Making Japanese Plum Wine
Perfect use for excess plums 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, ...
10 Questions About My Book: A Next Big Thing Blog Hop Posting
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- ...
My Year of Going Gray
Naomi getting in touch with her "roots" 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 t ...
What We Read in 2012
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, methin ...
Excess is the New Dreary: Restoration Hardware’s Fall 2012 “Source Book”
Pretentious much? 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 ...
Quarter-Century
August 15, 1987 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 lat ...
On Writing Slowly
Slow writer 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 ...
What We Read in 2011
For 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 Jen ...
In Praise of Persimmons
ripe Fuyu persimmons 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 ...
Occupy Downton Abbey
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 ...