Skip to content

Tag: family

Saying Farewell to our Fairytale Farmhouse

Casa Roshell Ready for a New Cast

I’ve been told I’m a lousy movie date; I predict punchlines, spoil plot twists, and (yawn) anticipate jump scares. As a professional storyteller who’s penned and plotted my way through five decades, there’s not much that surprises me anymore.

But this? I never saw this coming.

It was a year after our youngest son left for college, and I was puttering around our spacious family home, rearranging tchotchkes and fluffing throw pillows, like ya do. When it hit me. Hard. Exactly the way a throw pillow doesn’t.

My Social Distancing Diary 

Starshine Reports from Weeks of Santa Barbara Isolation with Her Quaranteens

Day One

Inventoried all Lysol wipes on premises, trimmed nails short for maximum tidiness, and gathered as family to create daily germ-blasting household wipe-down regimen.

Gobbled up kale salad, popped an Airborne gummy, and added home workouts to my calendar four times/week. Health is a priority!

Pulled out old recipe books, dusted off a 1,000-piece puzzle, and upgraded video streaming services now that we finally have time to explore all those award-winning series.

Brought in logs for cozy fires, ordered cute desk lamp for work-at-home station, and dug out tub of pore-purifying facial mud mask from the bathroom cupboard. Bring on the staycation!

Our Kids are Snitches

Running for office requires a hardy hide. Detractors lob accusations as easily as jugglers hurling torches; politicians expect it. But Oklahoma judicial candidate John Mantooth is being pelted by a particularly painful source: his own grown daughter.

Jan Schill (formerly Mantooth) recently took out a newspaper ad that read, “Do Not Vote for My Dad!” on the grounds that he’s “NOT a good father, NOT a good grandfather,” and would make a lousy judge. She launched DoNotVoteForMyDad.com, linking to legal documents that call his integrity into question and describing a Christmas gift she once received from her pop — a box of chocolates infested with worms and weevils.

Eww. I don’t care if you vote for him, but do not under any circumstances invite this guy to a secret Santa swap.

The candidate claims his daughter is embittered by his ugly decades-gone-by divorce from her mother, which may be true. But it’s hard to ignore the shocking shriek of a child blowing the whistle on her own badly behaving begetter.

Cops heeded just such a shriek last week when a 13-year-old New York girl called 911 from the backseat of her mother’s swerving car to report that mom was driving drunk. The good news: Troopers hauled in the besotted mama before anyone was hurt. The bad: Dinnertime conversation at their house will be awkward for quite some time.

Content Copyright © 2026 Starshine Roshell