Barbara’s Riffs on Life
My Upper Lip and Other Sorrows
I feel bad about my lip. My upper lip. Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck, a body part she made famous back in 2006 with her book I Feel Bad About My Neck. Nora also felt bad about her frizzy grey hair, parched skin, incipient mustache, flabby upper arms, and tendency toward belly fat. She was getting older.
No Words
By Barbara Falconer Newhall I’ve got no words today. I’m out of town visiting a sick — very sick — aunt. And I’m pretty sad. The hospice nurse is not optimistic. My mother and father are gone. Jon’s mother and father are gone. My aunt is the last of the aunts and uncles on both sides […]
Atotonilco, Mexico — High Art, Folk Art, Hot Springs, Food!
If you’re planning a trip to San Miguel de Allende, be sure to budget time for a day trip to the nearby town of Atotonilco.
Confessions of a Nintendo Mom: The Day I Unplugged My Eight-Year-Old
Like any normal person with a job, two kids and a front yard full of weeds, I had been sleeping in on a Sunday morning – until the sound of Jon and Peter playing the new Nintendo woke me up. I burst in on them. “HEY. YOU WOKE ME UP.” No answer. So enraptured were they with their dratted boomerangs and Oktoroks they didn’t care that they had wrecked my beautiful Sunday morning sleep-in. I stomped back to bed, covered my head and cried. Read more.
‘Read Me a Story, Mommy, But Not That One You Wrote’ (Or,The Nicest Thing My Husband Ever Said to Me)
To save money, management had cut my hours back to one day a week. I did what every self-respecting writer does when she’s ticked off at the world. I sat down at the keyboard – and wrote. Read more.