My black and white photo makes it look pretty tame (you’re welcome. Also it is REALLY hard to take a picture of your own back), and as far as surgery scars go, it is tame. The common cold of cancer was kind to me. I did expect it to be a neat tidy little perfectly straight incision. In reality it looks angry and red, a slash across my shoulder blade, like I was in a bar fight.

Today I received my box from nuuly. And I am THRILLED.

So thrilled that I took a bunch of photos on a day when I shouldn’t have. Full disclosure said photos are of me unshowered (for 2 days), unfiltered, unmake-up-ed, and uninterested in doing anything but lounge about in my pajamas and read. This happens to me every once in a while (please tell me it happens to you too). My take  — highly, highly recommend. As in stop what you’re doing right now and go check them out.

If you send a kid a care package, chances are they’ll want one every day.

If you’re like me and didn’t quite get one ordered in time for Halloween, you have lots of other chances in November:

Firefly, fired and flew. We made it to three Firefly Music Festivals starting when my daughter was 15. That sounds ridiculously young now, but somehow seemed perfectly fine at the time. Well, ‘perfectly’ might be a stretch, but it seemed fine(ish)…or at least legal. Here’s what I was grateful for that first year:  The girls…

The summer of loss and relentless life punches. Every time I tried to catch my breath and find my balance, I couldn’t. And every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t do that either. Empty, helpless, overwhelmed, stymied by not knowing how to say or write what I needed. I didn’t pick up a book or put hands to a keyboard for months. For a girl who usually finds solace in words, it was an agonizing void. Here’s a recap of what went down, and why I shut down.