“Was that a baby frog?” I asked my man as we were having our breakfast on our lanai a couple of days ago. “It’s too little,” he observed. “And how would it grow into a frog from a tadpole on a screened-in porch?” Good question I thought as I observed another creature about half-an-inch in […]

Why is eye-rolling so appropriate these days? I have my theories. For starters, it’s not a word spoken that you can’t take back. You can roll your eyes without anyone noticing; a kind of silent protest as it were. And it feels so good to make a gestural statement without fear of reprisal, especially if

I didn’t mind paying $16.99 for my annual NOAA Clime weather radar app subscription. But in July the price goes up to $69.99. Talk about inflation. I cancelled it this morning out of principle as much as anything. I had just renewed my subscription, so they already got $16.99 out of me for one month’s

I’ve already started reading the mysteries slated for our new season’s Sleuth Book Club, a group on the island that shares a love of mysteries. The question is, will I remember them in four months when it comes time to discuss them? Probably not. I usually can’t even remember what movie we watched last night.

I was playing Mahjongg with a friend the other day when she told me what I needed to do with my life: more working out at the fitness center, avoid eating certain foods, don’t play Mahjongg with the two ladies in our group that aren’t fast enough. “You just can’t sit around writing all the

The emergency room doc sent me home with a piece of paper and instructions on how to elevate my bed to ease my acid reflux problem. His instructions made sense at the time. They turned out to be a pain some place other than my stomach last night. I had heard of GERD before but

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around, does it make a sound? An age-old question. Similarly, if you write a book and only a handful of people read it, are you wasting your time? The question surfaces every time I think about starting my next new book. I am

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m too old to fix scalloped potatoes and here’s why. I had been excited to prepare that special dish—and trust me it is special if for nothing more than the time it takes—for the eight people I was having for dinner last week. When I learned that one of

We had our neighbors over—six of them—for dinner last night. They are all new to us and great fun. We wanted the evening to be special and started planning three days out for the event. It was, we decided, worth the 90-minute trip to our favorite island grocery store to pick up Smitty’s famous pork

It was another column in The Daily Beast from a whiny individual—someone I’ve never heard of who claims to have multifaceted talents as an actor, comedian, and writer. In other words, a so-called “famous” individual who thinks we care about what he has to say. In this case, his column was about leaving the country