Sara Ryan

The previous renter of the Hyundai Sonata I am currently driving is connected with NASCAR. I know this because I found a Rooming List for the NASCAR Craftsman Truck series in the glove compartment. My favorite first name on the list: Freager. Only two sets of roommates (of around fifty) requested smoking rooms. Two gentlemen [...]

Through a long chain of link-clicking, I ran across a page about the bear pits of Berne, a tourist attraction of which I had previously been entirely unaware.  Now I know that they’ve been in the city for hundreds of years, since bears are the city mascot, and I also know that there is now [...]

Pro: The Undisclosed Location now boasts not one but two locally owned, independent coffeeshops that serve delicious soy lattes. One even has free wifi. Con: They both play smooth jazz. I’m reading and loving Absolute Friends by John Le Carré. Here is a paragraph from page 148 — readers of Rules will understand why I [...]

Today was a long day of flying to arrive at The Usual Undisclosed Location(tm). We had breakfast at the airport one table away from Ed Begley, Jr. He’ll be doing a show in a 99-seat theater soon, we learned. (Ed has one of those carrying, actorly voices.) No crew from his enviro-reality show were in [...]

Note the tragic lack of cheezburger.

Because I find things like this sweater. (The colors are nicer than they look. One of these days I should get a camera that is not also my phone.) It’s from here. I know this because the original tags were still on it. One of said tags looks like this: I do not know what [...]

Explained by Disney characters. [via desayunoencama] It reminds me a bit of Jesse Walker’s piece, Mickey Mouse Clubbed: Disney’s cartoon rodent speaks out on the Eldred decision.

I was pleased and excited to see that The Rules For Hearts was covered, along with Cynthia Rylant‘s Ludie’s Life and Gretchen Olson’s Call Me Hope, in Sunday’s Oregonian — especially pleased because book reviews, increasingly, are an endangered species. On the same day that those reviews appeared, over at Critical Mass, the blog of the [...]

Sighted: An obvious prom couple — he’s in a tux, she’s in a long black dress, and if there were any doubt, she’s got the telltale wrist corsage with, yes, a rose — are sitting on a bench. She’s staring off into space. He’s texting. The bench is located inside a mall.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what friendslists and RSS feeds do to the experience of reading online. You can’t control who you’re next to — what someone will have just read when they come to what you’ve written. A sincere but glibly written post about my cat shows up next to someone else’s [...]