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“Service Desert Germany” – unfortunately that is one of the self-bestowed nicknames of my mother country. At least it was true in many ways when I lived there. Who knows where it derived first or whence? I guess it all started when Germany recovered from World War II. At first, pretty much everybody was lending […]

In a little over a month, we will be celebrating Thanksgiving again, and then the final rush into Christmas preparations begins. Which means writing dozens of Christmas cards and sending them out in time before the cut-off date. Which means that now is the time to start crafting Christmas decorations and Christmas cards. The latter […]

Let’s face it – maintenance is not my strongest talent. That’s probably because I come from a family that never owned a home (landlords took care of maintenance) and that was rather on the academic side of life. Also, there are quite a few regulations what you are permitted to maintain or repair where and […]

Sometimes I wonder what it will be like when I’m a couple of decades older, my fingers not as nimble and my wrists not as strong as now. It usually happens when I’m fighting another packaging of something and I feel that either I am incapable or the package designer totally unempathetic. Also, it is […]

Sometimes I get asked what it takes to be a writer. The answer is: Write! I also get asked when I decided to become a writer. I never did. It decided me. Before I could write, I told stories to my kid brother. As soon as I was able to spell, I borrowed my parents’ […]

What do I remember from my first day of school in Germany ever? A big candy-filled cardboard cone, throngs of people seated in the gym to attend a welcoming program and to listen to the principal, then entering a classroom and being pretty much clueless about anything that was going on. I was able to […]

When I was a kid in Germany, my family went off hiking to the Black Forest or to the Swabian Alb, low mountain ranges close to my hometown, Stuttgart, on a regular basis. Either a newspaper clip or a hiking book was placed in my mother’s shoulder bag, and usually they were day trips. I […]

The other day, I was vacuuming my house and was totally in deep thoughts when, all of a sudden, my vacuum cleaner died on me. The sudden silence woke me out of deep contemplation about a plot twist in my next novel, but I knew immediately what had happened. The plug had fallen out of […]