23 Nov 2015 4 Comments
I lost a valuable friendship this week and have been blocked for good measure, so finding out what happened might not … happen. And that’s regrettable because I could have learned something important from the experience.
So, then, here’s how this works (after we slide into our big-ass panties):
“Cry it out if you must
Bleed a little if you must
But once you’re done, suck it
all up and move on and
never, ever look back.”
–Ali B. Moe
16 Nov 2015 6 Comments
As some of my friends know, we aim for an adventure a day and they never have trouble finding us. Yesterday’s didn’t happen until close to midnight, but its scope more than compensated for its last-minute arrival. Everybody’s heading for bed, after nodding off for at least the past hour. Maddie’s in her jammies, all sleepy-headed, and I’m in the big room doing some of the 37 things women do after they say “I’m going to bed.” Colossal stupendously-loud crash from the bedroom, sounds like wood, metal, glass, and a set of cymbals, followed by a voice in falsetto Spanglish saying “I’m okay.” Casey S Ross, the line will never fade from our lexicon.
.
By the time I make it in there, Kim has extricated himself from the wreckage of our industrial-strength California king bed and Maddie is in the bathroom peering around the corner, eyes huge, and trembling so hard her feet are threatening to go out from under her. The foot end of the mattress is cratered through the frame and onto the floor, looking totally like an elephant decided to sit down and take a break on his way through. Au contraire, mon ami, merely the KIMN8R crawling innocently into bed and rolling over to warm Mama’s side. Turns out the hell-for-stout frame was not matched with a comparable foundation, surprise, surprise, and a recent bit of shifting to clean provided an excuse for it to abdicate all responsibility.
.
The good news: the inferior platform gave us more than eleven years, and no animals or humans were harmed in the making of this travesty. We scooped Maddie up and loved on her, the bed frame is intact, and Kim is down at Cotton’s as we speak, picking up a few supplies for rebuilding the support system. It was actually kind of fun dragging the big square mattress into the other room and spending the night there. For now, our little Maddie is the only collateral damage — she started trembling again this morning when she walked through the bedroom, she wants nothing to do with the sounds of clean-up, and doesn’t come out from under my desk unless I go with her. So I moved her bed under here and she’s sleeping it off. She’ll have most of it to endure again while he puts it back together, but she’s a tough cookie, so all’s well.
.
Starting to wonder what today’s adventure will be …
For the uninitiated, Maddie is our 5 lb. Maltese, not a grandchild, as someone surmised.
15 Nov 2015 4 Comments
“You can only extend the hand of friendship; you cannot force the other fellow to grasp it.”
Things come along entirely too often that throw shade on my discernment, comprehension, and BS-detection capabilities. Each time I’m left wondering how I could have gotten it so wrong, and each time I vow to learn the lesson and do better. Some things, of course, can be attributed to the adage “The man woman who has strong opinions and always says what he she thinks is courageous — and friendless.” But that doesn’t speak to what’s been unfolding for the past week or so.
Question: Has it ever once occurred to you, Dear Reader, to devise a stealth attack for gauging who your real friends are, or to send suspected disloyalists on wild goose chases to see who will or won’t follow your mandates? No? Yeah, possibly because I wasn’t a Mean Girl an In-Girl in school, that brand of cunning feels foreign to me and I can’t relate to it — set-ups, plots, fidelity tests. I mean, if you want to know something from or about me, ask me — I’ll tell you. FRIEND: Are you loyal? ME: Yes. {Or no, I disagree with you, but we’re still on the same side.} Instead, my prove-you’re-with-me mission, should I choose to accept it, was to troll someone until he/she left a page, but nobody ever said who I was “trolling,” so I couldn’t actually follow through. Haha, silly me — pretty sure I was the one slated for the guillotine all along — how’s THAT for being clueless? Anyone having flashbacks to junior high?
Truth — this friendship has longevity to it, a ton of agreement, much fun, a couple of heart-to-hearts, a few this-is-who-I-am convos … so while I wait for the other shoe to drop I’m doing an internal file-search, looking for where the relationship started to go off the rails. It’s entirely possible that I was wandering around in a fibro fog when the Freight Train of Distrust left the station long ago, and unbeknownst to me started picking up steam. I do know that the arrival whistle blew shortly after my friend sent out the BFF test, and when I didn’t turn mine in right away it was instant winter on that page. My friend won’t see this, but for anyone who might view Tests of Friendship as a cool experiment, see if you can first pick up on whether any of your potential testees are currently engulfed in heavy-duty life-stuff, because it may not, for myriad reasons, be possible for them to really get back to you any time soon. Here is where most of us, when we sensed which way the wind was blowing, would feel compelled to *explain.* But ‘splaining accomplishes nothing except to make the offended party dig in with increased resolve — and we all just feel shitty afterward. It took most of my life to scrape down to the actual me — not going back to justifying my existence now.
I shed my tears days ago and the inevitable denouement can take the stage when ready, I’m good. Being unfriended ain’t no thing, but if I’m blocked on top of that, it’s gonna leave a mark. It helps that I do understand what happened — the friendship simply became a casualty of what happens around us every day — collateral damage. It’s a stress-inducing challenge to trust and align yourself with someone whose skin color looks like other people who don’t love you and don’t mind proving it. By association I’m required to do more, try harder, prove myself over and over, and pass all the litmus tests. I don’t have to ask you how familiar that sounds. Every cell in me is sorry the world is so incomprehensibly ugly — I’m trying with all I have to reverse the trend and I thought you knew by now what my heart looks like. I think it’s gotten steadily harder for you to look past pigment and I do not blame you. None of this changes my firm belief that race is simply a construct — if we were truly separate peoples, our insides would not match any more than our outsides … but we’re the same under the skin.
Love and acceptance are priceless, as is friendship with a person you instinctively trust, and all of that is hard to let go of. But since some things do happen for a reason, I’m going to assume this is for the best — you know, maybe we weren’t all that good for each other’s blood pressure and mood swings. I do know you were good for my heart, however, and I’ll still be over here loving you — you wield a lot of power, but it exceeds even your pay grade to stop me. I’m grateful for all I’ve learned from you, my friend, and I’m in awe of your feistiness and sass — please don’t rest until you get your hug from Barack Obama.
02 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in My Thoughts
Ned is my friend because he makes me laugh.
As I’m sure you can imagine, being a humor columnist, I am constantly working up a sweat. In fact, I can already feel perspiration forming. By the end of this paragraph, I will be a drippy, sweat-stained mess. Most people don’t know it can take hours to finish a column.
The reason has nothing to do with procrastination, writer’s block or even the ability to Google history of Star Wars universe; many of us humor columnists simply become too sweaty to operate our keyboards without sliding off and potentially endangering ourselves and others. Newsrooms everywhere understand this, which is why we are often placed in special cubicles that are refrigerated.
Or at the very least equipped with a drain pan.
Yet somehow, beverage companies continue to overlook us as potential thirst-quenching icons when developing trendy ad campaigns. Chances are, you’ll never see a commercial featuring a humor columnist at…
View original post 576 more words
01 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
PROCLAMATION:
Be it known that on this 29th day of September, in the year 2015, I did don a sweatshirt for the first time since storing it last winter.
Because while out running errands, in thin t-shirt, floppy shorts, and flip-flops, I came this close to freezing my buns off. Pretty sure the temp was only in the high 60s, so … And the breeze was chilly on the balcony, in the shade, so hey, sweatshirt weather, fall is here!
*
Halfway up the block I had to peel out of it, but it happened! It’s official, my favorite season is gracing us with its presence. I’ll shed the flip-flops by first snow.
*
The wagon, in its autumn sweetness, was a part of my farm for as long as I lived there and many years before. I don’t know where it is now, other than in my heart, but I still love it.
*
Various and sundry nonsense … everything about the season brings it to the surface …
07 Sep 2015 2 Comments
Yesterday was nice. I slept through sunrise, thereby assuring myself that it still functions well without my supervision. Kim made ranch-bean omelets and we shared massive quantities of coffee and a soak in the spa tub. We gave Madison a bath and watched her turn into a fluff-ball again while she careened zoomie-dog-style through the house. Laundry was done and favorite pieces made ready to wear in mere seconds on the balcony — it was one of those hot windy days that signal a change of seasons, which will add to our appreciation for cooler temps later in the week.
And it was my birthday! Not a five- or ten-year milestone, but it means more to me than any since my 30th, which I nearly missed thanks to an inconvenient cerebral hemorrhage at 29. Far too many people I loved left this life far too soon, including my brother at 29, my first husband at 58, and so many others. I was born when my mom was just short of 20, and sharing a birth month with her I always felt there was a ribbon that connected us in some indestructible way. When she died suddenly at 67 a little trapdoor clicked open inside me and closed just as quickly. Shut up in there for the past twenty years was the unanswerable question of whether I would outlive her. Yesterday I celebrated 68 — and now we know.
Both of my grandmothers lived past 95 and kept their minds intact, so that’s my goal, free and clear, now that I’ve crossed the Rubicon. Not that I actively contribute much — walking our tiny dog three times a day is the extent of my exercise program and most of the time I eat what I want, although a recent not-good metabolic workup is forcing me to rethink that approach. Basically, in lieu of hard work on my part, I’m banking on great genes and a positive outlook. Happiness determines about 99% of life, so a Zen attitude and an abundance of good juju are my weapons of choice. And all these numbers … ages, blood pressures, cholesterol counts, calories … are just that — numbers. It takes so much more to measure the weight of a life, and our control over any of it is mostly imaginary .
Okay, I have to go, my husband’s running the spa tub full of hot water and therapeutic salts again for heading into another year of doing it right and seeing what happens.
P.S. The greatest of ironies would be if I’d gotten fried in my tracks on any one of my trips out to the balcony tonight to watch the lightning. Hitting the mark is no sort of guarantee, but I’m optimistic.
01 Sep 2015 2 Comments
If it’s ME you’re asking, that was another lifetime. Kim and I met twelve-plus years ago, we’ve been married eleven, and if you know him it’s no surprise that I’ve learned a lot from him. I wasn’t a rookie, I knew things … just not necessarily THESE things, not for sure. So from the always beguiling viewpoint of my toothsome mentor …
LIFE LESSON #1: It’s okay to be happy — you have to give yourself permission.
LIFE LESSON #2: Just because someone looks like that guy your mother warned you about doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fall in love with him, get married, and live happily ever after.
LIFE LESSON #3: Knowing when to be satisfied is the key to life. {Spoiler Alert: It’s when The GOOD arrives, not just the Good Enough. Knowing the difference between GOOD and PERFECT is central to the equation.}
LIFE LESSON #4: With proper motivation old dogs can learn new tricks. {Madison affirms that truth.}
LIFE LESSON #5: Work is not the only honorable use of time, and is, in fact, an insult to the universe if not matched with an equitable amount of not-work.
LIFE LESSON #6: The best way to get a job used to be a) say you know how to do it b) go home and read the manual/book/instructions/recipe, and c) show up and do it. Even though the world doesn’t much work that way anymore, the basic principle still applies in some way to most of life.
LIFE LESSON #7: You won’t necessarily stay in command of your limbs and faculties right up until you die, so in case your heart/lung apparatus keeps performing longer than your motor skills and your brain stays on the job until lights out, you’ll need things to think about, so start deliberately cataloguing scenes in your head … memories of EVERYTHING. The way the air smelled, the voices, all the sensations. Every part of every face you ever loved … and the taste of kisses, all of them. Because someday if you aren’t exactly independent anymore, and the hours get long and you’re going out of your freaking gourd, you can stop chasing nurses up and down the halls in your throttled-back Jazzy and take some time to remember the good shit. Once you crawl into your empty box, snag a memory from the archives and get settled, you won’t even remember where you parked your carcass. You won’t hear anybody, you won’t see anybody, they’ll assume you’ve come unhinged, which is perfect because they just might walk away and leave your wrinkled old ass alone until it’s time to ladle out the evening pudding.
*****
There are more, but I’ve been pleasantly hung up on #7 since last week, and I’m preoccupied with storing details in the database. The weather triggered all of this — our early transition from hot-and-humid to autumn-is-at-the-door. The air has changed, the leaves are turning, the students are back in town — it’s ridiculously easy now to memorize the feel of the mornings and evenings and what happens in between.
Last night I asked Kim to wake me up early enough to see the sunrise this morning, and by golly if that didn’t stick in his drowsy mind. 6:15am he’s standing right there, on the job, already dressed (I peeked), his smile threatening to blind me, so without actually opening my eyes I slid into my jammies and felt my way to the balcony (because he’d sweetly provided a hint). The view that greeted me when I finally raised my eyelids was totally worth waking up for. First of all, my husband — still smiling — and in front of him on the table two steaming mugs of coffee. And the SKY, seemingly ALL of it, splatter-painted every shade of blue and pink. We sipped our beans and listened to the city waking up while the big orange sun floated out of the trees in nearly the same spot the big orange moon did last night. The air was clean, the sounds were a sampling of everything, those wafty little food-smells from up the street were insinuating themselves past the railing and making us consider our bellies, the sky was growing ever lighter, brighter, and more childrens’-movie-like, with its panoramic rays and white fluffy clouds and sheer natural drama until it all became so overwhelming I had to come back in and lie down. I did better than Maddie — she was back in bed in five minutes.
*****
We aren’t really solidifying plans to end our days as wards of the medical system, I mean, who DOES that. But if
*
Plan A) to get really ridiculously old but also miraculously in shape and just gradually eat less and less until we fade away right where we are
*
… doesn’t work out, and
*
Plan B) to spend the last of our cash on a fabulous trip around the world and then drive off a cliff together in a brand new Porsche
*
… has to be cancelled for lack of discipline and foresight
*
WE’D BETTER HAVE SOME GOOD STUFF TO THINK ABOUT.
24 Aug 2015 10 Comments
A post from the archives.
We didn’t win the lottery AGAIN, which is crushing because PLANS — I was on a quest to revolutionize my wardrobe by way of that venerated institution, the Sundance catalog. Please don’t sue me, Robert Redford, for naming names — I obviously can’t afford that since we STILL DIDN’T WIN THE LOTTERY.
It’s all so disappointing because my first new outfit as a gazillionaire was going to be killer, starting with the jeans, which are $108 and still have PIECES OF ACTUAL DENIM clinging to each other! There’s a sweet top, a twee rumpled creation weighing less than an ounce and going for a very reasonable $198. There’s a distressed-leather peacoat that looks fab with the little top — it’s only $548. The shortie boots in the same shade as the jacket, complete with fringe and studs, are a must — they retail for $575. To nail the look I’ll need the slouch bag for $368 and a cool nubbly belt at $120. Then we get to the fun stuff — the jewelry. Three necklaces, layered, at $1190, $3400, and $1300 respectively; eight stacked wrist cuffs totaling $4800; seven rings for $1603; and the earrings, $285. And a perfectly darling may-or-may-not-keep-time watch for chump change of $98. The surgery to add 10″ to my height is probably going to run into actual money.
So for just the debut ensemble, not counting height-enhancement because who knows, I’m looking at approximately $15,000 with shipping. And realistically I couldn’t wear the outfit every day because it isn’t wedding and funeral appropriate, so it’s imperative that I buy out the catalog in its entirety, including the furniture. My dreams are all-encompassing.
Way to ruin my life, Powerball — Bob and I were going to be besties.
Plan B: Snag this $98 vintage bandanna scarf and accessorize my overalls.
02 Aug 2015 2 Comments
No part of my world seems to be coming undone today, but in past days, weeks, months when it has been, writing it down has saved me. If I can tell myself what happened, life loses its power to put me under. When you’re broken, it’s good to know where the glue is.
28 Jul 2015 6 Comments
Once upon a time there was a little red schoolhouse that was in fact a biggish red-brick edifice. Until it was built sometime before 1920, at considerable cost for the times, the children of the local farming community attended classes in a drafty wood-frame building that kept the mothers stewing over its shortcomings. Farming was booming, there was a homestead on nearly every quarter-section of land, and families were still moving into the area. A bigger, safer, warmer, more forward-looking school was needed, and my grandmother, a teacher — although not in this building, which was three-quarters of a mile from our farm — was one of the motivating forces behind the cause.
The funds were raised and the school built. Double-walled, with both facing and interior brick; a kitchen; wood flooring; full cement basement with a stage. My siblings and I, in one of its later iterations, roller-skated in the basement, daring each other to take artistic leaps from the stage to the smooth cement floor three feet below. My brain still knows whether or not anyone did, but the database is unfortunately down at present.
My dad went from first through eighth grades here before attending high school in the small town six miles southwest. My grandma took him, via horse and buggy, to his first day of first grade, and turned around a couple of hours later to find him standing in her kitchen. The teacher had let the kids out for recess and my dad, having all he wanted of this “school stuff,” simply made a break for home. He was bitterly disappointed to learn that attendance wasn’t optional, and despite being a thoroughly intelligent guy, formal education never became a favorite.
As Murphy’s Law #11 states, “You get the most of what you need the least.” So about the time the beautiful schoolhouse was nearing completion, the farming boom was starting to go bust. The air was turning to dust, Wall Street was headed for instability, to put it lightly, and families stopped streaming into the neighborhood while others gave up the struggle and packed it in. By the time the little six-year-old up there finished eighth grade in 1935, the student population had thinned considerably, finally making it impractical to keep the doors open, at which point the building became a community center, a polling place, the location for township meetings, and an ongoing setting for the Grange’s poetry readings, plays, and other literary endeavors, which sounds so quaint and genteel I can hardly stand it.
In my lifetime it was the site of community Thanksgivings … mostly in the late 1950s, which were nearly as devastating as the Dirty ’30s and left people feeling tapped out at holiday time so they pooled their resources. We also held big carry-in dinners for extended family, where all the old men brought fiddles and harmonicas and assorted other instruments for Frontier Karaoke while my grandma “chorded along” on the old upright piano.
I haven’t seen that corner for a while so I don’t know what if anything is still standing. Those few acres became part of the family farm, and my dad told the friends and neighbors who inquired that they could have what they needed. He and my brother had started taking the building apart and cleaning all the brick, a project that came to an end following my brother’s unfortunate death, and after that I’m pretty sure my dad didn’t care who did what with any of it. He did, with tears in his eyes, bring me a load of brick my brother had cleaned so that I could have a cozy hearth built in my newly-remodeled farmhouse … meaning we still don’t know the end of the story. An entirely different family, in another county, will keep it going forward.
It’s clear that bricks know the secret to longevity.
25 Jul 2015 4 Comments
First post on my Facebook feed this morning was a Happy Anniversary wish from our son John. It’s our 11th … and both of us spaced it off completely, a first in that number of years. We are, joyfully and officially, The Old Married Couple. We’ve been cutting Hallmark short since about year five, our favorite flowers ever were the ones at our wedding, and neither of us needs chocolates, so nothing lost — it rained a bit ago and cooled off the oven that’s been raging outside our door, so we’ll probably walk the half-block to Cielito’s, our home away from home, and celebrate on their big patio with the best margaritas in town.
888888888888888888888888888888
Eleven years ago today, we got married after the close of the morning church service, and then our pastor and friends served lunch to about 300 people. Simple, beautiful, memorable, sweet, and fun.
888888888888888888888888888888
Happy. So happy.
888888888888888888888888888888
Our glamour photo shoot — a gift from Kim for my birthday not long after our wedding.
888888888888888888888888888888
Yeah. This guy.
888888888888888888888888888888
The newlyweds today. A lot of changes can happen in eleven years’ time, but the basics stay the same, and that’s so cool.
888888888888888888888888888888
13 Jul 2015 3 Comments
Remember this photo from the other day? My Great-aunt Nora, my grandmother, and my Great-aunt Ruth in the middle dressed in white. Christmas 1917.
Now we have this — taken same day, same location, when Ruth’s daughter Myrl was around two years old and my Uncle Ed maybe seven or eight and already missing his right eye. Until my dad came along several years later, they would be the only children of their family generation. There were eleven years between the two brothers, so they didn’t become friends until they were adults.
Ruth’s life took twists and turns from early on, and at no time did she adopt the quiet lifestyle of her two sisters. She instead embraced the 1920s, transitioning quickly from the chaste white dress to flapper gear more suited to The Party, wherever it happened to be. 
A happy Ruth …
******************************
My grandma, who lived past 95, told me endless stories about life in the late 1800s and on, but I don’t remember her going into detail about why Myrl was raised by her Aunt Nora instead of her mother. There are bits and pieces we could combine in formulating answers, but as in all things there are nuances to be taken into account. Fortunately I have an inside track and a fact or two at my disposal. 1) As far as I could discern, not having really known them until they were what I thought of as old, my grandma and Great-aunt Nora, having been raised in challenging circumstances brought about primarily by their alcoholic father, were straight-laced to the max. 2) I heard mention of drinking when Grandma did talk about Aunt Ruth’s life, which would probably have required the equivalent of endless come-to-Jesus talks, but their objections to her lifestyle tell us nothing about Ruth’s feelings or her capacity for maternalism. My guess is that Grandma and Aunt Nora offered to keep Myrl at every opportunity and gradually made that a permanent arrangement, Nora thus getting the child she never had despite two marriages (more stories, kids), and Ruth getting what she, maybe, wanted in the first place, which was simply the freedom to be. That’s the trouble with photographs … they can tell us only so much. Ruth was the baby, spoiled and indulged by her older sisters, and she came along just as social mores were evolving ahead of the more devil-may-care attitudes of the Roaring 20s. The comparative drudgery and boredom of her growing-up years no doubt quickly lost out and fell away in the face of NEW, FUN, HAPPY, EXCITING! By the time I was conscious that I had a Great-aunt Ruth, she was older, ill, married to the last of a series of hard-drinking men, although Uncle Erv did treat her like she was made of glass. Her laugh, which she never lost, sounded like that same glass breaking, and I instinctively loved her. Life ended up costing her dearly … but that’s a story for another day.
******************************
Mesa, Arizona, in the late 1990s. Me holding Merle’s dog Su-Ming, my dad, and feisty Merle, who at some point shed the old Myrl and moved on under her own terms. She was a party girl like her mama, but smarter about it, turning the discovery that her husband was a serial cheater into a flush retirement. By this time Uncle Ed had passed away, so Daddy and Merle were the only remaining direct connections to my grandparents and their era. Merle loved to laugh, she loved people, she loved family, she loved her little dog … and everything was “Oh, kid!” followed by delighted laughter. My favorite story was about the times a neighbor would pick her up from Aunt Nora’s house and then go get her mother. As Aunt Ruth was walking to the car, dark-haired little Myrl would giggle and shout at her “You tan’t fit, Roofie, you got too big a BUTT!!”
******************************
There are a million ways to make life work and it’s a bonus to come from hardy people who knew about some of those ways. I’m in their debt but that isn’t how they saw it — they were simply surviving, in the end doing as well as anybody at that and hanging onto a healthy sense of humor through it all. They’d be genuinely happy to know they left a mark.
09 Jul 2015 2 Comments
The recent photo sorting with my sisters has yielded much treasure, all of which I appreciate infinitely more than the first time I saw those pictures. Some I’d never laid eyes on before, and I do a little dance over each one. We’ve tossed bags full of bad pics — exceptionally bad pics of blurry armpits and floors and the back end of a cat — that nobody ever bothered to weed out, but we’ve glommed onto anything of interest, everything that sparks memories and smiles. Today’s little collection has been making me smile all morning, so I’m sharing …
My great-grandmother, Caroline Fuhrman Dierking (looking outward), and her sister Emma.
On the back, in my grandmother’s handwriting: “Caroline Fuhrman, my mother, was born in Germany. The family emigrated to America in 1872, with eight sons and two daughters, my mother being one of them. Aunt Emma was born in Atchison County, Kansas after they came to America. My mother and her sister loved each other very much. This is at Aunt Emma’s Camp Creek home in Atchison County, sometime around 1920.”
********************
Caroline Fuhrman married Louis Dierking and after living northeast of Emporia for a time, they moved to this dugout northwest of Bushong in 1894. Several sons were lost at birth or in childhood, but daughters Nora and Clara (my grandmother) survived, and after the move to the dugout, Ruth was born in 1896.
This photo was taken when my dad, brother and grandmother went to a Camp Creek family reunion in 1966, and shows the house my great-grandfather Louis Dierking built onto the front of the dugout. Pretty sure the horses, and whatever other livestock they had, lived in the lower part made from rock.
********************
The daughters of Louis & Caroline Dierking, Nora, Ruth & Clara, Christmas, 1917
********************
Ruth Dierking Cox in 1920 — clearly things had changed a bit in three years’ time,
although my grandmother’s comment was
“I believe her car was a Studebaker. Always breaking down or out of fix.”
********************
And now we’re back to sweet Great-Great-Aunt Emma, with pretty little Colleen, who was in some way my cousin, and 2-year-old me with my naked doll and a scowl. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1949. Life is both long and unbelievably short.
"How did it get so late so soon?" ~Dr. Seuss
The Power of Story
Words and Pictures from the Middle East
Welcome to my weekly blog on life's happiness. We are all human and we all deserve to smile. Click a blog title or scroll down. Thanks for stopping by.
Rhymes and Reasons for Every Season
Just the journal of an aging man looking at the world
Permission to be Human
Creative Space + Literary Magazine
Funny Blogs With A Hint Of Personal Development
When will we ever learn?: Common sense and nonsense about today's public schools in America.
Art from the Earth
Life from Southern California, mostly San Diego County
The parts of my life I allow you to see
Medieval History, Pop Culture, Swearing
twinning with the Eichmans
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.
Live Life Write
Working towards global equity and equality
Creative humour, satire and other bad ideas by Ross Murray, an author living in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada. Is it truth or fiction? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.
random thoughts and scattered poems
Best Friends for Sixty Years and Counting...
The latest news on WordPress.com and the WordPress community.
A Taurean suffering from cacoethes scribendi - an incurable itch to write.
Humor at the Speed of Life
Playing for Time 
Join the conversation …