In My Words: Kimberly Burton Allen, Writer

Offer accepted. We are in contract. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows us that we found a property that can be a project. Built in 1900, extensively renovated and updated in in the mid-80s, while keeping and enhancing the original details (beautiful woodwork, floors), the house is 2600 square feet on an acre and a half, with 250' feet of waterfront on a large pond fed by a river.  The house is set up with a small apartment which has its own entrance (exterior spiral staircase) which we envisage renovating so that we have both a guest room with bathroom and the apartment. Perhaps, down the line, we'll need the apartment should one of us require live-in care. In the nearer future, perhaps we'll (gasp!) Airbnb it. Under the previous owners it also operated as a garden center, and there are greenhouses, hoop houses, and a raised vegetable bed on the property. And -- be still, Chris's beating heart-- there's a barn with a workshop, an office (origina

I write from a rental cottage in Connecticut that Chris and I took for the month of December. I've k ept the news on the down-low primarily because I don't want to tempt Fate, but we have sold the bed and breakfast, and are retiring from innkeeping. We are scheduled to close at the end of next week --the closing was delayed two weeks, resulting in more hesitation in sharing the news. Once the closing has  taken place and I know it's a done deal, then I would feel more comfor table in announcing it  I studied psychology in college because I was fascinated by how people were wired, how they thought,  what made them do what they did. Specifically, I was obsessed with why I did/thought/felt what I did, and what it meant.  Early on, I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test (result: ENFT [Extrovert/Intuitive/Feeling/Judging]) and there was a question that has returned to me thousands of times since I first encountered it:  " Do you prefer things settled and decided, or unset

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Dixieland jazz was my childhood soundtrack. First, the LP records (they didn’t call them Long Playing for nothing) on the Hi-Fi stereo console: Jack Teagarden, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, the haunting soprano sax of Sidney Bechet, the seemingly improvisational, but actually well-polished lively sounds of the Firehouse Five + 2, who we could occasionally enjoy live at Disneyland as many of the members of the band were animators, illustrators, and members of Disney studios. There was“Strictly From Dixie,” Benson Curtis’s radio program of trad (traditional) jazz every Saturday at 5 PM, recorded on Dad’s Teac reel-to-reel and played back endlessly over the backyard speakers while we swam in the pool and Dad pruned the palm trees or barbecued the chicken. My parents were charter members of Orange County’s Jazz Inc. jazz club, which hosted a meeting/performance on the second Sunday of each month at a local Moose lodge. From time to time, we kid