When it's hot outside, I have a hard time getting motivated enough to cook.

My kitchen is small, so the oven really heats it up. Plus, who wants to sweat while eating hot dishes? But at the same time, it's too bad, because so many delicious ingredients are garden-fresh right now.

I didn't intend to make a shower curtain as a part of my bathroom project.

When I start seeing U-Hauls parked in front of apartment buildings this time of year, I feel a sense of overwhelming relief at not having to move.

Following that, though, I usually get a desire to spruce up my house. Last year, I decided at the home-improvement store that I needed to paint my spare bedroom and it needed to be turquoise.

 I've written before about creative ways to reuse newspapers (and newspaper bags, but that's not pertinent here). 

I've described this feeling before – when you dig the new Pottery Barn catalog out of your mailbox, ooh and ahhh at the carefully placed, beautiful objects inside and think, “Man, my house would look great if I had ______.”

I had the pleasure of dining this weekend with a dinner club focused on enjoying local foods during the summer season.

 While the C-U Schools Foundation's I.D.E.A. Store is still getting set up in the shopping center just east of Neil Street on Springfield Ave., it's clear to me that it has a lot of potential. It will open in September. 

When a PR team for Sephora contacted The News-Gazette to let us know we could visit their new store at Market Place Mall before it opened to the public, my editor and I figured it might be a good time to write a makeup-tip story for the features section. (The store opens Friday.)

I had the pleasure of interviewing John Beatty yesterday, a strongman and nurse from Pesotum who's competing on "America's Got Talent."

Between 2008 and when I started in the features department last September, I did some work in The News-Gazette's marketing department.