Tell a Story Day

Posted on April 27, 2025 by arwenbicknell

As my husband will attest, “tell me a story” is my favorite demand to place on just about anyone I encounter. My grandfather always acquiesced to this demand the same way:

“I’ll tell you the story of Mary Morey,
And now my story’s begun.
I’ll tell you another about her brother,
And now the stories are done.”

Most unsatisfying.

When my kid was little, he used to tell us that before he was born, he had lived on the planet Neptune but decided to visit Earth and got in my belly when his microscopic alien self went swimming in ice cream and I ate him. (I loved this, but I confess it actually creeped me out a little.) When he got older he wrote a story about going on a swashbuckling adventure with his trusty companion—his stuffed prairie dog. He’s still telling stories, but they are longer and more involved now. His ideas are brilliant.

My mother says her favorite stories of mine arose from the overactive imagination of an only child. I would come in from the back yard and she’d ask what I’d been doing, and I would tell her about stalking a lion on safari (I didn’t use the word “stalking,” but that was the gist) but that it had jumped the fence and run off, or I’d explain that my imaginary friend had taken a tumble in the puncturevines and landed in the agave cactus and we needed six Band-Aids, please. (I’m pretty sure this never worked. Band-Aids were like gold bars in our house.)

I don’t remember telling those stories. The one time I do remember just making up nonsense was with my friend Kirsten in kindergarten or first grade. Her mom had left us in the car while she did something—made a bank deposit or pumped gas or something—and a bee got in the car. Kirsten was terrified of being stung and started to amp up.

No problem, I told her. I speak bee.  And I bizzed and buzzed at the thing until it got fed up with me and parked itself on the windshield far away from the spazzes in the back seat. There, I told Kirsten. He has promised to stay up there and leave us alone. I have no idea if she believed me or just thought it was so hilarious she forgot to be worried, but the crisis was averted, and when her mom came back, the thing flew right out her open door.

So now it is your turn. Tell me a story! I’ll send you a book! 

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Independent Bookstores Day

Posted on April 26, 2025 by arwenbicknell

The hubs is back on the book tour circuit, which means a lot of visits to bookstores.

Much as I love a good Barnes and Noble and much as I lament the loss of Brentano’s (as my son laments the loss of Borders), I have to say that I have grown more enamored of the independents. They always have a distinctive smell—not the same smell, but a distinctive and pleasant one. There’s often a cat. The person behind the counter has actually read a book or two in their lifetime and might have a guess about what you’re looking for.

Plus, most of them have great used sections where you can find things that no mainstream bookstore would even be able to order. Out of print novels. First editions. Outdated histories about outdated things that nobody wants to focus on in new histories.

Everyone probably knows The Strand in New York. It’s heaven. City Lights might be the only reason I would ever go back to San Francisco. Vroman’s was one of the high points of living in Southern California (and I can only hope that someone buys it and it doesn’t go the way of the Original Pantry Café downtown). I went to some great talks at Politics and Prose in DC (one of them by the hubs). My son’s second home in Manassas was McKay’s Used Books (although he spent more time on the movie and music side of things). Now that we are in Illinois, Books on the Square is our new favorite—there’s one in Springfield, and one in the teensy town of Virden that takes up three (three!) store fronts.

Keep the list going. Where’s your favorite idea garden?

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Historic Marker Day

Posted on April 25, 2025 by arwenbicknell

When I was a kid, my parents insisted we were too poor to fly anywhere, so we took a lot of road trips. Mostly, we went from California to Illinois and back to visit family. I don’t remember a lot about these trips except they were pretty awesome despite the fact that that cars with no air conditioning sucked, cars driven by smokers sucked, having nothing but slowly diluting iced tea and peanut butter available for sustenance sucked, and having to fit myself into the passenger seat so the non-driving parent could sleep in the back seat kinda sucked. How could anything be awesome? Well, the conversations with the conscious parent were nice. Staring out the window was nice. My mom always bought a billion car puzzles to shut me up, and those were great. Eventually I learned to play word games with billboards and license plates, and that killed a lot of time.

But it was all interstate travel. Lots of billboards. Lots of other cars. No historic markers. I suppose my intro to those must have happened when we moved to Illinois ourselves and would take 2-lane highways from our house to visit family in other parts of the state, but I don’t remember them. The first time I remember noticing them was when I visited my grandparents in Virginia—historic markers are all over the dang place in that state!

The hubs and I now do a lot of travel like that, so we see a lot of those markers go by, and we go out of our way to see even more. And for a long time, we’d go, “Huh, I wonder what that was…” as one flashed past, but now there is an app for that! I almost never remember to mark the ones we speed past and I read aloud from my screen, but they are prolific. But if you asked me, “name a historic marker,” I would answer “Simon Kenton’s birthplace.”

Why? Because it was at an intersection on the way home in Virginia. We drove past it pretty much every day for 20 years. Who was Simon Kenton? Good question. He fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, ran around with Daniel Boone, did a bunch of frontier stuff, and died in Ohio.

The hubs, who has a much better head for such things, is partial to a Lincoln County War marker in New Mexico that notes the site of John H. Tunstall’s murder (sort of—the marker describes how Tunstall was shot “at a nearby site,” which is accessible only by driving on unpaved Forest Service roads).

Do you have a favorite marker? 

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Bucket List Day

Posted on April 24, 2025 by arwenbicknell

As my Bucket Day approaches, my list has (happily) gotten much shorter. This is partly because I’ve done a bunch of the things I always wanted, but it is partly because I get lazier and less imaginative as I get older, so given a choice I’m more inclined to stay home and eat than go out and deal with traffic and people and cranky fellow travelers.

Honestly, the HUGE thing on my bucket list is to see my kid out on his own with a job he enjoys and a life he loves. Please note, this is not a critique of him. I reckon this is more on my genetics not screwing me over so I die early than it is on him to hurry up and launch. But it is the big thing, so I feel obliged to share it.

As for things I have slightly more control over—a few of those are still beyond my control. But in a weirdo perfect dream world where money and time and skill and physical ability are no object, here’s my list:

  • Get accepted to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. (This used to just be “finish my novel,” but I did that—at least, sort of. And all the work involved in “publish my novel” is too depressing right now. And “have a best-selling novel” just sounds absurdly arrogant—plus, I’m not at all sure that my sensibilities are best-seller fodder. Maybe I’ll examine all that in another blog post, but for now let’s just say that I’m probably too insensitive, too insular, and too insalubrious.)
  • Learn some sort of trade. I think I’d go for plumbing. Maybe carpentry. Probably not drywall. (I have no idea if this is achievable. I’m very lazy. And I have a part-time job already. Maybe when I retire—except this circles us back to the previously mentioned hurdles of my being lazy and unimaginative.)
  • Go on an absurdly long trip—I mean, maybe several months—to see assorted hunks of Britain with the hubs and the kid. (This is not impossible, but definitely unlikely. I reckon we will go for a couple weeks at some point and just hit the high points.)
  • Go on one of those African photo safaris. (This one is definitely doable!)

What’s on your list?

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Movie Theater Day

Posted on April 23, 2025 by arwenbicknell

It makes me so sad that movie theaters and shopping malls are going the way of the dodo.

I understand the loss of malls—although they were a staple of my life experience, they were a gas stop on the way from Main Street to the Information Superhighway.

But I really wish theaters would make a comeback. I get that people have thousand-inch HD screens at home with pause buttons and that the food is cheaper and the bathrooms are probably better, but still. There is something special about going to the movies—it is, as my husband says, an occasion. It is an experience, creating a memory. I find something viscerally satisfying about going into a dark auditorium and sharing an experience with anywhere from 0 to 300 other people.

Put it this way: Rocky Horror is a fun flick when you can hear all the dialogue. It’s an immersive experience when you go to a theater that has a shadow cast and regular attendees shouting responses and people wielding squirt bottles.

My mom worked in a movie theater. I worked in one. My kid worked in one. Spent a lot of happy hours in them as customers, too. Nothing like an afternoon with a vat of popcorn and a bathtub of soda and a big story presented larger than life in front of you.

Bring back the moviegoing experience! Bring back movies!

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IT Service Provider Day

Posted on April 22, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Does anyone who’s not in this line of work think much about IT until something goes wrong? I know I don’t, and then I’m always vastly annoyed at the inconvenience.

I am one of those people who watched technology come in like a tsunami. When I was a kid, my grandfather was playing around with DOS and spoke disdainfully of user interfaces that didn’t require starting with C prompts. My husband (who, much as I adore him, is one of the biggest rageballs I have ever seen when it comes to technology not doing what he wants and expects) actually spent a college semester working in the computer lab, where apparently the depth and breadth of his expertise extended to “unplug it and plug it back in.” I, myself, spent two semesters in a lazy pursuit of a computer science degree, only to dump the idea when I moved to Florida for a new job. (But I did learn HTML and Visual Basic, which were pretty handy for a few years after that.)

When I got hired to work on a news website fairly late in life (read: after I became a mom, which is good because that meant I had learned patience), I was constantly irked at the process—not because things broke, but because the IT folks circled their wagons so tightly and refused to let go of anything. They reminded me of those stories about priests in the Middle Ages who wanted to maintain their relevance so they refused to teach anyone else how to read. I understood that they didn’t want plebes going in and messing up stuff that would take hours to fix, but when the same thing breaks six times a day, and you have to wait a half hour for them to fix it every single time, it becomes a sore point. I got my way though: It only took me calling individuals at 1 a.m., 3 a.m., and 5 a.m. for three nights in a row before they grudgingly admitted me to their inner sanctum and showed me the 3 lines of code to fix, which I could have trusted my toddler to do—and did trust several other non-IT employees to do, with nary a slipup. (I wish I could tell this story with less schadenfreude, but … wait, no I don’t.) Ironically, we all ended up on pretty good terms by the end of my tenure.

These days, computers are sturdier things, and I work from home. My IT issues are (knock on wood) fairly straightforward, or so catastrophic that major overhauls are required. I have learned (for the most part) to back up my work in multiple places. My bigger issues now are with internet connectivity—rain seems to cause problems, as did squirrels chewing the lines last year.

Unfortunately, any mad skillz I might ever have pretended to have are long gone and I have become one of those people who can’t do whatever the computer equivalent is of changing my own oil. Best Buy’s Geek Squad has bailed me out of a couple jams over the years, as have the good people at Apple. So yes, let’s all give a hearty cheer for the folks in IT!

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Big Word Day

Posted on April 21, 2025 by arwenbicknell

When I was in seventh grade, I got booted from the big spelling bee on “rhinoceros” after debating and then incorrectly adding a “u” at the end. You can bet I have spelled that word correctly every time it has come up since (which, to be fair, hasn’t been very often). It’s not a particularly big word, which might be why I wanted to make it bigger, but it was big enough to trip me up at the time. And I considered myself something of an avid reader who’d bumped into plenty of tricky words.

Note that I said “avid.” Not “voracious.” This word choice was intentional.

When I began life as an editor, I was surprised at how often authors try to sound smart by using big words that they shouldn’t—because the word is flat-out wrong, because it is a buzzword and has thus lost all meaning (if it ever had one), because the result sounds silly—you name it, I’ve probably seen it.

I spend a lot of time changing “methodology” to “method,” “linkage” to “link,” and “utilize” to “use.” These are not synonyms. Some authors think they are and that more letters sounds more erudite. These authors are wrong.

A recent example of a buzzword is “bespoke.” There’s an absolutely brilliant scene in the movie Confess, Fletch about this word that distills every feeling I’ve ever had about faddish words like “craft,” “synergy,” and “holistic.” My mom went on a rant the other day about “gaslighting—It was a great movie! Shut up with that word!”

But my favorites are the words that are technically correct but stick out because the voice is all wrong. “Connie has, like, this sixth sense about people. She’s, ya know, perspicacious.” Not wrong, but so out of tune that it sounds like it might be. “That horror flick scared the right-hell out of me, man. I watched the whole thing just full of trepidation.” I suppose there are people who talk like this, but I’ve never met them.

All that said, there are some big words that I love tossing out in exactly these tone-deaf constructions just to see how people react. “Bumbershoot” got a workout when Mr. Cumberbatch was first making the scene. “Crepuscular,” which sounds gross but isn’t. “Scrofulous,” which sound gross, and is. “Sangfroid,” although I confess I struggle with pronunciation on that one.

I also tend to run across words and think, “Ooh, that’s a great word. Let’s bring that back,” and then promptly forget the word exists.

What big words do you wish were better known or used correctly more often?

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Volunteer Recognition Day

Posted on April 20, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Volunteering was never a big thing for me. We didn’t belong to a church when I was a kid and my mom was a misanthrope, so pretty much the only volunteering I did was for school or when I was hanging around the library where my dad worked. Then I went through a phase where I has lots of time but everyone seemed to want money, which was followed by a phase where I had some money but everyone wanted my time and I was already working 50 or 60 hours a week and doing laundry and other chores in the off hours.

I am in awe of people who just leap into action and make a difference. One of my BFFs from high school is like this. She is very involved in her church and service groups and I don’t know what all, and she will do just about anything to help anyone any time while also teaching preschool and running half marathons on the regular. I have been in awe of her for almost 40 years, and she hasn’t slowed down a bit.

Since arriving in Illinois, I’ve tried to reach out more. I’m back to hanging around the library, with varying degrees of actually being useful and just making more work. I joined a community group and have had maybe two good ideas that I completely flubbed when it came to execution. I have concluded that my volunteer life should probably reflect my professional life, wherein I have always felt most comfortable as a lieutenant—give me a destination; I’ll get the whole squad there unscathed. But don’t make me decide where we are going, or we will never leave the barracks.

I’ve made two good friends here who are a lot like my BFF. They are involved in pretty much every group, committee, and project going on in town. Any time I go into hibernation mode or light out for the territories for extended periods, they are the ones who get me up to speed when I venture out on the local streets again. And they seem to have forgiven me for my past transgressions, which is nice. Here’s hoping they can figure out how to put my lieutenant-y ways to some useful purpose—as if they don’t have enough to do!

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Husband Appreciation Day

Posted on April 19, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I’ll be honest, this should be every day in my house. It isn’t. I come up short.

The hubs is a long-suffering control freak married to another control freak. Fortunately, we got pretty good early on at divvying up what we would freak out about. For a long time, I got the yard and he got the laundry. I got the cleaning and he got the kitchen. I got day-to-day spending and he got investing. I got holidays and he got vacations. I got the kid’s academics and he got the kid’s athletics—and the kid showed us both who had the real control as far as he was concerned.

Since the hubs retired, he has expanded his fiefdom. He cleans up after the dog, mows the yard, and does the laundry. He does all the dishes and all the cooking. I work 3 days a week, so I make the money and he spends it (with a LOT of help). Sometimes I pitch in on extra yard work, but sometimes I just run off and find extracurricular activities to occupy my time. We hired a cleaning woman. We shipped the kid off to college and watch his progress with our hands over our faces, peeking through our fingers.

There was a period a few years back where it seemed like every time I turned around I bumped into another article about “cognitive load” or “worry work” or “emotional labor.” I was never one of those women going, “ah ha! I feel seen!” At most, I was the woman going, “OK, yeah, I have felt that way on occasion. Then I opened my mouth and told the other control freak in the house to deal with the thing making me pissy, and whatever he did about it was what got done.”

The hubs would doubtless argue with this. He has given me That Look in the past and said, “but you don’t just hand it off. You hand it off and then you decide it wasn’t done right and do it over.” He likes to point out that I regularly refolded my laundry (and he steadfastly refuses to fold fitted sheets to this day for this reason). But he’s got the same disease—he will reload the dishwasher if I put in so much as one dirty cup.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t, either. My dad used to say that perfect marriages involved finding someone whose neuroses and idiosyncrasies complemented your own. Mission accomplished!

I appreciate you, husband!

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Monuments and Sites Day

Posted on April 18, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Over the years, we have meandered over a lot of monuments and seen a lot of sites.

In studying up on this, I ran myself down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why the Washington Monument—which is referred to in its own press as “the National Monument” is not, in fact, a national monument. Apparently it is because the law says monuments are LANDS protected for their natural, historical, or scientific significance. Ergo, the National Monument is just a monument. Or maybe it’s a site. Whatever. I’m also perplexed why Stonewall in New York and the site of the Springfield race riot of 1908 are national monuments but South Dakota’s Badlands and the sand dunes at Nags Head are not. From what I could tell, it’s mostly a size thing. Whatever, again. Moving on.

For the sake of brevity, I will limit this post on our family’s favorite monuments to items on the oh-so-citable Wikipedia list of monuments. When he was little, our kid was enamored of Chimney Rock, but only because its Indian name was Elk Penis, which he found absolutely hilarious.

Montana won over my husband with Pompey’s Pillar, which involves a lot of stairs but is next to a very pretty stretch of the Yellowstone River. We took photos of William Clark’s name carved in the rock, and the hubs bought a hat.

And personally, I do not think I would be the person I am if I had not spent several years sitting at stoplights and staring at the ridgeline of the San Gabriel Mountains, and the Angeles Crest Highway is a very pretty drive. My love ends there, however. I am not generally a nature gal, and I remember feeling let down by the tiny bit of the Silver Moccasin Trail that I hiked—despite the fairy tale name, it looked like pretty much every other trail I’d ever hiked. (I was similarly annoyed by Ruby Falls. I was not suckered in by Jewel Cave or Enchanted Rock. The Grand Prismatic Spring, on the other hand, totally lives up to the hype.)

But the big winner for our family is Devil’s Tower. It’s in a movie, it’s weird to look at, it’s fun and easy to walk around, and there are millions of prairie dogs. Would visit again; highly recommend to anyone looking for a road trip with a satisfying destination.

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