Making Japanese Plum Wine

by with 30 Comments Eating & DrinkingHomeJapan
[caption id="attachment_1389" align="alignleft" width="300"] Perfect use for excess plums[/caption]   My mother’s visiting from San Francisco this week, and we celebrated Mother’s Day and the abundance of spring by bottling up six quarts of Japanese plum wine. When I posted a photo of the finished product online, several people asked for the recipe. So here it is, for all to enjoy. ...

10 Questions About My Book: A Next Big Thing Blog Hop Posting

by with 17 Comments Writing
My friend, writer and fellow (sister?) Hedgebrook alum Christine Lee Zilka, tagged me this week to talk about my current writing project as part of a “Next Big Thing” blog hop. I don’t ordinarily go for these “I'll-link-to-your-blog-if-you-link-to-mine” arrangements, but this one, which involves answering ten specific questions about a current or next project, actually looked fun. And Christine's quite engaging post, with its great photo of her door-o'-color-coded-post-its, inspired me to give it a try. ...
graying hair

My Year of Going Gray

by with 43 Comments BeautyFeminismGoing GrayIdentity
[caption id="attachment_1210" align="alignleft" width="256"]graying hair Naomi getting in touch with her "roots"[/caption] It started 12 or 13 years ago, when I was in my mid-30s. I had two small children, a cool dot-com job with many younger colleagues, and a sprinkling of gray hair. I didn’t mind the gray too much, but sometimes there’d be a wiry one or one that stood straight up from my head. I didn’t care for those. My hairdresser encouraged me to let her try coloring it. I did. It looked pretty. It was fun. So I kept doing it. But now I’m going to stop. I’m letting myself go gray this year, and judging from my roots, I'll be way more salt than pepper. UH...WHY? ...

What We Read in 2012

by with 4 Comments Reading
For the third year in a row, I’m publishing the lists of books that my husband Dan and I read this past year. Interestingly, we both started the year with Melville, he with Billy Budd and I with Moby-Dick. A good way to start a year of reading, methinks. The only book we both read was Don’t Take Me the Long Way, a memoir by M. C. Mars, whose cab Dan and I had the good fortune to ride in after our 25th anniversary dinner at La Folie in San Francisco. He regaled us with stories both wonderful and harrowing about driving in the City, and I eventually said in my writerly and English-teacher-y way, “Have you thought about writing some of this down?” “I have written it down,” he said, and held up a book. He had a small box of them next to him on the front seat. We added its price to the cab fare, he signed it for us, and it ended up being the only book that both Dan and I read this year. It’s pretty entertaining stuff. ...
"Restoration Hardware catalog", "Restoration Hardware Fall 2012 Source Book"

Excess is the New Dreary: Restoration Hardware’s Fall 2012 “Source Book”

by with 21 Comments CapitalismGeneralHomeShopping
[caption id="attachment_1124" align="alignleft" width="253"]"Restoration Hardware catalog", "Restoration Hardware Fall 2012 Source Book" Pretentious much?[/caption] Last Friday afternoon, I opened my front door to collect my mail and discovered that the postman had left one piece of mail on the ledge next to our mailbox. The piece was so large it did not fit in the mailbox. “What the hell?” I said (I talk to myself a lot when I’m home alone), and stepped outside to collect it. Of course. Only Restoration Hardware would have the arrogance to send a mailing so large it doesn’t fit inside a standard mailbox. ...

Quarter-Century

by with 24 Comments GeneralMarriageParenting
[caption id="attachment_1050" align="alignleft" width="255"] August 15, 1987[/caption] My husband Dan and I were married 25 years ago today. In honor of this milestone, I share the following: A few weeks ago, an alarm went off in our house in the middle of the night. Dan got up to investigate. He returned a minute later and crawled back into bed without a word. “Was it the smoke alarm?” I asked. “Yeah,” he mumbled, clearly ready to resume his slumber. “What did you do?” “I took out the batteries.” “What?” I was now more awake. “But what if something’s burning?” ...

On Writing Slowly

by with 15 Comments LapérousePublishingWriting
[caption id="attachment_972" align="alignright" width="300"] Slow writer[/caption] I’m an incredibly slow writer. How slow? Well, there was five minutes of keyboard silence between the completion of that first sentence (“I’m an incredibly slow writer.”) and the arrival of the second one (“How slow?”). And that’s fast for me. Now you know why I blog so seldom. (Another break while I check my dictionary to see if one blogs seldom or seldomly. Turns out “seldom” is both adverb and adjective. How nice to have that question settled. Another minute while I meditate on that and on the always reliable pleasures of the dictionary.) This slow thinking coupled with obsessiveness is also why, after seven years of not-exactly-unrelenting-but-pretty-sustained work, my book manuscript is only now crawling toward completion. Then there’s the research. ...
book lists notebook

What We Read in 2011

by with 5 Comments Reading
book lists notebookFor the second year in a row, my husband and I have kept lists of all the books we read during the year. Last year we had very few books in common, but this year we had more overlap, including David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, plus a few books one of us read in 2010 and the other in 2011 (Meloy, Franzen). But perhaps most notable is that for the first time in -- well, perhaps, ever, we agreed on a favorite book of the year: Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Quirky, compelling, plainly yet gorgeously written. I don't know why this novel isn't more famous. Jackson is about so much more than "The Lottery." I'm also struck by the way in which my husband will find a writer he likes and then just clean up through their oeuvre. ...
persimmons, Fuyu persimmon

In Praise of Persimmons

by with 7 Comments Eating & DrinkingGardeningJapan
[caption id="attachment_842" align="alignleft" width="300"]persimmons, Fuyu persimmon ripe Fuyu persimmons[/caption] Ah, persimmon season: my favorite time of year to be in Davis, California, and to live in my house. Nine years ago, when we left San Francisco and bought this place, I disliked almost everything about it (especially that it was not in San Francisco), and really liked only one thing: the mature Fuyu persimmon tree in the northeast corner of our otherwise unremarkable backyard. Over the years we’ve made a few changes to the house and property so that, if I don’t exactly love the place, I have at least developed some fondness for it. And the persimmon tree remains one of its abiding delights. ...
"Highclere Castle", "Downton Abbey"

Occupy Downton Abbey

by with 10 Comments Film and TV
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="219" caption="Highclere Castle, the setting for "Downton Abbey." Photo by JB+UK_Planet."]"Highclere Castle", "Downton Abbey"[/caption] Last week I had the worst cold I’ve had in years, and spent several days curled up in bed with my laptop, streaming BBC miniseries and period films from Netflix. I started with “Mrs. Brown,” the 1997 BBC Scotland production starring Judi Dench as Queen Victoria and Billy Connolly as her devoted Scottish servant; moved on to two adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell novels—“North and South” (2004) and “Wives and Daughters” (1999); then spent one sleepless night indulging in all seven episodes of the first season of “Downton Abbey,” the Julian Fellowes creation that follows the ups and downs of masters and servants on an English estate in the early 20th century. It was great fun, of course—the language, the settings, the costumes, oh my! But it was also sort of gross. ...