My sweetheart and I got married in December. And we took our honeymoon at the end of May/beginning of June - three days in Venice, Italy, followed by a 7-night cruise in the Mediterranean. Our first stop was in Kotor, Montenegro. The next four were in Greece: Corfu/Kerkyra, Piraeus (with an excursion into Athens), Mykonos (where we took a ferry ( Read more... )

For Poetry friday, my Poetry sisters and I are doing "golden shovel" poems, where you use lines or stanzas from an existing poem (grabbing a shovel full of gold from someone else). You use the words of a line (or lines) in the order given, as the end words of each line in your new poem ( Read more... )

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This month, my poetry sisters and I were writing poems to a prompt offered by Laura Purdie Salas. We were asked to pick a month or season that we especially like and write a "things to do if" poem.

Here's mine:
Things to Do if You Are October

I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.
from Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

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Of late, I've been on a romance binge. I finally finished the Pink Carnation series, The Lure of the Moonflower. I put off reading the last novel for two reasons - one, I thought things had sort of gotten a bit silly in Miss Gwen's novel, almost as if the author's heart were no longer in it, and two, I nevertheless didn't want the series to end. I ( Read more... )

Today has started out rainy - it may end up warm and sunny. Such are the vagaries of April.


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This month, my poetry sisters and I are responding to a poem selected by Sara Lewis Holmes - a lovely poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:

You, darkness, of whom I am born ( Read more... )

When the going gets tough, the tough . . . read. At least that's my experience, and it appears true for many of my friends and relatives, not all of whom are writers. Though now that I think of it, most of them are creatives. (Then again, aren't we all ( Read more... )

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A quick check with healthcare workers or media that does health reporting will establish that stress causes health issues. In my case, exposure to constant high levels of stress (back then I was a single mother working ungodly hours as a litigation attorney) led to my rheumatoid arthritis. A couple years later, I also developed fibromyalgia ( Read more... )