Category: First course

I escaped. I got out. I traded palm trees and ocean views for snow-capped mountains and wide-open vistas. Goodbye palmetto bugs; hello prairie dogs. So long honking horns; hello drivers so polite no one moves at a 4-way stop sign. Ta ta trying to stay one step ahead of the liars and schemers and drunks…

He should have been “put down” a year before I met him last March. He was a mere skeleton of his former self that I never knew, with tumors and other skin oddities hanging from his belly. He was deaf. He was blind. His walk was a painful hobble. When we first moved into our…

Five years ago, a reader found my blog quite by chance during an extraordinarily dark time in her life. She had no real interest in the restaurant world, but my stories about customer and co-worker antics, she said, made her laugh at 2 a.m. when she couldn’t sleep. That laughter, she noted, was the start…

As I sit on my sofa with two of my three dogs, half watching a “Twilight Zone” marathon while trying to keep paws off my keyboard, I have to marvel at a year gone by so fast, at a year during which I have worked too hard and not written enough. It was a year…

Overheard anywhere in the U.S. except SoFla: A young man is in a checkout line behind a woman with a small dog quietly sitting in her grocery cart. The woman is behind me. I am paying for my purchases. “Wow, they let you bring a dog in here?” he asks. “Yeah, as long as he’s…

It’s true, the girls won their Halloween Costume contest in these get-ups. Happy Halloween!

I live two blocks from Fort Lauderdale Beach, just off A1A, and yet I had not actually seen the beach since Sandy waved a brief hello on her destructive travel north. Since Thursday night, I have been more concerned with when my power would come back on and how best to navigate a normally 20-minute…

I filled my car up last week–twice. I bought so many rounds of Laughing Cow cheese that requires no refrigeration, I laughed at myself. I bought half a dozen packages of gluten-free rice crackers–at full price, which I never do. And of course, the requisite 12-pack of toilet paper rounded out my purchases because someone…