Shannon Costello

Summertime and the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high
Daddy’s rich, and your mamma’s good lookin’
So hush little baby, don’t you cry…
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know and like this song but it turns out I really never understood it.  On a hike in Yellowstone one summer [...]

An article in the Washington Post referred to the dingy Haitian part of Miami.  I thought, “Hey- I’ve been there!”  It wasn’t necessarily intentional, of course (Shannon:  always include the zipcode when looking for directions on Google Maps, ok?).  There were the churches (l’eglise).  There was the meat shop selling goat meat.  A few blocks [...]

I meant to comment on this story but got to it a little late, so it may be old news.
I would recommend the CNN video for the full effect of the former governor of Alaska surreptitiously reading her hand as she is being questioned.
She is getting better in terms of how she does [...]

My SOP has been to shop at Food Lion regularly but to make regular (say, monthly) runs to Target for cleaning supplies, crackling oat bran, and altoids. Lately I have started to slip…I’ll just pick up dish detergent at FL…too lazy to go to T…
It got to the point where I started to get curious.  [...]

When should “Petty Gluttony” be re-named “The Well-Rounded Me”?

By the numbers: 2 nights camping, 2 nights in hotels, 60+ confirmed mosquito bites on my legs (oops on forgetting the repellent on Sunday’s hike)
Best moments:  long hours outside, watching all those brilliant stars Friday night, hiking in the rain, tree & bird identification, piles of alligators basking in the sunshine, dolphins in a feeding [...]

My roommate on the Bolivia trip was Canadian, so it was somewhere in the depths of South America that it occurred to me that I knew NOTHING about Canada.  Wasn’t it just a kind of United States North?
So that’s why I started this book.  And running out of renewals helped inspire me to finish it [...]

Repetition isn’t bad!
I try to make at least one meal every week that I know will make good leftovers.  Of course leftovers can be problematic in a family of two.  One can only eat chile so many times before one gets sick of it.  And there seems to be a magic point- say after a  [...]