This post orignally appeared in the Bloomington Herald Times on February 22, 2006 In general, I am not one for window shopping, but when it comes to French patisseries, I’ve got my nose plastered to the glass. The displays are always breathtaking in these pastry shops – tiers of exquisite chocolates, boxed and bowed, tiny…

This post originally appeared in the Bloomington Herald Times on February 8, 2006 Check the thesaurus, and almost none of the synonyms for romantic are very flattering: starry-eyed, unrealistic, quixotic – and those are just the good ones, followed by emotional, maudlin, mawkish, mushy and schmaltzy. How chastening to realize that they all apply to…