A Fascination With Houses

I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with houses. I love everything about them – I love to know their architecture, their era, whether the windows are transom or bay. I like to know if the roofline is gabled or ranch, if the garage was pre-1950s or post. I like porches. I like fads: I like formal living rooms that eventually gave way to “great rooms” that then went back to formal living rooms, and  the fact that porches gave way to back yards in the middle of the century. I took an architecture/urban-planning course in my senior year in college, and it was one of those courses that makes you think your life could’ve taken a very different direction if you’d heard about it soon enough. …

Anyway, I like home architecture, but I also like what’s inside. I like the story of the house. I like houses that look lived in, not like pages out of a magazine. I like homes that have messy bookcases – filled with well-loved books and maps and maybe some postcards tucked in. I like frames on the walls – framed photos, framed T-shirts, framed posters, framed bookmark collections – I don’t care what’s in the frame, I just love to see what a person chooses out of his or her past to put up on a wall and remember. Continue reading

Speaking of Surfer Dudes …

Speaking of surfer dudes, I finally got a chance to work on a manuscript I’d set aside about a young surfer named Fin Hensen.

And it felt amazing to be writing again.

The whole weekend, in fact, was made up of early mornings; liters upon liters of Diet Coke; and hours and hours of writing dialogue, setting and character.

The only time I even diverted my attention was to tap in with my awesome critique partner, Patti, and to write a post for Popculturedivas about Big Love and the law-breaking “anti-setting” that we all know and love.

I just love writing — and January and February are months where I can throw myself in wholeheartedly.

How about you? Did you get to do something you love this weekend?

Surfer Dudes, Resolutions, Camellias and Chicken Paillard …

Sometimes wisdom comes in the form of a 6-foot surfer dude in a Hawaiian shirt. …

Such was the case with me when I got the best advice about New Year’s resolutions I’ve ever received.

Come over to Health Bistro and read my post about who the surfer dude was, and how to make this New Year’s resolution be the one to truly come true

Also, don’t forget to check on the update in my Camellia Watch 2010: They’re blooming!

And don’t forget to stop by and say hi to Dave. If you ask him nicely, he might even post some of his cool recipes on my blog as a guest poster! I’ll photograph the steps and we can all learn along. … (Chicken paillard with basquaise sauce, here we come. …)

A Personal Chef Inside My Kitchen

IMG_2279This is Dave. He’s Superman’s youngest brother. He comes into my kitchen like this from time to time and shows me a thing or two about finding my way around.

My culinary skills can be described as thus: late-blooming, learned from television, rather routine but with brief flashes of delicious.

I can make a normal dinner for my family that my kids seem to think is edible, but I make the same things over and over, and did for a good seven years when I was a SAHM. My kids had almost memorized my rotation: spaghetti, potato soup, beef au jour, tuna melts, ravioli with chopped tomatoes and basil, and mastociolli. Those were my basics.

Now that I’m a working gal again, Superman has taken on the cooking. Mostly because he’s home before I am, so it makes more sense to have him start things simmering. Superman is actually a very good cook. His salsa is brilliant. And he also makes us pancakes, breakfast burritos on Sundays, the most amazing enchiladas ev-ah that he learned from his dad, and hamburgers that could be served in restaurants. He also grills. And he makes a delicious Spanish soup (at least that’s what I call it, because it has lots of cilantro, some kind of hot pepper, chicken with a good spicy finish, and is topped with cheese/tortilla strips/onions). Continue reading

How To Make LinkedIn Work For You

The new year is always a time when people are in the mood to get out their new calendars, clean out their closets, update their phone lists, and otherwise start fresh.

And now it’s becoming a good time to clean up our social media profiles, too. (Or, for some of us, to start social media profiles on networks we’ve been ignoring.)

But rather than try to do them all at once, it might be less overwhelming (and more fun, actually) to deal with each social media network at a time.

Since I do social media work for my company, and review these networks quite often (and use most of them), I’ll throw out my best recommendations for you.

Let’s start with LinkedIn:

What is LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a professional online networking system that allows you to connect with people in a professional way — sharing resumes, work history, work-related articles, and professional contacts and networking groups.

Who should be using it? Anyone who is building a professional career and expects to be doing so for at least another five years. Continue reading

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