On her own Carol entered the hair salon and emerged with an appointment for the following Thursday, 8 May at 11:15. She was particularly proud to have committed her very personal standard of hairdressing (“just cover the roots!”) to a completely foreign country’s standards of beautician care. But she had done it, and with […]

  We were not able to reserve our little hacienda away from home for four consecutive weeks here in Rota. So, after much discussion (Carol: “We’re renting a car and taking a road trip!” she explained) we mutually agreed to rent a car and take a road trip.   Carol found a cheap car rental […]

  And when I talk about Rota as a Paradise Found, I do not mean to include some of the descriptives that are to follow.  Call it just a happy accident, or maybe an arrested adolescent’s male fantasy come true.   But there are bare boobies at the beach in Rota. Carol was the one who pointed […]

  I was going to tell the story of our return trip to Rota chronologically. But since my objective in the return was to recapitulate my life at home – that would be: reading, writing and …well, watching baseball (at home) but staring blankly at the Atlantic Ocean (here) – such a simple (and boring) […]

  That’s the lead from the most recent review of A Roomful of Monkeys posted on Amazon’s web page featuring my book. Along with “playful” from the Kirkus Review, those two words sum up precisely what I was intending to achieve with my first comic novel.   To say I was relieved to see words like those […]

This review reminds me of the admonition from that high school composition teacher of mine who’d admonished me to leave humor for those that can write it. Well, the admonition didn’t stop me then, and it looks like this one won’t stop me now. Still looking for buyers of A Roomful of Monkeys and readers […]

Days 16-19 Beach Boy   When Carol and I first got together, I had stated unequivocally my opposition to sand, the reality of it, the very concept of it and the grit of it that manages to find itself into every crevice and moving part of my body – especially  and particularly how it winds […]

  So here’s the thing. The main part of this Spain trip was to be two weeks in the Atlantic coastal city of Cadiz. That meant our three nights in Barcelona and then two more in Madrid were just a holding pattern awaiting the beginning of the real trip. Barcelona and Madrid, Spain as mere […]

  Just a quick word that my comic novel, A Roomful of Monkeys, is now available on Amazon.com as a Kindle download for the mere bag of shells of $5.99.   Figuring you’d prefer to purchase from a site you’re more familiar with, I held off making this more shameless solicitation to part with some of your […]

  A Roomful Of Monkeys is the comic novel I’ve thought about writing for years. I like humor. I like satire. I could sustain both for about 600 words, as a newspaper or magazine column back in the good old days of newsprint. (I loved it when my words would dissolve into a  gray film on your […]