Spring Things and Other Excuses

I haven’t gone AWOL, but I admit to ignoring my blog recently. It’s one of those priority things I mentioned a couple weeks ago — I had to decide if writing posts was a bigger priority right now than family, work commitments, the mess that passes for our slowly-unwintering garden, and my ongoing novel writing. It wasn’t,

#wipMadness Day 5: On the Shady Side

Every spring my hubby does battle with the invasion of moss and lichen in our lawns. He’s already making plans to do the annual de-thatching, raking and liming, and he’s muttering non-too-quietly about it. Despite the myth that says moss grows on the north side of trees, moss grows wherever it can find moisture and shade — it requires

Hanging in there on a Monday

It’s Monday again… and I imagine many of you went into it already counting down to Friday. I happen to like Mondays, but I’m probably an oddity. (Stop nodding your head and laughing!)  Living through the week while being focused on something else is a little like what our resident squirrel does. He took all winter

March Madness 2: Making a Noise

The brown and grey Song Sparrow isn’t very big. The Cornell University’s Ornithology site describes song sparrows as medium-sized but bulky, and says they are one of the most familiar sparrows in North America. If I sit quietly down by our marsh on a summer day, I’ll sometimes hear their chip-and-trill song from somewhere in

IT’S MARCH MADNESS TIME!

  I wonder if there is such a thing as a literary masochist. There is a group of writers who tweet under the hashtag #wipmadness and spend all of March frantically dredging up words with which to reach writing goals during that span of thirty-one days. It’s something like a spring version of NaNoWriMo. Not