As a holiday gift, my husband kindly bought the next installment in a series I’ve been enjoying for years. S is for Silence is the next in Sue Grafton’s series about private detective Kinsey Millhone. In this nineteenth volume in the series, Grafton tries something a little different. The Kinsey Millhone series is set in… Read more »

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When we were children, all of us experienced the pleasurable feelings of creating expression through visual art. Whether we were drawing, modeling with clay, gluing together collages from magazine pictures, or making papier mache puppets, these creative tasks tended to bring about a sense of concentrated bliss, a state of relaxed but intensely engaged mental… Read more »

Waking up to the clock radio, the first news of the day is all about bodies mangled by bombs in Pakistan. Women and children are reported buried under the rubble. A few minutes later, a spokeswoman for an environmental group is playing “connect the dots” with tsunamis, landslides, tornadoes, hurricanes, drought and floods. Closer to… Read more »

Dear Barb: A family member has recently been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. I wonder if you could provide a bit of information about this condition. Is there a special diet individuals need to follow? I’d like to know what types of food to prepare or what other things I can do to make this person… Read more »

In a follow-up to a recent column by the same name, here are some more snippets from the Edmonton Journal and the National Post. I spotted these crazy, inane, sad items during a marathon read of about ten newspapers that piled up in my absence. Here it goes. In a January 4th story in the… Read more »