Deep-fried Jalapeños

Are a thing. A really, really good thing. I just discovered this and thought other people might like to discover it too, if they haven’t already. Please enjoy.

Podcasts I Like

I’m such a podcast fan, though a relatively late-comer to the party. I “discovered” podcasts while working at a hotel in the Outback sticks of Australia–I needed some kind of entertainment while making beds and cleaning guest rooms. Now they are indispensable for my workouts: music just isn’t quite engaging enough to make up for […]

Favorite recent reads

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin (2015). One of the best and definitely most innovative fantasy novels I’ve read in ages. In the world of this novel every few hundred years a cataclysm so earth-shattering and violent occurs that it wipes out most of the planet’s population. Because of these “fifth seasons” the world […]

Kohlrabi is better bigger

I thought, based on the one kohlrabi I’d eaten, that kohlrabi was a small little baseball-sized vegetable with far too much skin to be worth all the peeling, especially when it only tasted like broccoli stem in the first place. I was wrong. Turns out kohlrabi can be nearly as big as your head. And […]

Favorite books from the last five years

A selection of the best books I’ve read in recent years, as logged in my most recent five-year diary. I looked back at the book log in my first five-year diary as well, but that book list reads more like a combination of things I barely remember and classic favorites I’m ready to revisit. Anyway […]

Five-year diaries

My most prized possessions, certainly the items I would be most distraught if I ever lost, are my five-year diaries. These diaries consist of one page for each day of the year, with a small paragraph marked for each of five years. You wrap your way through the book and end up able to compare […]

Notebooks and inspired writing

When inspiration is abundant writing is the easiest thing in the world for me. Not to mention the most fun. If I’m in an inspired groove the words can just flow out for hours and hours, NaNoWriMo days clocking in at 10k words, and the words are good. But sometimes, (often), getting there isn’t so easy […]

NaNoWriMo is coming

The very exciting month of November is almost upon us! Exciting for me because November is National Novel Writing Month. For those unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is a writing challenge that was started nearly 20 years ago by some cool folks in San Francisco and has grown into an international event with over 400,000 participants each year. The […]

Some fun non-fiction I’ve been reading

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family,by Mary S. Lovell. The most famous sister in this famous family was Nancy Mitford, author of Love in a Cold Climateand The Pursuit of Love,some of the funniest and most fun books I’ve read in recent years. Lots of the stories and humor in Nancy’s novels were […]

David Byrne live

Just went to a second viewing of David Byrne’s American Utopia tour, this time in Orlando, and had my mind blown all over again. This show is more of an art piece than a rock concert. Instead of a band set up on stage around a lead singer, twelve barefoot musicians in androgynous gray suits […]