My kind of rain
“This is your kind of rain,” my husband said. “I’m surprised you’re not standing by the door watching it.” He was right – it was my kind of rain, even though I hadn’t realized I had a “kind of rain” of my own, or that he would recognize it as such. It was a strong but gentle rain – the steady, consistent kind that comes without any wind or lightning and thunder. The kind that comes straight down and bounces [...]
You’ve been here HOW long??
“A year and a half? You’ve only been here a year and a half? It seems like much longer.” I’ve heard that from several people just in the past few weeks, and I’m taking it as a compliment – even though I suppose it could be interpreted as, “It seems like we’ve been putting up with you a lot longer than that.” It’s actually been one year and seven months – if you want to be precise – since we [...]
Time for Class
My class at the Georgia Writers Museum is tomorrow, and I’m really excited about it. I was there for a few hours this morning helping with set-up and getting things arranged. I’ve printed out all my handouts, and tonight I plan to bake some cookies so I’ll have some homemade snacks to serve. Everything else is pretty much taken care of. The class is a two-hour version of a full-day workshop that I presented a number of times in Minnesota, [...]
Weathering Another Storm
I had an “emergency post” ready to pop in for my blog this week, in case I wasn’t able to write a regular one. Here’s how it would have started: “If you’re reading this, it means our power is out due to the hurricane – again.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to use it. Although we were in the path of Hurricane Michael, it didn’t hit us as hard as Irma did last year, knocking down trees and power lines, and [...]
Is there power in knowledge? It’s debatable.
I wasn’t on my high school’s debate team, but I had enough friends who were that I knew how it worked. Every debate season, a complex issue would be presented, and the team members had to collect and document every bit of information they could about it. They had to learn as much as they could about both sides of the issue. When the actual debates took place, students needed to be able to argue whichever point of view they [...]
A long-distance lesson
“It could have been a lot worse,” we told ourselves. “At least nobody got hurt.” Well, except for the car, of course, but even that wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been. I thought I should say that right up front, because if I started out with, “We got hit by a semi on our way to Chicago last week,” you might have gotten unduly alarmed. We had just crossed over into Indiana when an 18-wheeler next to [...]