So bittersweet! To say good bye to Ramadan, but to have your heart swell with the joy of Eid! A long time ago my older sister, her husband (at the time) and my husband and me, had an Eid greeting card business. And it was my job to come up with the jingles inside. One […]

That’s what I think Ramadan is. It’s a time to reboot, turn the switch off, and start again. All the bad habits, the excesses that we might have gotten into the habit of eating, drinking or doing, are shut off, from dawn till sunset for a lunar month of 29 or 30 days. And isn’t […]

A few years ago when Jon Stewart was hosting the Academy awards, the African American group that won for best song/score started jumping around at the announcement. Up till that point, Jon was uncharacteristically subdued and not his usual irreverent self. But at this show of raw emotion, he perked up and said something about how […]

When the animated movie Despicable Me came out, I watched it on a teeny tiny video screen on the back of an airplane seat and still absolutely loved it. The premise is about an evil genius who becomes good and voiced by Steve Carell, it’s really worth watching! The funny thing was that when the […]

There’s only been one other time that I’ve been as nervous as I was before the Golden Kite speech, and that was just before giving the plenary speech at the Danish IBBY Congress. Actually, that moment was more intense–at least this time I wasn’t going to say anything controversial. (I’d already done that on Friday.) […]

I only had to do one ‘presentation’ at the conference and it was last Friday. Nevertheless, I was pretty nervous. Writing about other cultures is a pretty contentious issue, especially with my approach to it. It was funny, because as I was preparing for the trip on Wednesday evening (I had to leave at 6 […]

I wrote this in a spiral notebook on August 4th, when I just arrived at the Hyatt. Aug. 4th: One of the coolest things I learned about my coming to the SCBWI conference was the fact that my signing session, tomorrow (Friday evening) was the same where Henry Winkler aka ‘The Fonz’ would also be […]

A friend of mine asked me how the cruise on Saturday went. I wasn’t going to blog about this, because it’s quite embarrassing, but then I thought, why not? I’ve written lots of embarrassing stuff on my blog, what’s one more. And maybe someone can get something positive out of it. I know at the […]

It feels like a big fluffy blanket of serenity has drifted down on me and my household. This seems to happen every Ramadan and the problem with that is that it really makes it hard to take anything else, world squabbles over a debt crisis, and attending an impending SCBWI convention, very seriously. In the […]