Are Flip-Flops Making Women Fat?
A couple of weeks ago my husband brought up flip-flops again. It’s summer, and today at 11 a.m. the thermometer read 98 degrees, but I’m pretty sure it was hotter. I wished I was wearing flip-flops, the shoes that are like a fresh breeze of coolness for the sizzling feet of summer. But I can’t […]
What to Do with Kids Instead of “Screen” This Summer
Bollywood from Another Room. That could be the title of the movie of my life, if it were based on today only. My husband and kids are on their second Bollywood of the afternoon. Why they jumped straight to New Delhi after a week of “screen-fasting” I don’t know, but the music is fabulous! Screen […]
Getting the Wrong Mail – and Zucchini Enlightenment
Do you ever get the wrong mail delivered to your house? We live in a neighborhood with one of those post boxes that has a bunch of slots all together, and sometimes our postal lady slips up and gives us someone else’s pool maintenance equipment catalog or another neighbor’s DirectTV offers. This week I accidentally […]
A Mom’s Throwdown Over Throw Pillows
After all these years sitting in living rooms, it finally occurred to me this morning why they’re called “throw pillows.” It’s because every single time a child encounters one, he or she feels an uncontrollable urge to throw them on the floor. Why is this? Why is it that every time I go into my […]
What Do May Flowers Bring?
Despite the fact we had no measurable rain in April for the proverbial April showers, May seems to be making the flowers come up in my yard. You should see the snapdragons. They’re glorious. And my husband planted them from seed, which still just dumbfounds me. You know, I think I have never once grown […]
Things I Paid my Daughter $1 to Do
Today my 10 year-old asked me if she could save up and buy a kiddie pool to put in the back yard. My mommy mercenary ears went a-buzzing! Cheap labor! A way out of doing housework chores I have been dreading! Yeah! “Sure, sweetheart. Do you want to start today?” “Do you mean ‘money jobs’?” […]
Yes, dear, I *am* an island. An automobile island.
I don’t get it. Why am I the only person in my family who can see the beauty and fun of the automobile? Since I was a kid I loved cars, looking at classics, knowing what models and makes were cool, which ones were clunkers. I learned to drive on a sweet, shiny copper 1964 […]
Miss(ing) Manners
So, the other day I made pork chops for dinner. This is the kids’ favorite thing. They were on sale, so I was thinking how neat it’d be to treat them. My husband was gone that evening, so I was holding down the fort, serving the chops, monitoring the mealtime chaos. Now, over the years […]
Make that $481
Remember the Rice Cooker? Wait. There’s more. My vacuum also broke. The “dream” vacuum my mom insisted on buying me three years ago when she was here last and saw the ridiculous effort I was making with my fourth vacuum in 8 months, and how futile the effort was. She couldn’t take it and in […]
The Near Death Experience of Fuzzy Logic, Or How I Saved $181 This Week
Fuzzy Logic. That’s the jargony term the Zojirushi company uses for the magical way their rice cookers “know” when the sticky rice is done just perfectly. We bought a Zojirushi rice cooker with said Fuzzy Logic about 12 years ago when we bought our house. At the time I was dying because my husband insisted […]
