Photo credit: Pete Deutschman     One thing was clear from the beginning. There’d be no kids sitting in the back seat of cars eating cold hot dogs, while the parents up front argued who’d started the fight. Even my obliviousness to facilitating the introductions was taken for granted, and everyone knew everyone else before I […]

Photo credit: Lovisa Photo   When Carol returned from shopping the other day, she saw that I had made the bed with fresh sheets from the dryer. “Thank you for making the bed,” she said, giving me a kiss. I thought, What’s up with this? She makes the bed every day of the week, and I’ve […]

   So the least sociable of both the Madigan and Champagne families is the one who decided to resurrect the reception celebrating our wedding that covid had canceled last July.   Why didn’t I let this sleeping dog lie? While it’s true that nobody can outperform the Madigans when it comes to creating social events […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan July 19, 2021 Dear Diary,     Well, Reid truly surprised me this time. In the weeks since he first said “We’re going to Iceland,” I was so expecting him to suddenly look up from the book he was ignoring me with and say, “I said what and we’re going where?” Like […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    Carolyn told me about a trip she made to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. She traveled with a tour, but she went alone. On the flight home, she told me she said to herself, “I can do anything.”    As Carol and I were flying home from a bucket […]

Laughter has many benefits such as it helps burns calories, boost the immune system, releases endorphins and many more.

Don’t have time to write? Don’t worry, we will show you how to write, between picking up the kids and saving the chicken you forgot in the oven.

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    As I write this, a month has already passed since Carol and I spent those two weeks in Iceland. I’m still trying to process it all. The trip originally fell into the category of impulse or pipe dream. From the moment we read that Iceland had opened up to vaccinated […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    I once interviewed a museum renovation architect. (And if you think these blogs can be narcoleptic, you should have read that piece!) During the course of my interview, he mentioned a phenomenon of museum-going that I’d certainly experienced, but never realized there was a name for it: museum fatigue. Basically, […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    Today marked our first week in the camper. Thanks to Carol’s housekeeping skills, the van still looked as pristine as the day we picked it up. No partially made bed, strewn laundry, empty potato chip bags and wine bottles lying around like a homeless encampment, mad searches for cell phones […]