My younger child, Billie-Goat Bowie
WARNING – this posting contains some mush and goofiness – indicative of my open heart regarding Billie.Older, grumpier Marley has a Facebook profile, but I have resisted creating one for Billie. It feels odd for a hyper-articulate person like me to say this, but Billie is hard to write about. The living beauty that is

Bowie Christmas tree revisited...?
Even before Billie ate actual trees, she gnawed on a lot of my favorite ornaments, which always amazed me - I put my precious collection of mini teapots higher on the tree (token attempt at dog-proofing?), so why did she reach past the boring cheap stuff and how did she know...? Did they smell like me? (Does she think teapo

As the HOLIDAY continued...
From 2 days later in December 2005...Billie Holiday must have wanted to restart the party yesterday - there was nothing left to drink, so she looked for snack food. Since we had done such a good job hiding the tree light plug, she had to be very resourceful. She pulled down a low limb of the tree and started picking off

A dog named HOLIDAY
Every year I recycle this story for new friends - I'm sure you will agree that it is timeless! From December 20, 2005...Our beagle Marley is named after reggae genius Bob Marley, and we named our mixed-breed Billie after scrappy songstress Billie Holiday. And yes, the names have created confusion since "Marlee" sounds lik

Grownup Furniture Takes Me Back to Childhood
My childhood bedroom furniture was caked with scaly white paint, which I later learned was over 1930s jade green, originally my mother’s parents’ set – wow! No wonder it was caked & scaly – which gave me nightmares when I had chicken pox and my skin resembled the paint – but I neve