Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to you all, but also to myself because I finally published my fourth book this week. And to everyone who was asking about it, I told them fall. Dec. 19 is still, technically, fall. It is also just in time for Christmas. What actually took a long time was cover art, but I […]

2023 End of the year book reviews

As we get closer to the end of the year, I thought I’d recap some of the books I’ve read this year. Some of you may know that I keep a spreadsheet of all of my books, and when I went back and looked, I had to go back and look how many books I’ve […]

Shop with a hero and lessons learned

Every year, I have the great pleasure of accompanying the Brandon Fire Department and the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office Brandon substation to the Oxford Meijer for Shop with a Hero. For anyone who doesn’t know, the program gives local kids an opportunity to shop with a police officer or a firefighter for Christmas gifts, and […]

It’s never too early for Christmas joy

It’s no secret that I love decorating for Christmas. Anyone who has walked by The Citizen offices has seen our little historic Ortonville village in one of our windows, and Santa and all nine of his reindeer in the other window. One of my highlights of the season is seeing little kids walking by with […]

28 lessons in 28 years

On November 28th, I’ll turn 28 years old. Age is just a number to me, and doesn’t generally mean much. My papa always said you’re only as old as you feel. Sometimes I feel like a teenager, sometimes I feel like a little old lady. Rarely is it somewhere in between. Maybe one day I’ll […]

A community that deserves thanks

Last Tuesday, during the heavy rain we got, I noticed my tires slipping a bit while driving. I said to my husband that I needed new tires, and he said he’d take my car in to get them when he gets paid, which is on the 15th of November. On the 9th of November, I […]

Daylight doesn’t need saving

Now that daylight saving time is over and it gets dark at 5 p.m. every day, I have to say I don’t like daylight saving time. I know why it was created, which was to get more use out of daylight in general, but I’m not a big sunlight person to begin with. I like […]

The one where we lost a friend

I, like many people out there, am mourning the loss of actor Matthew Perry. It’s pretty much all I’ve seen on social media and news websites for a week now. It is no secret that I’m a fan of the show ‘Friends’. I grew up watching a lot of television, even just passively, and there […]

Trick-or-Treat

It always surprises me how few trick-or-treaters we get every year for Halloween. This isn’t a new phenomenon, and some years I’ve blamed the weather. No one wants to go walking around in a costume when there is sleet falling from the sky. As a kid I would have toughed it out, but as an […]

To read or not to read

I recently made a ‘to-be-read’ jar, full of pieces of paper with the titles of the books I currently own, but haven’t read. I didn’t count them as I was writing them down, but I can say I have a log of all of my books (probably around 500 at this point) and I’ve read […]