Visiting family for the holidays, and deprived of your usual ways of entertaining yourself? Starting to explore their DVD collections and/or digital cable on-demand service? So am I, so am I. Here are reviews of movies I have been driven to watch at my parents' house out of sheer boredom. There may be a second installment of this before the ( Read more... )

Today, my mother and I made these bourbon-pecan balls, without the gold dust. Does your supermarket sell "edible gold dust"? Mine sure doesn't ( Read more... )

It's a sad irony that when one needs tea, one tends to forget that the water is boiling. In California I have a handy whistling teakettle to avert this problem, but my family here in New Jersey are coffee drinkers and have no such device. So I've nearly burned my mother's little pot three times this week, today being the latest in this string of ( Read more... )

Living in southern California means that the only experiences with winter that I have occur when I come back to New Jersey for the holidays. And for at least the last two years-- maybe more; I remember one snowy winter but it may have been as many as five years ago-- there has been zero snow during my trip. We got a little flurry here earlier this ( Read more... )

Look: writing every day was going to be a chore for me and tedious for you. Let's just agree that I am going to "try to get into the habit of posting more frequently," shall we ( Read more... )

Awhile ago I alleged that I was going to do a series of short pieces based on things posted at The Page, which is a compilation of one-line excerpts from prominent poetry reviews. The problem I've run into-- apart from being short on time, which is the perpetual problem-- is that these excerpts have been more analytical and less poem-triggering ( Read more... )

Last night The Boy (who objects to being called "P." and thus will have to suffer with this moniker until he can provide me with a better one) and I went to see Milk, which has finally arrived at one of our local art-house theaters. It's pretty good-- very well cast and decently well written, though not quite as ground-breakingly fantabulous as the ( Read more... )

P. and I tend to watch movies from Netflix in themed series-- we've done a vampire series, a zombie series, a Woody Allen series, a 60s psychedelia series, etc. Recently we've been doing a Ziegfeld's Follies series, which has introduced us to the floppy tapdance stylings of Ray Bolger, best known as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. So now we're ( Read more... )

As I explained earlier, I'm going to try to get in the habit of writing here every day again. The idea of writing a comprehensive update of What I've Been Up To For The Last Several Years is both daunting and boring, so I'm not going to do it. Let's just jump right in, shall we ( Read more... )

Let's face it: I haven't been present here for years in the way I used to be. I've been thinking for the past few weeks that I'd like to change that. Several things have stood in the way of this until now ( Read more... )