It surely looks different for everyone, these ideas of home and family, but I do hope each of you gets whatever form of home and family you are needing this Christmas.

I was in Oregon over the weekend to celebrate my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Which might not seem like much—they were a regular small-town couple who raised regular small-town children and had regular small-town problems (including cars that almost never worked)—except think about that for a minute. Think about people you know who have been married for 60 years.

This store hosts a Northwest authors fair each summer, and for years I've been trying to get in. Nevermind that I no longer live in the Northwest. Nevermind that I spend much more getting to author fairs than I make in book sales from them.

I woke up last Thursday morning to the sight of a woman at the top of my driveway putting a bag of dog poop in my trash can. And so I stewed on this for hours, feeling pissed and a little violated. What is wrong with people?

Ditto everything I said in my last post. There are days when it wins me over. Although I've yet to experience a day on the Oregon Coast that did not win me over.

I love living in New York, but it's hard to beat this view out your back window. Yes, I love living in New York, but I'd be lying if I said it was stress free. Au contraire. It's noisy, it's expensive, and the woman downstairs keeps whacking her ceiling as hard as she can every time my cat runs across the room.

In an effort to simplify and downsize my life, I've begun going through my belongings. You know the drill. Saving this, chucking that. It's a process I haven't done to this extent in the entire six years I've lived in this house. Needless to say, I've accumulated a lot of crap. OK, it's not crap. Well, some of it is crap. But mostly it's just stuff that when push comes to shove (or when the day comes that I need to fit myself and my life into a much smaller space...), I can do without.

I got home this evening from a very taxing day at work to find a thank-you note in my mailbox. You all know how I feel about thank-you notes. A dying art, surely, but one I feel is so, so necessary. It's just the principle of the thing. And it makes us decent.

You've probably never thought about it before, because your family probably doesn't have a permanent slot on the Christmas program every year at church.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, one who I grew up with back in Oregon, and she was telling me about the book she's writing. It's about her life, and as she was telling me about some of the events that will be included in the book, I was shocked.

My friend Crystal Brinkerhoff, a fellow writer who hails from the same corner of Oregon that I do, is today's featured post. It's my first guest post and I hope to do more in the future. Enjoy!!

Or whatever they are. (Firs?) I don't really know trees, but I grew up positively surrounded by them. It's always funny to hear people talk about how "green" Cleveland is, because are these people insane? They don't know green.

I was twenty the first time I pumped a tank of gas. This is not unusual for a kid who grew up in Oregon, because in that blessed state you don't pump your own gas.

So, remember when I said this? Well I take it back. Except the part about how I wouldn't be surprised to see him move up one day. And the part about Ohio State fans being kind of obnoxious.

Being from Oregon, I'm a huge Ducks fan. One of my first major trials of living in Ohio was, in fact, when Ohio State played Oregon in the Rose Bowl a few years ago. It felt like me verses the entire state of Ohio. Probably because it was.

I've just spent the weekend with a large portion of my extended family. My grandparents have lived in the same house for 43 years, and small-town Oregon still serves as the meeting place for our holiday gatherings.

I was in Pittsburgh this past weekend, a city I visit fairly often. I love the donut shop in the strip district, I love that Pittsburgh houses both the closest IKEA to me and also the closest Tiffany & Co., and I love that it has the same industrial blue collar feel as Cleveland but is infinitely more lovely with all those rivers and bridges. I might live there if they had an NBA team. Yet, I digress.