Well, I started this site in May of 2004. so that’s a ridiculously long time of writing here, and til a while ago I’ve never had an “about me.” It takes me a really, really long time to accomplish things most of the time. But if you’ve done any reading on the site, you’ve probably learned quite a bit about me already.
so anyway, I’m Grace Hughes, and i live in Springfield, Illinois with my sweet husband Kevin. We’ve been married since 2006, and we have now have five inside and two outside kitties, which is beyond the pale of number of cats a person ought to have. But it just happened, we didn’t say, “hey, let’s see how many cats will fit in the house.” Insiders include Les Paul, Riley, Sweetie, Lovey, and Pumpkin. We found Les Paul in the Menards parking lot back in 2011, and then Riley came to us in March a few years ago, and Sweetie arrived a couple of Aprils ago. Lovey, a feral cat, had been hanging out on our front porch all winter and Kevin kept feeding her and bought her a heated kitty house, and she finally warmed up to him and we brought her inside in a couple of Aprils past. She’s adjusting to life with all the other cats and us ok I guess, except I still make her very nervous. it takes time.
In Dec. 2021, Mom’s friend Wanda passed away and we immediately adopted her four pound, elderly cat named Marley. They were going to put her to sleep! So we took her without even thinking about it. She had one and a half wonderful years with us, and passed away in September 2023.
Wanda had two outside cats named Pumpkin and Harley, bonded brothers who lived outside her house for all seven years of their lives, and the whole thing is too much of a story for now, suffice to say that we now have Pumpkin inside even though he acts more like an outside cat. We love him but he’s very challenging.
Our two outside cats are Spot and Lemon Drop, both very good kitties but we just can’t have anybody else living with us.
We used to have a wonderful dog, Mollie, who i wrote about quite a lot, but she died in 2013, and our cat Chester passed away on January 4th 2018, and our sweet cat Winnie died on Jan. 19th, 2019.
My dear, late friend Christine created this blog for me, but as the years went by it sort of fell into disrepair, so i found this great guy named Gary, who reinvented it for me.
I started writing this blog because for a brief moment, in 2004, I wrote a humor column for a local weekly paper. My column was called “grace about town,” and i wrote about stuff going on in Springfield, and about my escapades here. But when i started writing the column i realized there was so much more i wanted to write about, hence “graceuncensored.”
I did have fun writing the column, though, and every week I’d include a different goofy photo of myself along with it. It seemed to be very popular; people would stop me on the street and say how much they liked it, and they’d write me fan mail, and one time a woman told me that at Christmas her family read aloud my column about a decorative Christmas ashtray that I’d made in high school. I was excited that for the first time in my life, people were actually reading what I wrote and I felt like a real writer.
But unfortunately, the powers that be at the paper didn’t like me, it was weird, and the editor fired me. Well, he didn’t actually fire me; he wanted me to write for the paper, but not my column anymore. He told me he “didn’t like feature articles.” hmm. I got mad (i’ve only been mad about four times in my life) and I told him I didn’t want to write for them at all.
but it was a good experience because it prompted me to start this website, and then a friend said that i should create a one-woman show. That sounded fun to me, and I wrote and performed the first one in 2004. Kevin had read my column in the paper and then my blog. He wrote me a fan letter and came to my first show, introduced himself to me and the rest is history. So even though writing the column ended badly, it was the catalyst for profound and wonderful changes in my life.
Up til now, today, the only really notable accomplishment (besides marrying Kevin) i’ve done is to make a movie. That was almost 30 years ago, though, so I think it’s finally time to get more things accomplished. The movie, BTW, is called “Hope’s Happy Birthday,” and I did most of the stuff on the film by myself, and was quite proud of it, but then never had the wherewithal to actually get it out there in the world. There’s a link to it here on the site so you can watch it if you want.
ok then,
grace