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stefan grossman is the real deal, if you ask me

I’m still playing my little parlor guitar most evenings, sometimes just for a few minutes, but enough anyway so that my callouses don’t disappear. I think it is so amazing (and ironic) how playing the blues can make me so happy. It totally has this power.

Here is a wonderful video of Stefan Grossman, my [...]

another overheard conversation

Luc is sitting on a skateboard, rolling through the yurt, la la la, thinking about whatever Luc thinks about while idling on a skateboard.

Sophie comes along and lays down in front of him. “I’ll be the road kill.” She sticks out of her tongue, making a grunting “I’m dead” sound.

Luc, not missing [...]

a conversation overheard

Luc is fascinated by war games. Playing “army men” with a thousand little people, animals, aliens, and monsters, plus setting up massive bunkers and fortresses out of blocks and legos and castles, endlessly working out battle strategies and outcomes. “Look at my line up!” he says. “Who do you think will win?” is his favorite [...]

the SS Novel 2012 is underway

This past Sunday I officially started a new novel. [Fireworks!] It had been so long since I was last drafting (what you call it when you’re facing the Blank Page a.k.a. the pulling stuff out of your bum phase) that I felt the need to prop myself with lots of, um, props. The last six [...]

like i needed a second yoga practice

Because my days are just adrift with wide open spaces of nothing to do, I’ve added a second, daily, yoga practice to my schedule. Madness! It all started with that video going around of the scantily clad Briohny Smyth doing some lovely yoga for a commercial for something (what? I couldn’t figure it out), which [...]

drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us, ANIMATED

Time for something different! Here is a cool animation of Dan Pink’s work, based on material from his book Drive: the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that I ran across on Tobias Buckell’s site. Motivation isn’t what people and economics tend to think! People aren’t simple! But here, watch for yourself:

Basically, [...]

ashtanga after 40

Claudia did a terrific post over on her blog on ashtanga for folks over 40 yesterday. As someone who will be turning 41 in a few weeks, I read with interest and my mind has been turning the topic over this morning— especially as I watch my nearly 8 year old daughter flip her [...]

juice me, baby

Okay, after watching Fat Sick and Nearly Dead, I’m thinking I need a juicer. Plus, we went to a big museum full of people and their kids oogling the dinosaur bones (we looooove the dinosaur bones) and I was struck in a painful, eye-popping way by the huge percentage of hugely overweight and sickly looking [...]

fat, sick, and nearly dead

No, not me, silly! This movie:

Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead is a documentary made by and about Joe Cross, an Aussie who was terribly overweight and very sick with an auto-immune disease that I can’t spell or pronounce. Realizing he is on his way to an early, painful death, [...]

the excellent jim dale and what is truly scary in harry potter

As you may know, we watched all the Harry Potter movies over the holidays. Then we watched them again when I was sick a week later. Which led, of course, to the books, or, to be precise, the audiobooks. And I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that audible.com does not have the [...]