Yvette Keller's Blog, page 27

A Decade of Imitation Fruit Literary Journal

Guest Blogger Eva Barrows is a San Francisco Bay Area freelance and fiction writer with a comedic bent. Eva blogs about local places, people, and events on her writer website www.evabarrows.com. She founded Imitation Fruit Literary Journal, www.imitationfruit.com in 2007 and has enjoyed promoting fellow writers and artists ever since.

 

 

Years of pent up technical knowledge about all aspects of publishing gathered in my brain. Tired of searching for an established outlet to release my talen...

Lemons. Meyer Lemons.

Late last week, a friend posted on her Facebook page that she had hit a point of complete overwhelm when it came to her overproducing Meyer Lemon Tree.

I offered to juice and preserve a couple of bags of lemon juice for her, in exchange for lemons.

So I washed lemons.

And juiced lemons.

Then I found out the hard way that you have to strain lemon juice if you’re going to preserve it. Why? Because who wants lemon juice in a cube full of slivered seeds and pulp? No one.

Four ice cube tray...

Dad Time

About a year after my father passed away, I found myself needing to “clean out” his belongings. I sorted through all the bits and pieces and found that I had a difficult time managing the detritus of his life.

I had helped my father clean out his Arizona home when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. I had helped him move his most precious things to my home in 2010. I knew that all of the objects that remained after his passing meant a lot to him…I just didn’t know why.

Most of the things w...

Erotica for A Clothing Addict

The J. Peterman Company has been around, publishing its glorious owner’s manuals since 1987 (the year I started High School). Yes, I had to look that up.

A Smattering of My Owner’s Manual Collection

I never saw one, nor watched Seinfeld, until I went away to college. That was when my mentor, Steven Crain, shared one of the catalogs on a cool, foggy Monterey morning.

Over tea in his forest home, I paged throughwatercolors of clothes: crisp or flowing; Dripping with translucent florals or soli...

Black Tea with Lemon and Honey

For the first time,I tried drinking my morning black tea with honey and lemon. The honey was a diluted buckwheat honey water (we are almost out of our honey stash and I am using up the last little bit). The lemon was a Meyer lemon, with a peel almost the pale orange of a sunset.

I tried it because with the cough I have had for almost a month now, the most significant advice given by the nurse at my PCP’s office was “reduce dairy and increase fluids.” Gah. For someone who tries to drink 64oz...

Marvelling at a host of great characters, oh, and that Dr. Strange guy too.

This may be harsh, but my favorite character in Dr. Strange was the Cloak of Levitation.It was decisive, powerful, loyal, and silly. Basically, the writers gave the Doctor a wearable guard dog to lighten him up. One of my closest friends is a surgeon, so I’ve seen adog-surgeon relationship first hand: the dog is the light of my friend’s life.

The dog balances the intensity of his job and his generalized frustration with all that annoying human relationship messiness. In real life and on scre...

Generosity and Intimacies

I’ve been sick this week which means that I was productive in unusual ways. I slept a lot. Coughed a heck of alot of phlegmout of my lungs (sorry to go literal on you there). Sat with the husband and completed year-end tax-deductible donations. And I finally managed to finish a book and a TV binge that had been on my list. Oddly enough, the donations, the book, and the TV have catalyzed some ideas.

The TV binge wasGilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. My husband and I watched the show regularly...

Taiwanese Treats: A Liquor I Like

My lovely conspira-tea-ist friend Angela went to Taiwan for work and brought me back aboxed set of three fine OolongTeas.

There is Chinese food en route with my loving husband for dinner tonight, and since I’ve been under the weather, I decided to treat myself by opening the box, cracking the tin, and slicing the inner, sealed gold foil.

Oolong teas are only partially fermented, meaning that they have a stronger, richer flavor than green teas, but are not as savory as black teas.

I brewed th...

Ramen Up For Tampopo, Cowboys!

Tampopo is a ten-course meal of visual intensity. Watching it was like being at a feast table with a wide variety of friends and relatives. Some tell funny stories and some tell scary stories. A few are boring and others are disgusting. And ten courses goes on, and on, and on. Too much for me to fully take in, I left feeling astonished, grateful, and a little bit sick.

Directed by Juzo Itami, this cinematic feast is an homage to master film “chefs” who have come before him, including (I ins...

Put Down the Cat O’ Nine Tails and Step Away…

I’m drafting this in Campbell Hall at UCSB, waiting to hear Steven Johnson talk about his book Wonderland: How Play made The Modern World.I expect it will be interesting and inspiring, and it makes me realize that it is official: I have given up on trying to “win” this year’s NaNoWriMo.

After the first week of November, I quickly realized work on the novel I planned to tackle during the month was reluctant at best, self-flagellation at worst. Forcing myself to continue writing scenes for the...