Stefanie Pettit

During our new stay-home lives, I am not alone.

If we have an extravagance in our lives, it’s our sailboat.

I almost met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ava Munizza is graduating with The Community School Class of 2020

Raymond Acosta is graduating with East Valley High School’s class of 2020

Tanner Noller is graduating with Northwest Christian High School’s class of 2020

Eliza Britt is graduating with the North Idaho Christian School’s class of 2020

Kindra Curran is graduating with the MAP High School class of 2020

Yeongseo Lee is graduating with the Genesis Preparatory Academy’s class of 2020

On Saturday, May 2, the glorious Miss Chicken died. It was just two days after the story I wrote about her latest life adventure appeared in this space, in which I told about her possible sour crop and the quirky-looking crop bra she was sporting – and how this might be the final health battle in her long and adventurous and good life.

Fair to say, everyone is getting a little stir-crazy being sequestered as we have been. Never mind missing work, family, friends, restaurants, travel, going to the theater – I confess to really, really wanting a haircut. Very first-world and shallow of me, I know, but I also know that a date with a professional artist with scissors will be my first self-indulgent activity when it’s safe out there once again. The passion I’m feeling about that is a little disturbing, all things considered.

An update on Miss Chicken who is 11 years old and receiving careful attention in her old age

The other night my son prepared steak, salad and a new recipe for squashed potatoes for dinner – all homemade and plated with a sense of design. That was in Seattle.

Several years ago when I was visiting family and friends in Florida, I spent two days with a cousin I hadn’t seen in a couple of decades. As we were putting sheets on the hide-a-bed in her den, she looked over to me and said she was glad I’d be there overnight, as she sleeps so much better when someone else is in the house. That surprised me. Evelyn was a good bit older than me, but I remembered her as something of a force of nature. She married and had a child quite young, divorced quickly after her philandering husband made it impossible to stay in the marriage. She was not going to live that way, even though that brave choice launched her into rocky financial waters.

The partial-but-increasingly growing, self-imposed isolation has begun.

This is about a delightful little adventure involving lost jewelry and lost memory and a bit of kindly detective work that solved the mystery dubbed “The Extraordinary Ordinary Book.”

Being at the very front end of the Baby Boomer parade, I am finding issues with memory more relevant in my life. And in that of my friends.

This is a column dedicated to a couple of unrelated items.

For many of us, perhaps the nerdier in our midst, this is the time when our inner logophilia eagerly rises to the surface as we begin our annual end-of-the-year search for announcements of the various official Words of the Year (which are sometimes phrases). Happily, for those of us who love words, the lists are now forthcoming.

Having lain dormant for many months now, my inner Grammar Goddess feels the need to rise up and spread her wings in celebratory and protective guardian-angel mode, this time to pay homage to a fighter for truth, justice and the proper usage of the oft-maligned and misused apostrophe. Behold the hero: John Richards. A retired copy editor from Boston, Lincolnshire, England, in 2001 he created the Apostrophe Protection Society with the singular aim of preserving the correct usage of this much-abused punctuation mark. Richards announced earlier this month he is withdrawing from the public fight and closing his organization.