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YouTube Skills Week: Cake Decorating
Cake decorating seemed like an easy choice in my quest to sample a new skill each day. My goal was not anything as elaborate as a wedding cake, rather a simple cake that didn’t feature my signature sloping, delaminated layers and disjointed frosting that looked more like road rash than a sleek and smooth layer. …
Read MoreYou Tube Skills Week: Bread Making
This fanagram is the second in a series about “YouTube Skills Week,” where I attempt to learn a new skill each day based on a YouTube video. The first focused on taxidermy. —————— You Tube Skills Week: Bread Making The second item on my You Tube Skills week, following taxidermy, is baking bread, which…
Read MoreIf Looks Could Whistle
I grew up in a gender-neutral household, the only daughter with five brothers. You might have thought my mother would have doted on her only daughter, but she never singled me out with any advice on what it meant to be feminine. She never said to me, “Oh, you look so cute in that dress,…
Read MoreMarketing Unplugged: Pot Pourri, Vol 2
Marketing Unplugged: Pot Pourri, Volume 2 Toothpicks I was surprised that the grocery store offered such a variety of toothpicks. I was experimenting with tater tots as a provocative appetizer at my grazing cocktail party, one of those affairs where if you stay focused and deliberate you can cobble together a decent dinner. The idea…
Read MoreAt Seventy
I sit in the leather chair, feet outstretched on the ottoman, pillow on my stomach, book resting on top of that. I have a very limited view of myself, basically my hands and the outline of my feet inside a pair of socks. This is a welcome change from Zoom calls where the time spent…
Read MoreMy Warbler
(Artwork by Maria McNitt – www.mariamcnitt.com) The blue-winged warbler struggles as I extract him from the fine netting stretched across the underbrush. Our instructor Caleb assures us that this will only be a tiny interruption in his migration, and the information gleaned from our bird banding will contribute to stewardship efforts. I immobilize the bird between…
Read MoreOpen Letter to Peg Bracken
Dear Peg, I am writing to thank you for saving my mother’s life, not in terms of death and dying, but in the sanity sense of the word. She clung to your 1960 cookbook, The I Hate to Cookbook like a life raft, that slim volume always right next to the kitchen telephone. The…
Read MoreMy Human Pearls
When I first wore my necklace, I made sure the new bead was discreetly hidden under my shirt collar. It would have blended well with the others. But it was uniquely mine and I didn’t want to share it just yet. Plus I had worked so hard to harvest it. It was my gallstone, my…
Read MoreOpen Letter to Stephen Hawking
There is one thing humans have relied on, well beyond the standard cliché of death and taxes. It is the universal standard of a second as an enduring constant across cultures and time. Some extremist with a jittery trigger finger can do us all in, but the clock will still tick and the earth will…
Read MoreMarketing Unplugged: No Needle No Scalpel Vasectomy
As one of the few women who listens to sports radio, I am privileged to get the inside look at male-oriented ads – frantic last minute flowers or pajama-grams on Valentine’s or Mother’s Day, the heartbreak of low-T (i.e. testosterone) or ED (erectile dysfunction). This week a new ad appeared in heavy rotation – no…
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