The Tea party is like a case of the herpes — it just painfully annoys you and stays with you forever.  Sure enough, the corporate media has another bad case of it, worthy of a Valtrex bomb.  Reported on Monday, the IRS is folded into...
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You simply won’t believe what’s just 45 minutes west of Winters, California — the eastern entrance to the Napa Valley: An entire winery inside a mountain, complete with an underground stream running through it. Finding it is easy: get on Highway 128, head west, turn...
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I’m not a doctor, but I am prescribing a one week, paid vacation at least once a year to you. That’s what my mom, brother and I have all decided to do from now on. We just got back from a three-day vacation at Universal...
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This is the season when basil is most lush. Except for not at my house. The deer discovered my basil patch this year. I found two mamas and three babies in my patch one morning and they had pretty much feasted the basil into non-...
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Because Nana told me I could. From a T-shirt on Pinterest I should have known that I would be this kind of Nana.  I was that kind of mother.  I was the mom who taught daughter and stepdaughter to make faces at the dinner table. ...
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My Mom passed away in the summer of 2006. Since then, Mother’s Day has remained a day of celebration, although it is lined with melancholy since I can’t physically reach out and give my mom a kiss and a hug. I do take the opportunity...
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Not long ago, on Facebook, we were having a flamethrower session about the recent federal judge’s ruling that the Morning-After pill must be provided to teenagers — without parental consent. I ended the discussion when I asked that whomever present had not had pre-marital and/or...
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I learned to cook early in life as a latch key kid in the 1960s. My parents both worked long hours: my dad in a parts department in San Francisco, Mom as a dental assistant in Hayward. This was before after-school childcare programs. In elementary...
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It was August 19, 2006 when I met my brothers, Orvis and Tony, for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Fairfield, California. Our younger brother Scott would be with us from Canada within days. The evening before, Tony had called to tell me that our...
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My life’s goal is to adopt a daughter from China. This has always been my dream. I have never wanted to give birth myself. Why would I? My daughter has already been born and is somewhere in China just waiting for me to find her....
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No handbook slushed out of my hoo-hoo when I pushed out my kids, and if it could have, I hope it would have been a scroll, not a hardback!  As I progressed from young maiden to mother to young grandmother,  I learned a lot from...
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I didn’t live with my parents the first six months of my life. I was born in June, and my father had two remaining classes before graduating from college, so my mother had to return to her job quickly after my birth. My mother’s parents,...
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It’s that second Sunday in May again. Mother’s Day, just like Valentine’s Day, is a truly pointless holiday. If you’ve treated Mom like an indentured servant day after day, a bouquet of wilting carnations isn’t going to make up for a year of neglect. Conversely,...
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My mother has been dead for 14 years now.  It’s hard to fathom.  I remember my daughter rolling her eyes at her own temerity when she recollected what she’d said to her grandmother.  As a child, she’d commented to my mother that it was hard...
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Holding a heavy book in my hands, I’m turning the pages slowly, reading about my life and looking at photos of France. I can just see the corner of the beaded wreath hung on the rough stone wall of Ethel’s bedroom, next to the window...
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My adrenals just can’t process any more gore or shock.  I am all shocked out.  No more fetuses, no more brutality, my body can’t digest it. Oh, I am doubled over just thinking about it. I’ve had to remove some relatives from Facebook, mainly for...
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So instead of beating myself up for being fat, I think it’s a miracle that I laugh every day and walk through my life with pride, because our culture is unrelenting when it comes to large people. Camryn Manheim   Oy.  Transitions.  Yes, I realize...
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iPinion contributor Judith Newton has won an IPPY (Independent Publisher’s) Award for her food memoir, “Tasting Home.” Many chapters from the book were first published on iPinion, where, according to Judith, she learned what worked and didn’t work. Conducted each year to honor the year’s...
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