Recently I posted a piece about a violation of my privacy –one I consented to—in the form of an app called Right Track. For three months I allowed my insurance company to track my driving so that I could scrounge a discount on my auto insurance. My ordeal is now over, the app has been  Read the Rest…

“People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.” Rebecca Solnit (Thank you, Jenni, for this quotation) I am no stranger to panic.  I suffered for nearly 20 years with panic disorder.  A counter-intuitive  Read the Rest…

When I was up on Whidbey, one of the wildlife issues was field mice.  In the city we deal with rats.  I know they are everywhere and lord knows I’ve had my adventures with them but I hated those adventures. On Sunday I went up to my local Fed-Ex to do some printing.  I like  Read the Rest…

Three weeks ago I set out to write another blog post about grief. It was going to be a calm, wise little reflection on a remark my (beloved) voice teacher Tommie had made. We were talking about the abysmal technical support that’s available for anyone over the age of 40 who is trying to cope  Read the Rest…

My two choirs began last week. I’m not sure what prescience caused me to be more than usually prepared with the music, the schedule and the quarter routine but I shudder to think what the first rehearsals would have been like if I hadn’t been. The OK Chorale has been singing for 23 years. It’s  Read the Rest…

“Bite of Broadview” signs are popping up in my neighborhood. They sadden me partly because this particular event used to be called “Christ the King Harvest Festival” and the whole “Bite of” thing is so played and partly because I won’t be going. As I gotten older I’ve contracted a condition called Tofts. It flares  Read the Rest…

I started writing this post at 10:00 last Sunday morning while sitting in my sun room surrounded by the junk of six households. It was day three of what I was calling my Farewell Yard Sale. It was the last sale I expect to do even though my mean friend (Tim) smirked when I said  Read the Rest…

My first thought here is do I want to write about this?  Do I need to make my weird private habits public?  People who have read my memoir will say that page is already torn. Two weeks I lost my Freudy, a cat I had wrapped my heart around.  He started to fail and within  Read the Rest…

I lost a day and half of my life to Customer Service last week. Its reverberations are no longer keeping me awake at night but I still shudder during the day when I pass the oven. It began when I called Seattle Public Utilities to make a payment arrangement. I’ve been doing this for years.  Read the Rest…

One of my side-lines is as a Value Village annex. All my friends know that I have a yard sale once a year. For years and years I slowly sold all the junk I had carted up to Seattle from my parent’s house in Olympia. As that stock declined I added things from the on-going  Read the Rest…