We had friends over for dinner last weekend, and our meal included cheesecake for dessert. It was from a recipe I’ve had for a long time, although I’ve never actually made it before. It was labor-intensive and time-consuming, with a lot of prep work required and some tricky steps along the way. There was one point at which things didn’t look the way they were supposed to, and I started worrying that instead of cheesecake, we’d be eating cheesecake soup for dessert. But it turned [...]

I got a phone call a few days ago from a very close friend. The call came early in the morning, and the first thing she said, other than, “Did I wake you up?” was, “I have to tell you about the dream I just had.” I love phone calls from her that start like this. She has vivid dreams that often seem prophetic in nature, and are always profound and inspiring. In this one we – as well as several other friends – were [...]

One of the things I’m very good at is proofreading. Part of this, as you might expect, comes from the years I’ve spent writing and editing. But even when I’m not looking for typos, misspellings, or other mistakes, they jump out at me. I’ve found them in books, magazines, newspapers, and catalogs, as well as the dictionary and the phone book. I even saw an error once in the numbers on the side of a measuring cup. I just found another one that surprised me, [...]