“Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images.” This line comes from a thoughtful essay by Pico Iyer called The Joy of Less. It’s a wonderful essay on living simply, [...]
A few of you kind readers have been oh-so-gently urging me to provide a link here to the essay I wrote for Mothering last spring. I’ve finally done it. You can find it here. About that title… I had, cheekily, submitted the essay with the title “How to Homeschool” since the piece is written in [...]
I got the idea in my head that Mr. T and I needed to raise tadpoles this summer. It’s something we’ve never done before. I was already thinking about it when Lori of In Heywood’s Meadow wrote about her son finding frogs’ eggs and raising tadpoles. She recommended the book Pets In a Jar: Collecting [...]
Post #5 in my year-long project. random notes: I have to watch myself when I read Anne Lamott. I only have to read a little, and suddenly I’m trying to write like her. Trying to be funny. Littering my lines with qualifiers: the merest bit jealous, or a tad overzealous. Once the tidepool metaphors start showing up [...]
A few weeks back, Mr. T and I watched a video from the library called Eric Carle: Picture Writer. It’s a movie I watched years ago with H and Lulu, about Eric Carle’s art, and his stories about how he became an artist. It’s a quiet, sweet film. One of my favorite parts is the [...]
My two older kids taught me the fine art of Googling myself. Several years back, they thought it funny that they could Google their own names and get hits, such as their credit for doing the art on the children’s album put out by the dad of my friend, Emily. Whereas if they Googled my [...]
Oh boy, life’s been busy. I helped a bunch of Lulu’s friends get our homeschool group’s first-ever yearbook off to the press. There was a fair amount of last-minute photography and proofreading to do. Then I spent all weekend coordinating baked goods sales at Lulu’s ballet shows. Oh, and I had a kid turn seventeen. [...]