home office to finish a poem I had started. I had forgotten the deadline was December 6th. I ended up hitting the submittable button about fifteen minutes prior to the…
slice of life tuesdays
Slice of Life Tuesday: Early Decorating
It’s not even December yet, and my tree is up and decorated! I am impressed with myself, can’t you tell? For a lot of reasons, I’ve never decorated this early. My husband has a mid-December birthday and I usually aim for having the house decorated by then. The tree usually stays up until just past…
Gratefulness
It’s been a weird fall. There were days that have been very hard, such as the first day I saw my mom on a respirator in ICU. Or, the day we had to fly emergently to New York because she was in ICU. The day she was admitted to a nursing home, and then, the…
Slice of Life Tuesday: Cider Making Memories
Yesterday, I had a glass of store-bought apple cider. It was lackluster, watery, and devoid of the depth of flavor that can be in cider. I know this because we’ve made cider for many years, except this one. Our apple trees did not produce enough apples to even attempt the well-loved but time-consuming task of…
Slice of Life Tuesday: On Being Published!
This is a tale you might have heard before or maybe experienced for yourself. But, today, it will be told again. By me! Today, in the mail, I received my copies of the poetry anthology in which I have a poem! Yes! I am published. The book’s birthday (who knew books had birthdays?) was actually…
Slice of Life Tuesday: Giant Saguaros & Saguaro National Park
We are still on our national park tour of the Southwest. We’ve gone from Arches to the Grand Canyon to Sedona to Tucson so far. Today, we travel to the Petrified Forest National Park, completing the three parks that are in Arizona. The last two days have been spent exploring Saguaro National Park, outside of…
Slice of Life: Arches National Park – Hiking in the Dark
For the next week, I’ll be posting short accounts of our trip out West. We planned this trip last spring in hopes that the COVID situation would be resolving by now. Last night we arrived in Moab, Utah. We had a 12 hour day of travel from Wisconsin to Denver on a plane and then…
Slice of Life Tuesday: Personal Effects
Over the last month, I’ve written several times about a health crisis our family had with my mom. It is now four weeks after sepsis landed her in an ICU bed for a week. This was followed by a step-down inpatient unit for a few days, until a rehab bed was secured in a transitional…
Slice of Life Tuesday: Just a Very Long Day
Today has been such a long day. It started out fine. Yesterday, I agreed to get up and walk with my husband when he took our dog for her morning constitutional today to the local nature trail in our town. I walked the same trail yesterday with a good friend in the morning. It was…
Slice of Life Tuesday: Self Taught Creating
Fortunate Genes I consider my family both unusual and fortunate in that we are all capable of self-teaching. From building furniture to growing a fruit orchard, or building a house, From creating jewelry, games, and wallets on a CNC machine, From learning water color painting in grad school, to composing music, From origami to colored…