My Mystery Fruit Tree

The other day I made an exciting discovery! A tree on the very back edge of my property line, right beside my compost pile and some mulberry trees, is growing a small, so far green, pitted fruit. And I think it could be edible! So then the next day it was nice out, and dry, [...]

Guardian’s 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women

So it was way back in February when I posted my only other review according to the decrees of the reading challenge I’ve decided to participate in. Since it’s almost July, I’ve decided to write this second review, of the book I read (twice) in June. I actually read two books off the list in [...]

Excellent news

Gay marriage is legal in Iowa! The Iowa Supreme Court announced their unanimous decision this morning!
You can read about it at The Iowa Independent
or the Des Moines Register
or the New York Times
or here
or here
or a bunch of other places but I should get back to work.
I am so excited! Don’t know how I’m going to [...]

Hayley Mills or Lindsay Lohan – Pick your poison

In memory of Natasha Richardson, Chad and I watched both of the Parent Trap movies over the last two days. Though Richardson was only in the second of the films, Chad has been living in a cave for a while, and so hadn’t seen either film, resulting in the obviously required viewing of both movies. [...]

What’s My Age Again?

Recently while running errands in Des Moines, my boyfriend Chad and I found a new bookstore in an old strip mall, a Half Price Books. We were forced to browse until we had exhausted all the areas we could possibly be interested in browsing. Besides books, magazines, comics, movies, and records they had used CDs, [...]

hate/love: poetry

I have a lot of love/hate or maybe actually hate/love relationships. Like one of the fast food restaurants in town – Chad and I call it by different names depending on if we like it or not at the time. It’s a combined KFC and Taco Bell, and we both like Taco Bell but not [...]

How do you dream about vacation?

Exciting revelation from yesterday: I now have a little more than a week’s worth of paid vacation days accrued.
This might not seem exciting to some. But this is my first job in which I have paid vacation or sick days. I find having my own insurance exciting too, but I’ve had insurance before, so it’s [...]

My other blog.

Sometime in December I came up with an idea for my mother and I to do something fun together, and for me to record some of the things I cook as a record and a way of potentially sharing them – at least with my mom, maybe eventually with others who might read the blog. [...]

1000 Novels Challenge: My first review

Last month I read about a neat reading Challenge on the book review blog of a fellow Grinnellian, Jennie at Biblio File. I used to be an avid reader, but as early as midway through high school I began struggling to juggle school, extracurriculars, and my desired reading load. Until recently, my available energy and [...]

an experiment

I’ve been working on improving my mental health for a while now. I’ve been going to my therapist once a week since July. And I’ve been trying out this idea of mindfulness – trying to be less judgmental, especially towards myself, being more present in the moment, being more aware of what I want and [...]