(Forgive me if you’ve already received this post by email. It’s not published on my blog – for mysterious cyberspace reasons that I don’t understand – so I’m reposting). I was going to rewrite and then post the entry below about the weather turning chilly but suddenly L.A. has gone from autumn to a…
I’m getting so familiar with various emergency rooms that a staff member at St. John’s asks me where tube station 22 is. When I say I don’t work here she says, “You look like you know what you’re doing. And you’re writing.” Since we arrived rather suddenly (R’s doctor admitting him for more tests and IV…
Plans were in place. The kitchen and dining room at home were all packed for the painters and our new cabin in Lake Arrowhead (see previous posts on chaos) finished in time for a house warming party on Labor Day weekend. Then we’d spend two weeks of vacation in the cabin just reading and staring…
There’s eleven years of my cabin stuff – furniture, dishes, books, towels, pots, paintings and boxes of well, stuff – sitting in my new garage In Lake Arrowhead waiting for floors to dry and the painter to finish. (Normally I’m better packed than this but the floor refinishing was a last minute decision.) At the same…
Yesterday on NPR I heard something that might just change my chaotic life – and maybe yours too. It was about a system called mise-en-place used in restaurant kitchens. (A variation of my German grandmother’s mantra, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”) Here’s an excerpt: The system that makes kitchens go is called mise-en-place, or,…
There was an excellent essay by Stephen Marche for writers last weekend in the NYT Review section, “Failure is our Muse”. (It’s another version of what my father told me years ago when I took off for New York to become an actress. He said I was so stubborn and stupid about the competition that…
I started taking yoga classes again which immediately threw me out of my comfort zone of doing perfect little stretches. I’m really good at my stretches, including salutation to the sun, triangle and some back twists. I do them every morning for twelve minutes, but in yoga class we’re doing balance poses. I am terrible at these.…
Maybe you’re not holding your breath to find out what’s happening with my new house in Lake Arrowhead, but I thought I’d do an update anyway because I’d like to do a little venting here, and what with the popularity of Houzz I think maybe more people are interested in fixing up houses than in…
This is the crazy cat who lives in the attic. (Actually my office on the top floor.) She’s seventeen years old and I inherited her from a daughter and granddaughter who named her Thatcher. When my brother and sister-in-law were here in April they started calling her Margaret, which seemed a much nicer, softer name.…
I heard a review of “The Fault in Our Stars” on NPR the other day and the guy said the teenagers had “movie cancer” – they didn’t get gaunt, their skin looked terrific etc. The thing about movie cancer that I find most irritating and untrue is that the person who has cancer always dies…
