Veteran journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall riffs on life as she knows it.
I've written hundreds and hundreds of posts over the years. To help you find your way to the best of the best, I've tagged my favorites "Don't Miss!" Scroll down here to find them.
Another way to locate Riffs on Life that you might enjoy is to click above on your favorite category – "My Ever-Changing Family," perhaps, or "Funny Button." You can also use the search box located way up top to hunt for stories by topic. There's fun reading at "garden," "aging," "kids" and, of course, "Jon."
It’s not too late to catch a bus – or a plane – and head out to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for the annual Bouquets to Art show at the de Young museum — including a flower arrangement that looks like a cake. It’s on till Saturday, March 23, 2013, but if you can’t make it to the real thing, here are some fun photos I took the first day.
It’s spring in March and the daffodils are going strong on the local hillsides in the San Francisco Bay Area. So are the camelias, abutilons and iceland poppies in our front yard.
I’ve been writing personal essays, newspaper columns and blog posts for years now. I’ve learned some writing tricks the hard way — by trial and error. Others I’ve just plain stolen from my various writing coaches. Here are some of my favorite personal essay writing tips.
When I’m writing a personal essay or a blog post, I find that nice stories in which I behave well and come off looking good generally don’t work so well. I look for the bad story, the ugly story, the story that shows off my marvelous human shortcomings.
Impermanence. It’s a helpful, if not always comfortable, idea: Everything changes. It just does. My Aunt Grace died last month. My son Peter will be married in May. And 56 wind turbines are now up and running on the pristine rural countryside near my father’s birthplace. Read more.
What’s rhetoric? I’ve always thought of it as the high-flown language of politics. But really, it’s something we humans do all the time, and that includes the two-year-old humans among us.
My authentic Austrian Walkjanker jacket has hung forlornly at the far end of a plastic garment bag for decades. It had no place to go till my son got engaged to a Minnesota girl — and I had a chance to show it a good time on a snowy weekend in Minneapolis.