When you get frustrated sitting in traffic to see your family…When you roll your eyes at something a loved one said…When you are annoyed at the crowded shopping mall getting your last minute gifts for the people in your life…When those things happen, remember this…Remember there are families all over the world wishing more than anything they could have just one more year doing all those things…

The day after Thanksgiving, around 11am, a man sat on his back porch and heard someone calling for help. I imagine he must have strained a bit, questioning himself -  was that the wind? Kids playing? Is someone in trouble? He must have gotten up and quickly made his way through several backyards toward the cries. As he approached the scene and took in the ladder on the ground, dented gutter, leaves scattered, and blood dripping from the head, the stranger-from-the-backyard immediately called 911.

Last year, on December 21, 2022, I started a post called Feels Like Christmas. I wrote it after we had gone into Brooklyn to see our friend Jason Loughlin and his band play at a bar called Skinny Dennis. He usually plays instrumental western but every year, just before Christmas, they cover The Venture Christmas Album. If you want a nice instrumental rock album to have on while you enjoy Christmas festivities, it’s a great one. Part wanting to support our friend, part wanting to experience a little Christmas fun, we made the trek into Brooklyn…

Here is your every-once-in-awhile reminder that while I believe setting goals and sticking to commitments is important, I also believe that sometimes we need to put something else first…

I recently rewatched my favorite childhood movie - 101 Dalmatians. When I was a kid, I was obsessed and so for Christmas one year my loving grandparents bought me a stuffed Dalmatian toy. I have a vivid memory of opening it up and complaining because it wasn't the right one; they got me Patch when apparently I wanted Lucky. I mean there were 101 different options for crying out loud… and I was upset because they didn't pick my favorite? And all parents know I probably had only decided Lucky was my favorite that morning. What a spoiled brat I was.

For those of you alive in the 1970s, you may remember the Ford Pinto. Debuted in 1970, this small car was cheap to buy and the first of its kind from the Ford Motor Company. It appeared to be successful by all reports until about 1972 when the deaths started piling up. Upon investigation it appeared that the car was prone to catching fire when hit from behind, even in low-speed crashes. What’s very disturbing is that this wasn’t something accidental that occurred; Ford failed numerous safety inspections and knew that the car was likely to catch fire.

My bed is covered with probably-way-too-many-pillows, and so every night we take the pillows off, stack them in a corner somewhere, and then in the morning put them back on. This week when I was putting them back and taking pillows from the stack that my husband had made the night before, I realized that we both had a different process for such a simple thing. If you do this at home, think about it for a minute (I promise I have a point to all this). How do you stack the pillows? The way I see it, there are three options…

As soon as it was pointed out to me it was like all the adrenaline left my body. I had been on cloud 9, selling lots of books and having great conversations with so many people, then in an instant I felt foolish. I couldn’t believe I let a typo slip through.

We are taught that being brave means facing our fear. A brave person will step up and do something they don’t want to do; they push through the scary and get to the other side. We learn this young and carry it into adulthood. This is true. Being brave is being afraid of something and doing it anyway. The thing is, sometimes we’re not honest with what we’re afraid of…

45 minutes. That’s how long I waited at the table by myself. The first hour of my first book festival was pretty painful. I sat there smiling, wondering if I would spend the next four hours talking to myself. As I sat there I thought about how my presence here was teaching me something…

This weekend is my anniversary, and this morning I ate breakfast alone. When I got out of bed Andrew was gone and I ordered room service for one. Now if I were to stop the story there, you might assume we had some sort of fight. When I was younger, I probably would have thought the same…

A few years ago I started to dislike the word weird. It's one I used to say anytime something was new or I didn't understand it - that's weird. Somewhere along the way, I realized how hurtful of a habit this was. Just because something was unusual to me, did not mean it was unusual in general. My lack of…

There are people in our lives that are only there for a season. High school friends. College roommates. Coworkers. People you bonded with over shared experiences like being on the soccer team together or watching executive leaderships’ exponentially terrible decisions. The dumpster truck fire rages on as your friendship grows stronger.

I saw something recently that was an image cut in half. On the top was a bunch of people together and on the bottom was one person chatting with another person about a book. The caption read: we are not anti-social, we’re differently social. I thought about that as I walked home from my nail appointment hoping I didn’t run into any of my neighbors…

Does anyone else out there do chores around the house like the mouse who was given a cookie? I’ll start with a simple task, like deciding to go to the grocery store, but then I’ll realize I need to check the fridge to see what we need which leads to cleaning out the fridge and washing the fruit drawers which I can’t lay out to dry because…

With a big smile on my face, I waited impatiently for him to look. The past hour I had spent researching and designing some table displays for upcoming book fairs and events (if you’re in NJ mark your calendar for October 22 - more details in the book updates below!). I was really excited and wanted the closest person to me to share in that excitement so I made the mistake many people make - instead of asking for encouragement, I asked for feedback.

I am hardwired to think ahead. Anytime I am given something to do it is difficult for me to just take the next step without first thinking about the twenty steps that will follow. This is something that comes in handy in any sort of strategic planning but is a pain in the ass when I’m trying to do just any normal thing. Everything we do doesn’t require thinking twenty steps ahead. In fact, most things don’t…

Feeling disappointed, I continued to float across the surface of the water. I had been snorkeling for nearly 15 minutes at this point and hadn't seen a single fish. I was about to give up and head back to the catamaran when I heard someone shout something about an eel. An eel!? Where!? I see nothing… With the new confidence that there was, in fact, something interesting to see, I took another look.

Every day I get an email in my inbox called The Skimm - it gives me a highlight of the News of the day that I typically read in the morning when I'm drinking my coffee. Sometimes, when life is a little more full, I get out of my typical routine and fail to read it. When this occurs…

Every time I hear the song Time After Time I think of Abby. She was one of my close friends in middle school and one summer we went to Belmar beach and Z100 was DJ-ing at a restaurant where we were getting dinner with her mom. I don't remember how it came about, but we ended up on the radio announcing the song… This is Kristen and Abby from NJ and you're listening to…