Here you’ll find progress on current books, behind-the-scenes insight and story inspiration, as well peeks at my life on rural, (usually) rainy East Hawaii Island.
The Blog Menu Dropdown highlights three categories, Hawaii Life(pretty self-explanatory), Stories I Love (also pretty self-explanatory, but includes books, movies, and TV), and Magpie Moments (bits I snatched from real life and incorporated, magpie-like, into my fiction).
Interested in something else? You can also Search for something specific—the little icon is at the end of the header—or just dive in and start scrolling.
Getting tired of the same old NCIS-Boca Raton or Law & Order ASPCA? You can check out my Stories I Love posts for recommendations, or read on… The hubs and I have been incredibly fortunate during the pandemic in many ways, but we haven’t seen our families—or much of anyone or anything else—in over a year. I’m sure many of you can relate. On top of that, we’re both the kind of people who need periodic exposure to new things to maintain our sanity. So how have we kept our household from turning into a lurid headline or a Stephen Read more…
How are y’all doing out there in the big wide world? I hope you’re not still slamming ibuprofren after digging out from Winter Storm Gail. If—like me—you were wondering about the whole winter storm-naming thing, Wikipedia says it has happened intermittently in the U.S. since the 1700s, but really kicked in with the Weather Channel in the 2010s. This Mental Floss piece explores, Why Is It Controversial to Name Winter Storms? Webcams showed that, in solidarity, Hawaii Island had at least a dusting of snow on Mauna Kea last night. Meanwhile, we had four inches of rain in Lower Puna. Well, Read more…
I’d intended to share this soapbox on Black Friday, but we spent the Thanksgiving holiday eating cans of soup and ramen, not Tofurkey and trimmings and leftovers, as we completely rearranged our house. It’s a small house, but there are a lot of books! And bookcases. We moved Every. Piece. Of. Furniture. And reversed our offices. Not only were my floor-scrubbing hands cramped into contorted claws incapable of holding a mouse, I didn’t have a place to plug in my computer. I’m happy to say I do now, though many less crucial items are still floating in search of a home. Read more…
I don’t know about you, but I feel like I could sleep until 2021. Our rainy weather isn’t helping. Believe me, I’m grateful (as is our catchment tank) that after what has felt like a dry year, we’re having a winter-ish wet spell. Note, it feels like a dry year, but I have a pile of about three years of rain gauge data I haven’t bothered to enter yet, so at this point a feeling is all it is! The upside of the overcast is I’m not ready to pass out from the heat in our house, or from the Read more…
Another quick post this time around because I’m up to my eyeballs in tech troubleshooting and advertising dashboards and promotional fun bits (more on that momentarily). I’ve also been battling a “bug” for a while—the much milder return of whatever knocked me flat a few months ago. Nothing major, but it has slowed me down just enough to make sure I fall completely behind. I did the responsible thing last week and got tested to be safe. It turns out I don’t have Covid-19. Apparently another microbe said, Oh, so Covid comes back? Hold my culture flask. (Joke for the Read more…
