My mother, Margaret Vartanoff, was an Episcopalian convert. She always greeted us happily on Easter Sunday with “He is risen!” In the week prior to that joyous day, my mother walked the walk of Jesus through all the miseries of the crucifixion. By Saturday, when he was “dead,” she was…
Every year at the beginning of the tax season, our AARP Tax Aide outposts in the public libraries are mobbed. These free tax preparation service sites are first come, first served, which enables us to do far more tax returns in a day than if we took appointments. That’s because…
I have a confession to make. It’s harmless, so don’t get excited. I am one of those women who likes particular tissue box designs. We buy the patterns we like, and then we save the cardboard box when the tissues are gone. Then we restock the same box with new…
I have always been an extremely dutiful observer of the written social niceties. I write Christmas and holiday cards. I write bread-and-butter notes. I wrote my great-uncle in the nursing home, and my aunt in another nursing home, and my cousin in her retirement home, too. I keep in contact…
Recently, teen suicides are in the news. Gay teen suicides especially, but also other teen suicides. These are said to be the result of persistent bullying. Is the school social world is any more poisonous today than it was almost fifty years ago when I was a favorite target of…
I was talking to Marie Severin a while back, about comics, as we often do. I mentioned that Stan Lee, although an affable person to work with on various projects, never seemed to me to be a mover and shaker on the business side of Marvel Comics. Marie responded that…
What if hoarders talked to other hoarders? The hoarders we see on television or read about in various media do not all live alone, but they generally live with people who are not hoarders. Many have oppressed their closest family members for years with their sick habits, but their family…
In a blog about romance writing, The Healthy Writer Blog, an exercise for writers involved coming up with the names of your ten favorite movies. Many doubted they could name ten, although naming ten books would have been easy. Of course I was tempted to try to name ten myself,…
A while back a friend of mine complained that s/he had been de-Friended by someone on Facebook, and didn’t know why. Facebook, like many Internet sites, provides a method by which you can e-mail a private message to someone, even if you are not officially Friends. There is also the…
Here’s something to think about. At the San Diego Comicon recently, a cover by Mike Kaluta was for sale at $30,000. Not directly from Mike, more’s the pity; he’s not going to get another penny for that piece of his original artwork. The dealer’s price was met via a trade…
