I love my holiday traditions. There’s Christmasification Day, the day when I lug all the Christmas decorations from the attic, take down all my year-round home decor and replace it with its holiday-themed counterpart. It always takes hours. It’s always exhausting, and it’s always worth the effort. There’s the annual…

A short horror story…happy Halloween! “…wife’ll kill me.” Oscar drained his beer and turned from the TV to his companion. “Huh?” Derek slid off his stool and laid a ten dollar bill on the bar top. “I said I gotta take off. …

Yesterday, I came home from two days away at a writer’s retreat. I use the singular form of writer’s as there was just one of us there. Me. It was a do-it-yourself retreat. I planned it for two reasons. First, I was stuck with my second book. I had a…

So let me ask you this: a cleanse isn’t a tough concept, right? Like, if I say — hypothetically — “I’m doing a 10-day smoothie cleanse. I’ll have smoothies for all my meals for the next 10 days,” that’s pretty clear, right? I’m asking for a friend. My “friend” has…

Candy, candy, everywhere / Chocolate dark as ink / Candy, candy, everywhere / Pour my smoothie down the sink (with apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Day 7 was Halloween. In years past, when my kids were still trick o’ treating, my strategy on candy was to buy the stuff I…

So it snowed today. Yeah, snow. In October. Don’t get me wrong, I love snow. I love watching it fall. I love getting snow days (back when I was commuting, that is), and I love how it looks covering the trees when I take my dog into the woods for…

I miss food. The thought popped into my head on Day 4, when I was driving my two kids home from our bi-annual teeth cleaning. It was sneaking up on lunchtime, and my daughter asked — as she does pretty much every day — “what can I have?” As I…

If you’re keeping score at home, you know that Day 2 was record-breaking awful. So it was with trepidation that I rose in the wee hours (to me, if the clock still shows “6” as its first number, it’s the wee hours) of Day 3. It was Tuesday, which meant…

I love my “wake up time” in the morning, to the point where you mess with it at your own peril. Normally it looks like this: I pad downstairs in my pajamas about an hour before I need to start getting ready to be where I need to be and…