Life in the key of E flat minor

For bookclub this last weekend, I had picked 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith since I had thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Edinburgh as well as Scotland and wanted to read something based in that area. You may know him for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series which was made into an HBO show. I obviously chose Scottish and English food for the theme. I knew that I was going to make my shortbread fingers as well as serve some ginger and whisky malt preserves that I had picked up in Marks & Spencer over some good soft cheese. But I needed an entrée. I searched for ideas and but only found haggis as the quintessential Scotch food. First, I wasn’t confident that I would even find any haggis if I looked for it and it is a rather maligned food (though I found it evocative of Philadelphia’s scrapple.) I dug deeper and focused on googling "Scottish/Scotch entrée" and found Fife Miners’ Stew. Since Fife, the council area, is across the Forth from Edinburgh, I...

It’s January again and it looks like we all survived the Mayan Prophesy.   So I figured that I would work on my resolutions for the upcoming year.   I have a mediocre track record with my resolutions, but it doesn’t stop me from making them every year.   While I will build upon some of the ones that I have made before – ranging from the inane (wearing sunglasses as often as possible) to the meaningful (going to the gym regularly), I’m adding one more to the list: writing a page a day. I always wanted to be an author and have a book published that people want to read, but I haven’t really put “pen to paper” and written that book, yet.   So the goal of this resolution is to ask myself daily to type out a page. Hopefully it will be a page about the story I want to write into a novel, but if not, as long as it’s an exercise in getting myself to write habitually and daily, I will consider that a success.    I simply open Microsoft Word to start a new doc...