Curiosities

I’ve had a few readers ask why I call my younger son Chia. This post is for you all. It’s also for those who love nicknames and have children who’ve tried to thwart you, lol. If you have a child; have helped raise one; or teach them–you’ve been thwarted. 😉☺️ It all started long ago, when my younger son decided that he didn’t like having his hair cut. Both he and his…

There we were, in the middle of a meeting, discussing a controversial person. It’s the usual back and forth and talking over each other when I hear the words: She’s dead to me. Those words cut through the noise as my head turned toward the speaker. It wasn’t the outspoken person. Nor was it the angry person. It was the nicest person in the room who quietly said that. Honestly, if we…

It’s National Emoji Day on July 17th! Emojis make me deliriously happy. So much so that when I was having Newsletter plugin issues on my website, my friend helped me fix them instead of watching me omit them from my newsletter. This was the awakening that I really could not live without my little cartoony friends. Reluctantly, I was willing to “let them go.” However, my friend was persistent, “But you LOVE…

I get asked this question a lot: Why Westerns? That’s a darned good question that has an ironic answer woven into its fabric. Short answer: I took a class and came up with the idea there; hint: there was a gun involved. A couple of years ago, one of the writers from my accountability group suggested a class called The Fearless Writer, taught by Laura Baker, and a handful of us took…

Barbie has a skeleton in her closet and it isn’t in the closet in her mega-mansion. I suppose that many a little girl of certain time periods were coerced, cajoled, or even praised for her femininity. My mother desperately wanted me to be a girly-girl. No surprise, I was a tomboy. However, I was a girly tomboy who didn’t like dolls. She thought I “should” play with dolls. I can’t tell you…