Recipe Boxes

3 Commentscrafts, food, history, holidays, lifestyle, memoir, , , ,

Something came up today that made me think about recipe boxes. You know those heirloom collections of handwritten recipes on index cards? I didn’t inherit my grandmother’s cooking skills, but I did wind up with her recipe boxes. And I’m fairly sure that at least a few of the recipes go back to my great

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Heading for the Hills

charities, hiking, holidays, Science, travel

Happy 4th of July, everyone! This year, in true introvert fashion, I’ll be skipping the noise, the crowds, and the charred meat and heading for the World Bird Sanctuary in beautiful Outside Saint Louis, Missouri. (Valley Park, to be precise.) The goal? To see an American Bald Eagle up close and personal. The World Bird

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Comic Books and Thanksgiving at the Hi-Way Diner

food, holidays, lifestyle, memoir

After four or five generations of togetherness, the “Family Thanksgiving” finally exploded a few years back. Nothing horrible ever happened. It was more of an old woman who lived in a shoe arrangement. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins’ spouses/significant others/crypto-others and their children. And if you’re doing math, that’s roughly two busloads full of people

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Maybe That’s Where Trappist Monks Come From

2 Commentsholidays, memoir, ,

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Lent. I had to look that up. Not being from a liturgical background myself, Lent comes and Lent goes, and mostly what it means to me is yummy fish tacos and 40 days of my Lent-ing friends being in vile moods ranging from I gave up sugar to I gave

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Valentine’s Day: A Brief History of Disaster

5 Commentsholidays, writing, , ,

One of the benefits of being a writer is that you wind up looking at your own culture through the eyes of your characters, and you start to see the things that are… well, a little bit weird. Valentine’s Day is… well, let’s be honest… about as weird as they come. It’s a holiday dedicated

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