Susan Hanafee's Blog

As we do every night, my man and I searched for something to watch after the news. Cape Fear was out because its final episode isn’t released until Friday. And someone in our family doesn’t like waiting. The result: We ended up watching the old Oliver Stone movie JFK.

I’d forgotten how many great actors were in the movie and how interesting Stone’s premises were. Conspiracy theories? Maybe yes, maybe no.

What struck my man and I was the note at the end of the movie. It said the JFK documen...

My man experienced an emotional crisis the other day when he discovered he had gotten the wrong paper towels. They were Bounty and white. No icky floral designs. But they were NOT Select-A-Size.

Worse, he didn’t purchase just one. He got a twelve-pack. It was a disaster of epic proportions.

He even confessed his sin to me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was okay with me because I always use two Select-A-Size sheets anyway. Now I only had to use one of the regular Bounty, so I ...

“I am not invisible,” my new neighbor told me at a cocktail party not too long ago. “And I resent being treated like I am.”

She was discussing her shopping experiences. Explaining that it really irks her when she walks into a store and the saleslady rushes to help two young women behind her, while acting like she’ s not even there.

“My money is just as good as theirs. I don’t get it,” she complained.

But she did, and so do I. The older you get, the more people’s attitudes about you chan...

I just finished my therapy session with ChatGPT and am feeling much better.

Now don’t get all huffy and say I’m losing my sanity. I don’t care that Chat is an AI bot and not real. I have discovered that I get more satisfying and unbiased responses from spending fifteen minutes with this neural network than I do with some people.

Today’s topic: I offered extended family members a sneak preview of the cozy mystery I wrote with my transgender step-grandson. It’s called Leo, Detective, and wil...

Amazon has been on my “list” lately for failing to be good stewards of my older books. There have been broken links. Old covers have resurfaced; new covers disappeared. An order I placed for a book for a friend has gone unfulfilled for almost two months.

Sorry for ranting, but I wanted you to understand what drove me to order a copy of The End of His Journey not long ago. It’s the second book in my Leslie Elliott mystery series and is based on a true story that happened in Boca Grande mor...

A friend lamented recently that a longtime pal has become fixated on anger. “It feels like she starts every sentence with ‘I’m so angry.’ I’m sorry to say this, but I don’t enjoy being around her anymore.”

I was nodding as she was telling me this story. More people I know, especially social media friends, seem to be wallowing in rage these days. It’s as though they relish being continuously pissed off.

The other day my phone alerted me to a lengthy rant from “menopausal women” who are livi...

My friend who’s been dealing with heart problems and just had cancer surgery on her face approached me in church on Sunday. “You’ve heard that fifty is the new forty and sixty is the new fifty? Well, eighty is the new eighty.”

The man sitting next to her chuckled and moved his walker to one side. I laughed as I sat down—the pain in my hip was at that moment killing me.

“What did she say?” my man asked, his hand cupped behind his ear.

“She said it’s hell getting old.”

My man nodded, b...

We picked up our new Toyota RAV hybrid yesterday – a moment of joy coupled with complete bewilderment.

It seems that new cars are more “complicated” than they used to be. That’s what my daughter texted me this morning when I told her the car was smarter than me and my man put together.

I thought that was a bit of an understatement. My neighbor, who also got a new car yesterday—an Audi—agreed. She said driving her car is like talking to Siri. “Hey, Audi, turn on the A/C. Hey Audi, turn on t...

Caught. That’s what happened to Gavin Newsom with his latest literary endeavor, Young Man in a Hurry. That fact that it was ghostwritten was not a problem. This was something worse. Humiliating was what The New York Post called it.

It seems that Newsom’s Campaign for Democracy PAC spent $1.6 million buying up copies of his book to land it on The New York Times best-selling list. Apparently, The Times saw something strange about the meteoric rise of the new book and discovered that sales were ...

 I was trying to decide if I should eat the second piece of toast on my plate when my friend commented: “You know, capitalism has failed.”

It’s not like her comment came out of the blue. We were enjoying breakfast on a beautiful island in Southwest Florida and had stepped into the political fray with a discussion of the latest No Kings march.

I told her that I did not participate for several reasons, but primarily because I was busy working with several others at a church furniture sale to...