1. Bring a gun. Preferably two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns.
2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
3. Only hits count. The only thing worse than a miss is a slow miss.
4. Move away from your attacker. Distance… Read full post »

 (Another essay from a couple of years ago, when I was still trying to get my second venture into historical fiction published the traditional way.)

 Or this one would, if it weren't a weekday. Besides the slow corrosive frustration of dealing with the various submissions processes of the b… Read full post »

Yes, I have a lot of cookbooks, probably more than any person not actually in the restaurant-chef business perhaps ought to have.

( William teases me unmercifully about this: on a day trip to Fredericksburg, trying to get me inside one of the shops on Main Street full of dubious Texas-themed tschochke… Read full post »

It is a truism that travel broadens the mind, and brings the adventurous traveler in contact with many, many things— some of them elevated and educational and some of them mundane - and one of the mundane adventures is the exposure to the many, many different ways that human waste can… Read full post »

Supposedly, seven years is the time it takes for a human body's cells to regenerate, to have new cells completely replace the old cells. I don't know that factoid is true, strictly speaking, or if it just applies to the skin. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that it's not… Read full post »

My parents chose to live in the hills, always, and preferably at the end of an unpaved road. I think Dad must be some sort of spiritual, desert rat descendant of Daniel Boone, who moved when he saw the smoke from someone else’s' chimney.

 But smoke - and fire… Read full post »

I used to be a feminist, a long time ago and another century, when it used to mean that you were bright and adventurous, and the life choices presented to you— the options that your mothers and grandmothers had were about as appealing as a plate of cold gruel. My Grannie… Read full post »

 

(The Lesser Weevil and Spike)

So, now that my daughter Blondie and I are supporting a houseful of critters… some of whom interact agreeably with each other, and some others of whom maintain a guarded distance and a policy of non-recognition, and one who spits and snarls… Read full post »

There are some kids in my neighborhood who, with something of the spirit of those performing a ritual that they don’t quite understand, but nonetheless perform,  accepting such rites as one of those things which kids are expected to do in the dreamy, lazy summertime, have opened a lemonade… Read full post »

 

(Rear: Sgts Butterfield, Festa,Thomas,Menaul, Buonarobo, McLendon

Front: Lts Francis, Dodge, Chandler, Becker)

 The ten men in this picture assembled in May of 1943 at Eprata Army Air Base, Washington, a place of which Jimmy-Junior wrote in disgust, “They have me living in… Read full post »

A certain  picture hung in a black frame, in the back bedroom of Granny Jessie’s house in Pasadena for many years, a black and white photo of four graves piled high with flowers. Only recently did my mother realize, upon looking closely at it, that the flowers were… Read full post »

... It just gets parked in new premises, every couple of years. Summertime is the favored PCS, or Permanent Change Of Station time for families with children, but it’s not like there is a really good time, just a least worst time to pack up everything you own and vacate the… Read full post »

When I wrote on my original mil-blog about what it was like to live in the women’s barracks during the late 1970ies, some of the comments on my stories would remind me of how much the lives of military women have changed, from the very beginning (1942 for most non-nursing services),… Read full post »

No, not the writing one – that is as liberating and as enjoyable today as it was when first I sat down to scribble the first couple of chapters of what would become “To Truckee’s Trail”, and even earlier, when I first began to write for my original blog, back in… Read full post »

I can’t remember exactly when I discovered that it was not actually very hard, to re-wire table lamps, and do things like replace plugs and swap out one-way sockets for three-way, so that an ordinary lamp could be transformed into a reading lamp. At a guess, I had watched Dad take…

Read full post »

 

(Granny Jessie and Mom,  c1950)

I don’t know what brought it on, remembering green stamps and blue stamps, and those thin little books that you glued them into… possibly emptying all those receipts from the grocery store out of my purse, especially those wadded up o… Read full post »

The poor moth-eaten ghost of Joe McCarthy has gotten as much mileage in the op-eds of the wise the last couple of years as zombie movies have in the multiplex these days. When in doubt, drag it out, shake it around and yell "Oooogah-booogah! Red-baiting! Black-list! It's a new McCarthyism! Save… Read full post »

(Great-Aunt Nan, Camp Lee, 1944 “Overseas Cap Issued”)

My great-aunt Nan was Grandpa Al's younger sister, born in Reading in 1903. They were the children of Great-Grandpa George's second marriage, to Alice Page of Middlesborough, Yorkshire, who had trained as a nurse, until sh… Read full post »

We were on our way to Granny Jessie's house just before Christmas, not over winter fields and woods in a sleigh, but in our parents' main car, the aged jade-green Plymouth station wagon. Mom was somewhere along Foothill Boulevard short of the turnoff for Descanso… Read full post »

 

(Blondie in Nauplion, Greece, 1982 - she is the little girl on the far right)

 

When I was 16 and half years old, I went to Europe with a troop of teenaged Girl Scouts and made the happy discovery that I blended in. Being plumpish and fairish,… Read full post »

When JP, Pippy and I were all kids, and growing like weeds, Mom was most rigorous about our shoes, owing mostly to her conviction that her father, Grandpa Jim’s notoriously fallen arches were a genetic defect that unless countered with the sturdiest and most orthopedically clunky shoes imaginab… Read full post »