The Gourmez

I spent this evening attending a discussion at Duke on banjos and their roots in Africa.  There are three reasons why I chose to attend: I have loved banjos ever since I realized that the melancholic and slightly creepy plucking during the Pirates of the Caribbean ride was, in fact, a banjo. Tickets were completely [...]

One thing you should know about me, if you don’t yet, is that I take my television seriously.  Not so seriously that I’ve actually rewatched DVD sets over and over, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode excepted, but enough that I spend lots of time reading other people’s opinions on what it all means.  Too [...]

Okay, so it’s been maybe a week since Facebook debuted its new layout.  I, for one, love it but I seem to be in the minority.  Either that, or the haters are just very vocal about it!  So here’s why I love the layout:

We are headed to Jamaica in less than a week.  I feel very overdue for a vacation, even though we just spent a week in California last October.  But as most of you know, travel is my lifeblood. Morro Bay, CA, from my last escape It seems as though, the more time I spend in [...]

As I glanced at my kitchen calendar this morning, I noticed I forgot my cousin Daniel’s birthday last week.  Sorry Daniel!  I usually like to send cards to people for their birthdays but have recently found myself settling for leaving messages on a Facebook wall or sending a super poke full of balloons.  If I’m [...]

Caution, for those not up-to-date with Battlestar Galactica, you may not want to read this. I’ve been browsing through my copy of Writer’s Market, marking the listings for magazines that might be a good fit for my work so I can research them to find out.  A good number of the magazines that publish fiction [...]

I’ve often wondered, while plugging away at a computer under the fluorescent lights of doom, how businesses can be successful and only stay open during the daylight hours. I’ve always thought that most of us consumers are chained inside buildings at work or school from first light until the sun has set. But just while [...]

I was listening to “The Diane Rehm Show” on NPR this morning and her guest was John West, author of The Last Goodnight, a book written about helping his parents commit suicide. His father had terminal cancer and his mother was falling into mental decline and both asked him to help them meet death on [...]

As I sit on my deck, delighted to be able to spend the day doing work that holds meaning for me rather than cooped up in a cubicle, I am confronted by my first dilemma. Where will my next paycheck come from?

Free Will and an All-Knowing God In discussions, I’ve often heard people claim that free will cannot exist in the same world as an omniscient God. This argument generally poses the question, “How we can truly make our own choices if it’s already a given what choice we will make, as the presence of an [...]