Rocks!!! Thank you Ric Tresa for making my space so much cooler!  I can't tell you how excited I am!  I think it looks awesome and I love it. 

You rock in every way :).   Read full post »

So apparently the only two people in the greater Little Rock area obsessed enough with OS to show up at the anniversary party were me and Fabflamingo, my artist compadre from across the river in Argenta.   

We met up at a place close to my heart -- The Oyster Bar.… Read full post »

I was a Dave Cullen fan before I read Columbine.  He once very generously sent me an extremely thorough and interesting note explaining the inner workings of publishing to me. It was more useful than anything anyone told me in five yea/… Read full post »

(Photo from the public domain).  

It is Sunday morning and we are deep into our respective rituals:  The Norwegian listens to 103.7 The Buzz, to worship at the altar of local talk-show host Bill Vickery.  I read OS and work on whatever little projects I’ve got going on in… Read full post »

I’ve been sort of absent from OS the past couple of weeks.  It’s a matter of things piling up that interrupted my momentum.  The Norwegian and I went to Memphis during the last weekend in March to celebrate our first anniversary.   Then I got/… Read full post »

Not mine, but this great slideshow by ABC news shows the double disaster North Dakota is facing right now.  You can see it here.   

We're keeping tabs on this closely in our house because the husband (Your Norwegian Uncle) is from Hatton, ND.  He was born in Mandan, which is… Read full post »

Without fail, every single Northerner I’ve ever brought home to Arkansas thinks I’m insane the first time I mention chocolate gravy and biscuits.   They imagine some bizarre combination of saw tooth gravy with chocolate mixed in, or maybe country gravy with cocoa o/… Read full post »

Okay, so maybe this is because my experience is in academia and I have a soft spot for writer’s conferences.   Maybe it’s because I’ve been a member of some other online communities that regularly host community events.  Either way, I’m wondering if anyone in th… Read full post »

When I first read the question “what is your ultimate vision for this country as it relates to sustainable mobility?” I thought, “define ‘sustainable mobility’ for whom?” 

For the average middle-class American living in suburbia, this means one thing. For a r… Read full post »

            Bar, my Appaloosa gelding, slowly trotted a right turn back toward the house. His hoofs thudded against the half-muddy lawn like little thunderclaps. It was a crisp afternoon in Dover, Arkansas. I was eleven years old, and  I w/… Read full post »

I just stumpled across this website:  http://zoomquilt2.madmindworx.com/zoomquilt2.swf

And I can't help but share it with the masses, really. It's one of the coolest things I've seen on the web in a long time.  

I also think that if you ever have a teenage kid ask you what it's like to… Read full post »

Or How Why I Call Myself a Hillbilly 

Look, I get it.  We’re all educated and enlightened people here and we all understand the power of the politically correct shame.   More than once on my blog, I’ve been accused of perpetuating stereotypes by/… Read full post »

In a student apartment off the campus of Arkansas Tech University. 

2.     In a house on the corner of Van Buren street in Little Rock.  An old Sears house, three bedroom craftsman.  The paint peeled on the walls in my room.  My father built a greenhou/… Read full post »

Me on Wall Street January of 2008, rubbing the bull's balls for luck, or wealth or whatever one rubs them for. 

Thinking about the recession has me thinking about how lucky I am, a lesson my parents taught me by accident:  They  let me live with eight Russian men… Read full post »

I grew up in a town where the phrase “religion is the opiate of the masses” is pretty apropos.  Teachers preached to us regularly in the hallways of our public school, there were regular conversion experiences in the choir room where the Student Chri/… Read full post »

After I first starting getting really sick to stomach, everyone asked me all the time if I was pregnant. I carried around Pepto-Bismol and crackers and sprite.  I regularly turned green and ran off to the bathroom.  I guess it looked like a good time in my life to be pregnant… Read full post »

This time of year, I get crafty.  It's the only time of year I have an irresistable impulse to make crap.   This year, I decided I'd make ornaments for my mother.  Most of her old ornaments melted in the heat last year after they moved into their new house. 

In… Read full post »

 This looks so funky because it's a tin-type photograph taken when I was seven or eight at Silver Dollar City.  

This is Your Real Hillbilly Aunt and Norwegian Uncle at our wedding last March.  Yes, that's a huge gap between my front teeth. I did say Hillbilly,… Read full post »

I turn 35 today. 

I was conceived in a trailer house somewhere outside Little Rock after a Grand Funk Railroad concert in February of 1973.  I’m pretty sure it’s the same concert where the guys from GFR met Connie Hamzy, who Wikipedia calls “… Read full post »

I am shamelessly late to the party, but I really did want to make a plug for my favorite dog breed, and a breed I think the Obama's would find very compatible with life in a more centrist White House.  For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to… Read full post »

Your Norwegian Uncle turns 37 in a few days.  As his gift this year, I decided that I would give his bathroom a makeover.  It's a very small space, and it has to double as the guest bathroom and the laundry room (our house is a tiny 1240 square feet).  That… Read full post »

Lyrics Meme (Survey) - Getting to Know You

The original instructions say to answer these with song lyric quotes.  Some of these are appropriate for that, but some of them aren't.  Instead, I am substituting some poems.  I also edited out questions I had no immediate response to :). Mak… Read full post »

In response to Kerry's Open Call on interesting facts about this election, I started playing around with the New York Times Election Results maps. 

I found out that, if you take the NYT's word for it, Arkansas actually turned a pretty deep red this election. In fact, the Republicans overall… Read full post »

I didn't make it to the great Auntie Family Halloween Bash this year. Your Norwegian Uncle got word on Thursday last that he had to have surgery right away (he's fine, just a little discomfort for a few weeks).  So we figured it might not be so good for him to… Read full post »