How I Plan FHE

Hope your holidays were lovely and memorable.
It’s Monday, and we try to make all of our Mondays lovely and memorable by observing a tradition of our own: Family Home Evening.
Oh, yes, our family nights are often messy and disorganized, and all too often they devolve into a morass of movies and munchies, but we’re all in [...]

Read Full Post »

How I Testify

We’re having a bit of a blizzard here, so Church got snowed out today. And a glorious Shabbat to you, too.
Perhaps I shall compensate for the lack of fellowship and community worship by studying my favorite translation of the scriptures: The Brick Testament, a Lego-ized pictorial representation of Biblical stories. Sometimes serious, sometimes satirical, it’s difficult [...]

Read Full Post »

How I Hassle Myself

I operate many mailing lists; sometimes a week or so can go by without my remembering to moderate the messages — and then all sorts of chaos ensues.
I’ve found the solution: Hassle Me, a helpful little resource that sends me abusive emails every few days reminding me to go moderate my lists.
Use it to remind [...]

Read Full Post »

How I Swipe (Free) Artwork

It’s time for the biennial — okay, bi-decadal — update of our primary website, so I’ve been out hunting for artwork. Lo and behold: I stumbled into a third of a million images, all legit, and all free, at Stock.xchng, a free stock photo gallery.
Just goes to show: People are pretty darned cool. Oh, and [...]

Read Full Post »

How I Style Me Some MLA

It’s finals week for the college kids, and they’re frantically dashing off papers and sitting exams. Mom’s helping the essay writers, natch’, by being harder on them than their own English professors would be. And I’m insisting that their papers reflect perfect MLA style.
My go-to place for online MLA style arguments: The MLA style guide [...]

Read Full Post »

How I 學習中文

I’m teaching a Chinese class to the kiddies in my daughter’s homeschooling co-op next quarter. But my fluency ain’t what it used to be. To bone up on my 中文 vocabulary I’ve been playing with the MDBG Chinese-English dictionary. It’s fascinating. Enter a word in English, if you wish, or in Pinyin, or even in [...]

Read Full Post »

How I Find Peace

So Saturday I took care of a friend’s three third-graders, all of whom wanted to watch Daddy Day Care at a high volume. Now I’m a big Eddie Murphy fan, but c’mon. It’s not exactly his best work. And I wanted to work on my book.  By the time we were past the first Angelica Huston [...]

Read Full Post »

How I Get Lettered

Pseudo-intellectualism is way more fun than the real thing. When you’re a fraud, as I am, you can still gorge yourself on intellectual ding-dongs such as country music and Go Fug Yourself.
When my brain looks for healthy fare, it noshes at Arts & Letters Daily, a web portal that tracks interesting books, essays and articles [...]

Read Full Post »

How I Fly Like a (Geeky) Eagle

Still doing way too much research, and way too little writing, on my new novel. Google Earth is proving invaluable (or distracting. I’m not sure which). Where before I might have driven (or flown) to the place I was researching, now I can pretty much Google Earth it and get at least a sense of what a particular [...]

Read Full Post »