driving mr. schneider: my day as a runner for the bob schneider band (part 1)
On Saturday morning, while my husband and daughter share cinnamon Bismarcks and chocolate donuts, I am getting intimate with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of glass cleaner in my car. I wipe away a year—that’s when my car was last cleaned, just before back surgery—of dog noses from the rear window

stepping away from the cake
The scale at Weight Watchers showed a 3.4-pound loss after the first week. That's almost three and a half pounds of cake research (and beer research and Halloween candy research, et al.) gone. I realize it's time to step away from the cake in other ways, too.As you know, I don't blog about confections, thou

fall's fabric
fall's fabricthe fabric of fall is a narrow gleaming stripbetween bloom and detritus,at once fresh and frayed.autumn is weaver, seamstress, singer.she is the gleeand the lament.birds and squirrels scavenge the yardfor scraps we

she hearts guitars
When my daughter left the house this morning in her school uniform, she was carrying far too many things: a backpack, a hoodie, her lunch box, a 20-ounce water bottle dangling from the handle, a book, and a magazine. It wasn’t just any book, either; it was a heavy one, the sixth Harry Pott

fortune teller
Lest you think I'm playing countless rounds of Bejewelled Blitz and neglecting my writerly duties, I thought I'd make a quick appearance as sort of a placeholder while I wait for inspiration. Recently on Facebook, I asked my friends, in a cryptic status message, for ten words. That is, I said something like, "Drop and give