Our weekly Events Wire newsletter is your guide to Northern Santa Barbara County concerts, arts, and local happenings—delivered every Friday.
Usually my column is devoted to the lighter moments in my life. This week is no different because I am going to tell you about the sweetest guy I know—a man with a beautiful spirit who has lived an amazing life. He is a true American hero, being one of the few survivors of the […]
Atop a hill overlooking the Sea Pacifica in the land of the grand arroyo lies Castle Waterman where lives the Brit Lord of the Soccer Channel and his young grandson, Britween. The Lady Ariel, queen of this domain, is caught in a mad power struggle with these two as they each vie for their right […]
My mother loves to send e-mails to me. This is a woman who has yet to figure out how to forward e-mail without including every single freaking line from previous senders. I now know the e-mails for each one of her friends, everyone at her church, and all of her real estate associates. Mom’s e-mails […]
Happy May Day! The first day of May was originally celebrated by early Teutonic tribes as Walpurgis night and by the Celts as the festival of Beltane. These were times for rejoicing. The warmer weather brought happier expectations of fruitful crops, birthing of lambs and calves in the fields, and renewed activity that had been […]
The past two weeks have been dark ones here at Bleak House. What the Dickens happened at our once happy habitat of Waterman Manor? What cataclysmic event could have occurred to bring both a young boy and grown man sobbing to their knees? What turned my hair even grayer in a mere 14 days? We […]
William Shakespeare marveled, “What a piece of work is man!” in act 2 of Hamlet. But I’ll lay odds his wife, Anne Hathaway, often exclaimed, “What pieces of work men are!” I know this from experience and have good cause to agree with Mrs. S. After all, when he died, all he left the poor […]
Baby, it’s cold outside right now, and it’s a perfect time to snuggle up in a warm, soft, micro-fleece throw with a hot hubby. OK, so he’s running a slight temperature and recovering from the flu, but he’s still hot! And to think of all the other men I could have had in my fantasy […]
Well, here we all are. It’s already the second week of January; the world didn’t end on Dec. 21; most people did not understand how the Mayan calendar really works. So much for the conspiracy theorists. I’m dealing with conspiracies of my own here at Waterman Manor. My British husband and newly-turned-11-year-old grandson, the Britween, […]
The holidays are looking a bit grim this year, thanks in part to political Grinches, budgetary Scrooges, and lobbyist wise guys. I wonder if there will be a Nativity scene at the White House this year, considering that no one can find three wise men and a virgin in Washington, D.C. If an epiphany isn’t […]
You’d better watch out, and you’d better not cry. You’d better not pout—I’m telling you why: As of this printing, Christmas is only 12 days away and, counting today, there are only five days of Hanukkah remaining! The elections are over and political ads have been replaced by holiday commercials. The last bit of Thanksgiving […]
Thanksgiving gives me pause to reflect on the many things for which I am thankful. One of those has been reliable transportation. Now, I know you may be thinking to yourself: “Whaaat?” But I have lived my entire life in places that were not transport-friendly unless you had access to an automobile. During my childhood […]
Gather round, children, and I will tell you a haunting tale. Everything in this frightening story is absolutely true, and I have the pink slips to prove it! Stephen King had his Christine, Henry Ford had the Edsel, and NBC had My Mother the Car. But none of these nightmarish sedans can equal my own […]
