For all my writing about loving long days and how I would fight to the death to keep Daylight Savings Time legal, I have a confession to make: I seriously love the Winter Solstice. Perhaps it’s that I love (and maybe run at) extremes, and the celebration of an extra long night of stars (if…
I’d love to tell you that I start every morning with with a cup of a tea and a sketchbook. Well, I do…sort of. The calming ritual of tea, pen, and paper is the first thing I do in the studio each morning, but, if I’m honest, I check my calendar and my email before…
Johnnie Jo’s Famous Cake Recipe: I stood in the kitchen of my old apartment, talking to my grandmother on a brick sized cordless phone, while thumbing through the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook I’d scored at Border’s Book’s outdoor sale table. “It’s not here!” I complained to her. “There’s not a single recipe that sounds…
There’s an old Carpenters’ song I often sang along to when I was a child. The chorus went, “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.” It’s been stuck in my head since last week’s impossibly warm days quickly flipped to gloomy, wet, and cold. While my dogs think shaking off the water droplets is…
I write to you today from the blissful calm of my new Zero Gravity Chair and nestled into my new, neck hugging heating pad here on the back deck. The birds have been chirping mere feet from me and occasionally a Disney rat (chipmunk) pops up over the deck’s edge to stare at me. Here…
Back in the summer, my husband and I watched more of Marie Kondo’s series on Netflix. In case somehow you’ve missed it, her whole revolutionary concept of organizing spaces is based on keeping things that “spark joy” and donating, recycling, or trashing the things that don’t. While we tune in to find tips on running…
Whenever I have a massive deadline, there is one thing—if I’m honest—and only one thing I want to do: reorganize my studio. I cannot begin to describe how powerful this drive is. Life feeling chaotic with outside demands? All I want to do is reorganize my bookshelves to make more space. Too many tasks in…
