Today is the publication day for The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage, an anthology of essays about marriage and family edited by Caroline Grant (of Literary Mama fame) and Lisa Catherine Harper (writer and writing teacher extraordinaire, author of A Double Life). This anthology includes a shorter version of my essay, “Still Life on the Half-Shell,” […]
A friend of ours, Rachel Dowell, died last weekend after a long and dignified battle with cancer. Rachel was able to hold on long enough to witness an important life event, and then Cancer won out. Friends, relatives, even pets who depart leave not only ghostly trails of their presence in our lives, faint footprints […]
I have all these grand thoughts I want to blog about, but I’m either bogged down in micro/maco work stuff or I’m doing personal writing of the long, non-bloggy type, or I am reading. Once in a while I do something beer-related, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Under duress, I clean and garden. Maybe it’s […]
The latest issue of Ninth Letter — a physically-gorgeous journal from the University of Illinois — includes my essay, “The Outlaw Bride,” about my marriage to my partner Sandy in 2004 and its aftermath after our marriage was invalidated by the state. It’s an essay about the meaning of marriage, and love, and stuff even […]
We had been considering ourselves super-super fortunate — we didn’t have a tree crash into our house, we aren’t in a flood plain (maybe in a 1000 years, but right now our house is on a hillock in an elevated section in the west part of Tallahassee), we didn’t have to drive in this mess… […]
I switched to a very simple two-column theme for Free Range Librarian on the theory — correct, it appears — that the theme I was using had broken my feeds, probably when I upgraded WordPress a couple of releases ago. So this morning after reading the Styles section of the New York Times — the […]
For libraries that have offered domestic partner benefits to their employees: does anyone out there have recommendations for accident insurance plans (similar to Aflac, or what Allstate offers) where domestic partners may be covered under their “family” plans? (I work in Georgia, if that makes a difference.) At MPOW, we interviewed Aflac and Allstate, and […]
I’ve been on this car-purchasing odyssey, made wild and crazy because it’s the summer when people will do irrational things to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles, including paying way above reasonable street value. I changed tactics to a new car late in the game, when I could not find a used Honda that met my specifications through […]
The last week of (very desultory) car-shopping I’ve experienced both a Starbucks Moment, an epiphany, and a moment of adult anxiety, which is a lot to handle in less than a week. The Starbucks Moment came when I rode in and even drove a friend’s brand-new MINI. I was expecting a deep envy-producing experience, one […]
So Sandy’s car is kaput (of course, since she’s temporarily between jobs — isn’t that how it works?) and I am going to bequeath her my trusty Honda Civic and get a new-to-me set of wheels. Probably not brand-new. I’m thinking a gently-used Prius or Mini-Cooper — exactly what I was thinking these last few […]