Posts under ‘Family’

On a blustery Thanksgiving morning, six months after I moved to Oakland, I took my parents to celebrate Mass.

They were visiting me for the first time in this new city I called home, and I wanted to show them the newly-dedicated Cathedral of Christ the Light, which I’d been attending since [...]

While visiting my parents over the holidays, my Dad announced, rather quietly, that he might have found a place to garden this year. My parents moved to Ohio just after I moved to California, and, like me, Dad hasn’t found his gardening groove quite yet. He has a yard, but it’s not a good one [...]

If you’re reading this, I survived the run-up to Thanksgiving.
Oh, I know. First-world problems, really. I MUST CLEAN. I MUST BUY CRAZY AMOUNTS OF LOCALLY-SOURCED FOOD. I MUST TEAR MY HAIR OUT AND RANT AND ROAR AND WHINE. So, enough already. Here’s the sunny side of the street.
For the second year in a row, my [...]

About six months before I moved to Iowa, long before I had any idea I’d be gardening, Steve and I were on the phone talking about our future living situation. We’d determined his first-year graduate school apartment wasn’t big enough for the two of us, and he’d been looking for another place for us to [...]

When I was up in Seattle during mid-March, my cousin Mary and I wandered into The Spanish Table, a store that, it turns out, has outposts much more local to me—Berkeley and Mill Valley.
But we were in the original, surrounded by pottery and paella pans and food that made me feel like we had walked [...]

It’s Thanksgiving here at Chez Inadvertent, and there’s much to be grateful for.
My parents arrived Tuesday night to celebrate the holidays here, and we’ve been making our way around to various eating and drinking establishments that are favorites of mine: Shan Dong for dumplings, The Trappist for Belgian-style brews, Café Madrid for tortilla Español and [...]

I decided this Thanksgiving will not be traditional. Why serve turkey, for example, when I live just a block or so from excellent Peking duck? Why serve green bean casserole when I can serve garlicky Romano beans with rosemary, every ingredient of which will be grown or produced within 100 miles of here? Why serve [...]

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Chase Ledebur, my cousin Kären’s son. Chase has been gardening this summer for the first time at home, and I wanted you to hear from this wonderful and talented 12-year-old in his very own words.

Hi, I’m Chase – welcome to my garden. This is the [...]

On my way out to Oakland from Iowa, I made a stop in Grand Junction, Colorado, at my cousin’s house. She and her son Chase had planted their first vegetable garden in a beautiful raised bed off one side of the house. Tomatoes, squash, basil, oregano – the garden was still filled with seedlings when [...]

My parents and I tried something a little different over the holidays this year — we celebrated in New York City. We hit all the typical requirements of Christmas in New York: the Rockettes, FAO Schwartz, Rockefeller Center, the New York City Ballet’s production of the Nutcracker — but also included plenty of unexpected stops [...]