Criminey sakes, as my eldest daughter says. Busy days. The last few days — well, actually, all of June so far — have been really full, with last-minute community service, term papers, tutoring and a graduation on my kid-and-school agenda. My youngest announced to me two weeks before school ended that she had 20 hours of community service to do before school got out June 17. “And just when did you expect this to happen?” I asked her. She replied that if she did 5 hours a day she would be done in 4 days. Ha! Ha! I say. Because any community service she has to do, I would have…

Just a brief post (ha! as if...) to say that on my Mac at work, the blog looks strange, with weird symbols. But it looks perfectly lovely here on my PC. Strange. I was a judge at the annual sandcastle competition (literally what it sounds like, far-flung fans — a sandcastle and sand sculpture contest held on the beach every year). It was a lot of fun and such a beautiful day. I got a little pink in the cheeks from the sun but not too bad. BBE has a new name — he’s now the Unhusband (which makes me the Unwife). Perfect, because while we were both unhappily married,…

Missing: One leather jacket. Gently used. 23 years old. Still fits. Sentimental value. I lost my leather jacket about three weeks ago. I had it on, I took it off, I laid it down, I apparently left it wherever I was and now it has vanished, seemingly forever. I bought that jacket when I was 19, at Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa, where I had taken the bus after classes at the junior college. I was working part-time for my father in his then-new brass wind-chime factory (housed in a barn on our rural property). I strung wind-chimes together: three knots for the center, five knots for the pipes, a…

News? Who, me? None to speak of, or, of which to speak…oh, all right. I’m lying. Everything is news to me.It’s been a whirlwind since that half-week in Las Vegas. The editor gave notice at the Alameda Sun so from Vegas I placed a Craigslist posting for a new editor, and when I came home, there were about a hundred emails from wanna-be editors. I sorted through those in an A-B-C way, then found out that my features editor wanted the position. However, I had already set up interviews with about eight other candidates, so I spent the next weekend in May — that beautiful Saturday — indoors, in the…

(Note — bits of this appeared as regular blog entry a few days back…see how it morphs, Aspiring Writers? This appeared in the Alameda Sun May 12, 2005)If you spend any time with teenagers, you’re bound to get into trouble. We just had a wacky and wild last-minute Cinco de Mayo party in the past week. Though it seemed like a good idea at the time to drag our friend Stella into the living room and do some salsa dancing with her, the children were not amused by this horrifying display of adult behavior. They peeked in the front door, because teenagers never congregate indoors when there is a front…