We are not alone

It is late afternoon on a weekend in mid-November and I am savoring the solitude.  It’s been a busy month, with back-to-back trips for work, family events, and fun, followed immediately by houseguests.  Delightful, all of it; but I am…

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DI Why?

This will be short:  I have only a few minutes to write, while the lemons I’ve just blanched are still piping hot.     When they’ve cooled enough to handle, I’ll slice them, pack them in salt, and set them aside to…

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Bread Yips

I have been baking sourdough bread since the last millennium, long before it became the hip COVID lockdown hobby.  Over the past three decades I’ve gotten pretty good at it, if I may say so myself, my weekly loaves both…

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A new video, for Labor Day!

Nothing at all to do with Labor Day, actually.   But my green screen does get a good workout:

Gratitude and Non-Attachment in the Veggie Patch

In these last two years of dislocation and loss, I have practiced a lot of yoga.   Woven throughout have been two central themes of any meditative practice:  non-attachment and gratitude.   We are happier and better people when we can be…

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Change of Plans

Here is how this past week was supposed to go:   

My husband was supposed to go on a long-planned deep-sea fishing trip, and I was supposed to go to a conference on the other side of the country.  Then he…

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A mother's day gift

This Mother’s Day, Boston has given me a beautiful bouquet of flowering trees.  

It’s been a cool spring, and the trees have been in bloom for longer than usual, a real treat.   I can’t see these particular flowering cherries without…

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Cold and Lonely

I am getting over a cold:  a sneezy, sniffly, thoroughly unpleasant and thoroughly unserious cold.   

I know that it is not COVID.   But you don’t. 

I got this cold from my husband, who is tested regularly at work, so he…

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My latest video -- Cocktails at Six!

Featuring the acting talents of Sheree Galpert and Chris Combest, with the inimitable Julia Ansolabehere on the clarinet.  Cheers!

Your Efficient Neighbors

Your Efficient Neighbors hang their laundry to dry rather than running the dryer.  Your Efficient Neighbors do not even OWN a dryer!  They only run the washing machine when it is very, very full; and they never, ever use hot…

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The young urban gardener

I used to live in the suburbs, where I had a biggish garden on a smallish lot.   

Now I live on the third and fourth floors of a rowhouse in the city, and I have no lot at all.   I’m…

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To Whom it May Concern

Dear Zoom, 

Please change Gallery view so that my own image is really tiny in the corner of the screen, the way it appears in Microsoft Teams, while everyone else’s image is full-sized.   I’d like my Hollywood Square to be…

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