I met Andrew at The Whiskey Café. I walked in the half empty bar and saw him sitting there watching me as I approached him. He was a lot better looking than his photo. He rose when I arrived and we shook hands and then I sat across from him.

He was already drinking a scotch and when the waiter came I ordered a glass of Italian white wine.

We chatted a bit, about his two boys and how every year for their birthdays he took them on a trip. His oldest son’s birthday was coming up and he was taking him to London, England.

“You always do that?” I asked him.

“Yes. Every birthday I take them to a different place.”

Hmm. I liked that about him.  I asked him about his work.

“I work in environmental waste.”

I also liked that about him.

“I travel a lot,” he…

Today is International Children’s Book Day. It is also Hans Christian Anderson’s birthday. The annual event is sponsored by the International Board on Books for Young People and has been celebrated since 1967. Each year a different national section gets to be the international sponsor of the day. An author from that country writes a message to the children of the world and a well-known illustrator designs a poster for that year. The 2019 sponsor is Lithuania, and both the message and this year’s poster are by author illustrator Kęstutis Kasparavičius, with the theme for the year being “Books Help Us Slow Down”.

The objective of the day is to share great children’s books, so of course, who but the fabulous Myrtle the Purple Turtle could I share on such a day?

Written by Cynthia Reyes for her daughter Lauren, the first Myrtle book shares the lesson that while…

I’ve written a post about being in Rome before, you can find it here if you missed it. Rome is absolutely beautiful & no matter where you look, you’ll see something interesting. However, it is jam packed with tourists &, my all time favourite, traffic.

I really enjoy walking around the city with no specific destination because I enjoy the feel of the city & I always come across great little restaurants & picturesque alleyways. Anyway, as I stated in my last post about this place, there are thousands of people out there who do a much better job of describing the city than I do so I’ll just stick to what happened to me.

Myself & 4 friends had spent the afternoon walking around the city. Other than being caught in a sudden & short shower of rain, we were blessed with brilliant weather & now that it is…

The Money Supply and me.

“No thanks,” I say. It’s my standard response when the Hub invites me to come along to some work conference in an exotic location. I picture myself in a glamourous foreign locale I’ve only ever seen in a James Bond film or the windows of mall travel agents. But instead of being surrounded by Daniel Craig and/or foreign locale residents holding out perfectly shaken-not-stirred foreign alcoholic beverages, I know I’ll be surrounded by economists. Because here’s the thing. They might be in paradise, but economists will still be talking about economics. They can’t help themselves, poor things.

Economists tell each other hilarious inside jokes about the money supply.

But when the Hub mentioned the conference on Ischia, an island off Italy’s Amalfi Coast, I hesitated. When he showed me pictures of the flower bedecked pools and charming old world villages, I wavered. And then—because…

Photo: Mehrdad Haghighi via Unsplash

Spattered,

Scattered,

Splattered

Like galaxies

Of reversed light

Upon the expanse

Of skin.

Concentrated pigment

On the canvas

Of the body,

They speckle

Like stars

Reflected

In the negative of film.

Beloved,

They dance upon

The nose.

A freckled

Symphony

Of brown and gold.

For the dVerse Quadrille Challenge