• Thanks!

    Look what the Hanukkah Armadillo brought to our house earlier this week!  Now how did he know that there’s a writers strike and nothing on TV and gosh, we’re pathetic and love us some 90210 fun?  Thanks, Hanukkah Armadillo!

  • Splotchy’s Story Virus

    My mom tagged me for an interesting meme…a story virus, I guess it’s called. Each person adds to the story, and then tags someone else to go forward with it, and includes the links of those who wrote before. It was started by Splotchy, hence the title. So, here goes: I woke up hungry. I pulled my bedroom curtain to the side and looked out on a hazy morning. I dragged myself into the kitchen, in search of something to eat. I reached for a jar of applesauce sitting next to the sink, and found it very cold to the touch. I opened the jar and realized it was frozen.…

  • Eat Poppa, Eat! Nobody Likes a Skinny Santa!

    I assume you’ve all seen that some folks have decided that Santa is too fat. He should provide a better example to children, they say, by exercising and eating more fruits and veggies, fewer cookies and cheese sandwiches. (Maya tells me she learned that in Europe, kids leave cheese sandwiches for Santa, rather than cookies and milk…I have no idea if this is true or if someone pulled her leg.) Then I read on my mom’s blog that there’s a group called “Keep Santa Fat“, and you can go to their website, sign a petition to keep Santa from going on Atkins (watch out, Rudolph!), and a pound of food…

  • Monday Meme ~ Christmas Version

    We’re still in the wonderful week of Hanukkah, and we’ve eaten the Stollen for St. Nicholas Day. What a confusing family, huh? Basically, we just love to celebrate many differnt cultures, even if they are not our own. This coming Saturday we’ll be baking Christmas Cookies and so on, and it’s a most wonderful time of the year. How better to commemorate it than with a meme? This one came from Scarlett, who started this meme herself just for us, and calls it “12 of my favorite things”. Here are her rules: Please share 12 of your favorite Christmas things: they can be memories, traditions, songs, presents, beliefs, whatever it…

  • Subprime Woes

    I heard something on the radio yesterday that ticked me off.  That’s nothing new, really, I listen to a lot of NPR, and there’s often news and politics involved, which often ticks me off.  So of course yesterday the big news was the subprime ‘bailout’, a move by the Bush Administration to help a few of the folks out there who are destined to lose their homes because they will not be able to afford the higher payments once their mortgages reset into a higher interest rate. There’s an assumption among many that these people deserve to lose their homes, because they were gambling anyway, and took on more debt than they…

  • Happy Birthday, Richard!

    Today is my brother Richard’s birthday, and even though he doesn’t read blogs (I don’t think), and certainly doesn’t read mine (he’s too busy making groovy cg art on his computer), I’ll wish him a wonderful birthday here. The sucky part of living so far away from your family is that you can’t be with them on special days.  Like today.  If they hadn’t all deserted me by moving to Alaska, we could all go out to dinner tonight, and he and I could tease our poor mom mercilessly, or, perhaps, his lovely wife, Kathy, my mom, and I, could all gang up on Richard and tease him mercilessly.  Ted…

  • The Giving of the Gifts

    Now that it’s officially ‘holiday season’, with Thanksgiving behind us, Hanukkah here, Christmas coming, and New Years not as far away as it seems, many folks start thinking of gift giving…of all of the shopping and gifting and so on that comes at this time of year. I’ve read two blog posts recently that, while speaking in very different ‘voices’, both said pretty much the same thing. First, Quee, in for Beenzzz over at Stealthy Bean, has a cautionary tale of someone in search of the perfect gift. Next, Quinn Cummings over at the QC Report comes up with the perfect description for about 95% of the stuff that gets…

  • A Random Post About Not Much…

    This picture is of a Christmas Stollen, which is supposed to look like the swaddled baby Jesus, and which you enjoy for St. Nicholas Day, December 5th or 6th.  (The 6th is St. Nicholas Day, but the eve is when you maybe eat the stollen?  Not completely clear, though I do know it’s yummy.) Not much to write about today, but I thought I’d say hi to let you know I’m still here.  Last night was nice, went to dinner with my friend Neva, whom I’ve known since 6th grade.  It’s funny to be two women in your 40s when you’ve known each other since you were in your early teens, because you…

  • Don’t Look Behind You

    When I was a little older than Maya is now, I discovered the semi-creepy world of Lois Duncan. She writes young adult fiction, and her books all seem to dwell on the darker side of life. You may recognize her name from one of my favorite of her books, I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was made into a slasher film starring the Gorton’s Fisherman as the arch villain, which I never bothered to see because heck, there was no Fisherman in the book, and it wasn’t a slasher book. That book is the story of the aftermath of a tragic evening, when four high school kids are…

  • Rhett Butler’s People

    While preparing for this post, I discovered that a new book was being released in the Gone With the Wind family. I knew I had to read it, knew I had to find out more about my favorite characters, and what might happen with Rhett and Scarlett. Last week, we walked to the library, where a fresh copy was being held for me. Pant pant. (That’s my eagerness to get home and dive on in…) I have a couple of different thoughts on this book. First off, I really liked it. I found it to be well written, much better than Scarlett, and I liked how the author took characters…

  • This Too Shall Pass

    When Maya was an infant, the baby books said that if you want your child to go to sleep easily every night, put them in their crib full, clean, dry, burped, and slightly awake. Be careful what bedtime routines you start, because the child will associate them with bedtime, and while you may enjoy rocking your child to sleep at bedtime every night, you may not wish to do it every time the baby wakes up during the night, often every 2 or 3 hours. What they don’t tell you is that they will soon grow out of the phase of wanting to be rocked to sleep, and you will…

  • Almost finished…

    Loyal readers know that we’ve been trying to sell our condo for almost 7 months now. You know that we had it on for just over 3 months, took it off the market, put maybe 10k into updates, and put it back on the market in late September. In all this time, we have had exactly one offer. One offer that was so crappy it was insulting. One offer that, had we taken it, we would not have been able to afford a big enough down payment on a new place, and thus would not be able to move, so what’s the dang point anyway? So here we are, going…

  • Hold the Door…

    This post, by Deb over at Punctuality Rules!, has had me thinking for a few weeks about holding the door. Back in July, I wrote a post about women who eschew the term feminist, because to them it divides us as women, or because they don’t like the stereotype of women who are unfeminine man haters, and wish to distance themselves from that idea altogether. I’m not sure why Deb’s post got me thinking again about my previous post, and the comments in that post, but it did. Whenever the issue of feminism comes up, the issue of holding the door open comes up. Some men were raised to believe…

  • ‘Tis the Season for Sharing

    Dee tagged me for a timely little idea she had. I won’t call it a meme, though I’m doing it for meme Monday anyway. Dee wants me to help get the word out about a charity that she is passionate about, which got me to thinking about the charities that I am passionate about, and people I love are passionate about, and how at this time of year, some folks do some end of the year giving in the name of loved ones or so on, and heck, maybe someone might not know about one of my favorite charities. So, not only am I going to tell you about Dee’s…