Time for Monday Morning Coffee. Today it’s 80F at 7 am for the third day in a row. Unseasonal heat waves seem to shut down my brain. Where there is normally a reasonably reliable system inside ...
Monday Morning Coffee Time: it’s 55F and cloudy after a night of thunderstorms, quite a change from 90F yesterday, and expected to only get up to 60. These 30-degree changes from one day to the...
Monday Morning Coffee Time! There are a lot of “M” words for today’s post, like mortgages, motherhood, moving around, missing my cat, making time, etc. Just Before the Bloom Mortgag...
Monday Morning Coffee time! Right now it’s 58F, drizzly, misty, foggy, breezy, and altogether the perfect excuse to sit here with another cuppa and not weed the garden. Even a Dandelion Has its...
There’s at least two ways of looking at nearly anything. Minimalism is no exception: is it the ultimate cynical luxury of the privileged, or is it mindfulness and appreciation of essentials? Or...
Good Morning, Monday Coffee Mates! It’s overcast and 50F, likely to reach 68 as we enter a warm humid spell this week. This inevitably happens after I put the finishing touches on a sweater, so...
“Genius is 1 percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” –Thomas Edison In Concert Creativity is overrated. I say this not as an expert in the fields of psychology, cogn...
The first of what I hope to be weekly extemporaneous posts. It’s a style of writing that is conversational and personal, but is also a good way to start off the writing workweek, to get in the ...
The Neverending Sweater Okay, so you know I knit. Last summer I started a top-down raglan cardigan using CotLin from KnitPicks. It took a while to figure out what size I was, get the gauge right, etc...
This Space, of Course It’s time for a bit of spring cleaning and redecorating on the blog, and some changes will be appearing over the next few days. No worries–it will still be the same ...
Well Take of Ourselves, Thank You Very Much “Simple living” often includes having a garden. Now, a garden can mean many things, from a substantial vegetable plot to a small sitting...
Wake Up by Jenny McCutcheon (non-affiliate link) lays out the intricacies of advertising and marketing in a clear and unmistakable way. It will help any reader snap out of the consumerist dream state...
Sitting Here and Thinking About Things Okay, time to pour a cuppa and let’s talk shopping update. A few weeks ago I changed my blog’s tag line to “essays on life after the clutter i...
Into That Good Night Our resident muse suddenly took ill and the vet could hardly hold back his tears as he tried to tell me just how bad things were. Tabby was at least fifteen years old, a kitten t...
Dont Ever, Ever Leave This Box It wasn’t my intention to start off the third year of this blog with over two weeks between posts. It isn’t because I’ve been too busy to write, or si...
The Eye of the Minimalist Beholder Adjusting the focus of a blog is a common, and also natural, occurrence. Some folks would say this blog doesn’t have much of a focus at all–it doesnR...
The Start of a Beautiful Friendship Special note: Spirits of Place, my little collection of flash fiction, is free today, if you’d like to get a copy. Valentine’s Day is the first true c...
Well, I did it: Spirits of Place is my first little book of fiction, a collection of short-short stories. It is available for the Kindle (and you can get free Kindle-reading software on Amazon) for $...
Really Feeling This Pincushion Sometimes I feel like a human pincushion in a world of needles, violated from every direction–and as if that is, moreover, my sole purpose in life. Now, I ...
The Intersection of Light and Silence Sacred spaces are not exclusively places of worship, but they are places where we are more keenly aware of an existence outside the mundane, the temporal,...
An Option I Didnt Know We Had a Couple of Months Ago Unlike a lot of other Minimalists, we still have a tv, and watch it regularly. And yes, it’s a fairly good-sized flat screen Sony Bravia, co...
Biding My Time When you write a lot, the flow lets you write even more. This goes on happily until something comes along to stop it in its tracks, whether it is writer’s block, a life event, or...
Waiting for the Moment to Make Things Right Being Right is a life or death deal for a lot of us. Plenty of self-help and relationship advisors have pointed out that arguments start and escalate becau...
That Was the House That Was Our little 1920 house sits on a corner lot very close to the charming old downtown of a small Indiana city. There was an abandoned bungalow right around the corner when we...
How to discuss the important things in life. My inner curmudgeon has been having a field day of late; I’m sure there’s something in the water around here, which I make palatable by brewin...
1 Egg, 2 Eggs, Etc. Okay, everybody, Minimalist Cooking 2: 27 More Practical Recipes is now officially published, available here on the blog and also on Amazon.com and Smashwords. It focuses on one-p...
Attention: Fruit! Food for thought, thought for food, Makes a better attitude. At least I keep telling myself that. Like just about everyone else who goes through dietary issues and changes, I get cr...
maybe theres some bounce left in the old thing Ten years ago on Halloween I bought the Red Ball on impulse at a K Mart or Target or some such place. I remember how I was feeling that day, very happy ...
shades of gray in the kitchen For the past month I’ve been working on another cookbook, and all that veggie-cutting and pot-stirring while proofing the recipes has naturally led to a lot of thi...
...the streets, the doors, and your eyes The unifying idea of the Occupy Wall Street protests is in one, minimalist word: OPEN. In both the literal and figurative sense of the word, OPEN needs to hap...
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