I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice,' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.

I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.

In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better; the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better.

When we stopped to rest and Tony tried to figure out what was wrong with his compass, I asked him what he thought it was about orchids that seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and worship them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait for nearly a decade for one of them to flower.

I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys.

I've tried a lot of different apps to manage Twitter on my phone (I use Hootsuite on my laptop), but I think the official Twitter app is really good.

Dog parks are more cliquish than any other human gathering with the possible exception of seventh grade. Deal with it.