Category Personal

Before After New everything: new sink, floor, walls, toilet, light fixture. It was a lot of work! Luckily, my parents helped. I’m pretty happy with the results. I learned that I don’t like tiling.

On Sunday, Kyle and I decided to check out the mission in San Juan Bautista. It’s the Spanish mission that was featured in Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. It is the largest mission in California and still an operating church. I’ve been…

As close to a costume as I’m going to get. In scary news, some folks are still trying to take the credit of Frankenstein away from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and give it to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. This has…

Dear Marcia, When I got to the conference, the organizers recognized me–California to Kentuckians is like saying you are from Morocco or something–and I realized how small the conference was. It made me self-conscious and I hid behind a column…

Dear Marcia, I had to do some work today, which is never fun on vacation. I conducted the most frustrating interview ever in the back of a car with my cell phone cramping my neck, a dying computer, and people…

Two weeks ago, Kyle and I went to Kentucky to visit relatives and for me to attend the Woman’s Writer of Kentucky Conference. Instead of re-writing the entire trip, I decided to just paste up my (edited) e-mails to Marcia,…

The next day, I was really sore from the hike and sleeping on the ground. We drove to a cinder cone that formed in the 1700s. It was by something called the Fantastic Lava Flows, and they were indeed fantastic—piles…

Purple lakes. Boiling puddles. Black pyramid-like cinder cones. Sound like crazy land? No! This is what I saw on my camping trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park a couple of weekends ago, which I went on with Kyle, Justin, and…

Last week, Marcia and I went on a road trip to the place where I grew up: Humboldt County, California. We stayed at Trinidad Bed and Breakfast in Trinidad. We had an entire apartment to ourselves with a kitchen and…

(Bing Crosby, Bebe Daniels and June McCloy sing “When the Folks High Up Do The Mean Low Down” from 1931.)

A couple of weeks ago, Marcia and I were lamenting the lack of molecular gastronomy restaurants in San Francisco. What is molecular gastronomy, you ask? It is a branch of cooking where chefs use physical and chemical processes of cooking…

Summer Activities List (Updated): Hiking Tennis Blackberry picking Listening to live music Canoeing/kayaking Picnics Something involving a fire on a beach and hot dogs Going on a boat Wine tasting Art galleries Daytrips (Gualala/Mammoth Lake) A couple of weeks ago,…