Random Connect Points:
Reba's Stories

Every Tuesday night when I take my place around the table at our weekly Sip N Strum gathering, I’m reminded why this is my sacred time each week. For nine years, we’ve been doing more than just learning to play the ukulele. We’ve been building a community, establishing friendships, sharing talents and just plain having fun (not to mention occasionally sipping a fireball)! Eight years ago today, I wrote a post on my Random Connect Points blog about my experience playing with this crew on stage at Tin Roof in Columbia . How funny that I stumbled on that post today while doing some maintenance work on my blog. What fun it was to re-read my early musings about playing music as a middle-aged wanna-be musician without any natural talent, rhythm or skill. That post led me to search further back in my archives to dust off the one chronicling the first performance of my fledgling music “career.”  It described the initial surge of apprehension, awe and excitement I felt in playing music wit...

It’s National Word Nerd Day, the perfect excuse to call out fluffy, pet peeve words that are a writer’s equivalent of drunk party crashers. These drunk party guests are the overblown words that show up too often in news releases, on websites and in articles adding no substance to the writing. Examples of these trite and overused words include unique, revolutionary, innovative, groundbreaking, unprecedented – you see them so often they just become white noise. These fluffy words are like obnoxious party crashers, stumbling in drunk and decked out in bedazzled outfits. They hijack conversations with indulgent, overblown language, causing others to tune them out. In doing so, the drunk crashers completely miss the point of the gathering—to engage in meaningful connections. The same thing happens when a writer overuses these fluffy words. The reader tunes out and misses the connection the writer is trying to make.  There are good practical reasons to stay away from these words: • The...